The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-13 00:00:00

TEE PR. