CHAPTER 6
SWEPT INTO THE HUMAN MAELSTROM OF CHICAGO
I STARTED TO walk to Chicago, along the Lake Erie and Western railroad tracks. The exact reason I started to walk was because the train crew pulled me out of a box car and bade me do so. Tramps were everywhere and had become such a menace as to forfeit all sympathy. I had spent nearly all my money on clothing and did not have any to spare for railroad fare. At that time the fares were so high that a tolerable walker could make good wages afoot. It was autumn. The golden pawpaws burst as they fell to the ground. Wrinkled persimmons hung on the trees. Pheasants were in full plumage and the quail and prairie chickens were strong of flight. Wild ducks and geese were winging south. Apples and turnips and cabbages were buried in pyramidal heaps in the field. Corn husking was occupying the men folks, and the women were about through “putting up” canned stuff for the winter.
I was leaving all these Hoosier things forever. But I did not know it then; I did not even recognize my own feelings as they surged within me. Only one thing was clear. I was going to Chicago where so many Hoosier lads had gone before and have gone since, only to be swallowed remorselessly.
At that age of limited experience I did not know the great cities devour boys and girls as a more avid Minotaur than the Cretan monster in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built, that ate the seven maidens and seven youths sent by Athens as an annual tribute, until Theseus killed the demon.
What a lot of Theseuses we need nowadays to hunt down the modern monster Minotaurs.
One night I slept a while in a straw stack. First I dug a hole in the stack and crawling in I pulled the straw in after me. Just as I got comfortably warm and asleep, the farmer’s dog treed me, and I was driven forth. Next I crawled into a corn shock where I was very cold and did not sleep much. It took me three days and nights to get to Chicago, only one hundred and thirty miles from LaFayette. Part of the way I managed to cover in freight trains, but I walked more than half the distance.
There was a railroad station at the foot of Lake Street, I think, with dismal, unpainted, wooden sheds and many rookeries about. Across from the station were saloon dives, cheap hotels, restaurants and barber shops. My first impressions of Chicago were very disappointing and I fear they have not improved much yet.
I had just fifteen cents. About nine o’clock in the morning I arrived.
Entering a barber shop I asked if I might wash. The boss said I could. When I thanked him as I started to leave the shop the barber stopped me and said I owed him fifteen cents. It was every cent I had in the world but I paid and then plunged into the human jungle.
I have seen the highways and byways of the earth since and have confronted many exacting conditions, but I never again have had such heart sinkings as I had that morning. To have no breakfast was not such a serious thing for a strong boy.
Alone in the middle of the Sahara I have felt nearer to friends and love and sympathy than I felt after the barber took my last cent. Some one to turn to was what I hungered for more than food.
Where to go or which way to turn seemed to make no difference. Rivers of people swept by in ceaseless, rapid flow. There was the sullen roar of the city like a Niagara of fierce sorrow. It seemed to me that all the faces I saw were hungry and hard.
I had heard of the Y. M. C. A., rather a new thing then, and made my way to its rooms. But they stared at me and spoke in a manner so short and feelingless that I almost fled from the room.
It seemed as though the Y. M. C. A. was run for boys who had a home, and not for the strange and homeless.
Of course I felt hard, unjustly so no doubt, and I was terrified by my own thoughts, which were that I hoped the place would burn down.
What a trivial cause to start such a low trend! I soon tired and wandered about cold and rather despairingly. Soon again I was at the depot.
A man with a big valise hailed me and gave me the bag to carry. It was big and heavy but I was strong. When I got it to the dollar-a-day hotel he sought he gave me five cents. I could have blessed him, but I only hurried away and found a place where I got a big bowl of soup and bread for the money I had earned.
I haunted the railroad station and for several days carried quite a number of bags and parcels and earned twenty-five cents a day.
At night I slept in the depot and was seldom molested. To me it was a cheerful room at night, as the coal stove with open door cast a bituminous glow which made fine shadows that I was too big now to be afraid of. Sometimes I had bad dreams, and once I awoke in a cold sweat because I was chased by “Nigger Henry,” who lived in a cave up Tenth Street “holler” at LaFayette, hissed on by “Crazy Cyrus,” who lived out by Reynold’s pasture, and wrung his hands and gawped “bloodle-doodle.”
Between errands for passengers I hunted for a job. Finally a cheap sort of hotel boarding house on Wabash Avenue near Polk Street took me as assistant porter. The work was to do anything I was told to do by anybody. When nothing more definite was in sight I was to scrub the stairs and floor and wash the windows. I got my board and was promised three-dollars a week. My shoes were wearing out and I had no overcoat.
Trips downtown afoot through the snow and slush breasting the lake winds not warmly clad are the features I best remember of that experience.
I could not get my pay so I began to hunt for another job. A fifteen-cent restaurant on Clark Street offered me two dollars a week and board as a potato peeler. I had to work in a grimy basement but I liked it because when the first week was up I got my pay and I could see new shoes ahead. The cook made soup of the potato peelings which was strained and sent up on a dumb waiter.
I worked here for some weeks. There were many swift changes in the staff and soon I found myself second cook. Then I went upstairs as a waiter at two dollars and fifty cents a week, because the business could not afford a second cook.
It was while waiting on the table that I met a Tribune reporter, who came to eat our best fifteen-cent meals in the city. We became friends and he found work for me with his paper.
The Times was the big paper of Chicago, but the Tribune had started upon the growth that landed it at the top. I really ran errands at first for the city editor. Sometimes he gave me unimportant assignments. Gradually he gave me more to do and I learned a great deal. Of course, I felt at home around a newspaper on account of the experience I had had at LaFayette.
Hard times grew harder. It was the early summer of 1879 that the Tribune cut things to the marrow. I was one of the first to go because I could be easiest spared. For my work on the Tribune I had been paid five dollars a week, perhaps really more than I earned. I lived on less than two dollars a week for food and saved enough to improve the quality and character of my clothing.
The streets were filled with workless men and to get a job of any kind seemed hopeless. So I made up my mind to go to Milwaukee and farther north if necessary. The trains were closely watched and I suppose I was not a clever hobo, so I walked most of the eighty-five miles to Milwaukee. Naturally I saw and fell in with many tramps and learned their ways. It was a shock to my youthful ideals and sympathy to learn that most of these gentry would not work if they could get out of it. It was always a satisfactory day when they had bummed their grub without turning over a hand. Few of them were inclined to be criminals.
In fact, they were drifting derelicts on their way to the hopeless, helpless, social sea of Sargasso which engulfs the inert human debris just as the flotsam of the ocean is caught. Nor did I then recognize the type at all except as something not to tie up to permanently.
It was only in after years that I came to realize that these deficients are the certain product of a social usury of yesterday and continued to-day with slight abatement. Theirs is a disease of the overworked world.
Milwaukee offered nothing. It was winter. I walked on north through Fond du Lac, Oshkosh and Green Bay.
A farmer living near Fond du Lac, to whom I applied for work, said he would give me a job if I could hold it down. It consisted of being a valet to a man-eating stallion. I fought that horse for a week with everything that I could use and not kill him, and I would have finished the vicious brute if I had dared. After having my clothing partially bitten off me and suffering from not a few nips that reached my flesh, I gave up the job. It is really the only time in my life that I have admitted defeat, and I have longed for another chance at that horse but in vain.
On toward the pole star I plugged away. At Oshkosh I was seized with neuralgia from exposure and underfeeding. It made me jump, I tell you. Some good people took me to their home for a few days and then I went on.
The Chicago & Northwestern was building its Menominee Range extension. I worked in the construction gang near where Hermansville was afterwards located. The force was reduced and I found myself among those laid off at the northernmost limits of settlement. No use to go farther, so I began to retrace myself.
There were tracks of bear, lynx and wolves, and the latter sounded their coursing tongues every night. Every hunting dream that had tenanted my mind as a boy was revived as I saw deep-worn deer run-ways after run-way.
Strange how the red deer followed the same paths in their food migrations for centuries. Indians built deer fences and killed thousands along them, only taking skin and saddle. Civilization was even more ruthless. It is pathetic to observe the deer habits now. They try to migrate as in the olden days, but so restricted and cut up is the zone of wild life that it is more like a city Zoo. Game sanctuaries must be established.
Things raced through my mind in a disconnected way. I wondered where I might get a start in life and how; a real one. Then back to the scenes and adventures of early boyhood my mind would travel. I contrasted the big forests with the Wea Plains, the Wabash bottoms and the borderland of the Grand Prairie in Indiana.
I sat on a log to rest and heard the drumming of a pheasant. They call it a partridge north; the ruffed grouse. It made me think somehow or other of a June afternoon long ago when a mower had cut three legs off my double-nosed pointer pup as he lay in the grass, panting from his intense work. I had been training him on young prairie chickens that kind of just fluffed up out of the grass when I flushed them. I was a big boy, but I cried in secret when I shot the beautiful pointer to put him out of misery. He had been presented to me by a man whose two children I had pulled out of a burning shed. When I was asked what I would like to have as a reward, poor as I was, I said a bird dog. One morning while going out to train the puppy I saw a black cat, and shot it as it was stealing up on some young quail. Nigger Bill had told me it was certain bad luck to kill a cat and worst of all to kill a black one, but I didn’t believe him, because after many struggles in which I was considerably scratched up I had cut a cat’s head off and no bad luck seemed to follow.
Now I believed it and as I sat on the log, with head full of disconnected thoughts, remembered that Nigger Bill had said that to kill a cat meant bad luck for seven years. I had two more years to go. Then I fell to thinking of signs and made up my mind to be very careful for, I argued, even if there’s nothing to them, it won’t hurt to avoid them.
And that is the reason why signs are bad. Those who are unobserving and careless are always the ones who trespass most in the field of superstition with the consequences only those things that would naturally happen to such persons.
My thoughts covered a wide horizon as I tramped along day by day. Finally after the usual experiences of hunger and weariness I again reached Milwaukee. I had not been depressed a moment since the morning in Chicago when I was penniless and friendless in that awful mire of men. The limitless forests of the north that spread out under the boreal aurora with their bear, wolves and wild cat things were kinder than the big hungry city with its human wolves that are worse.
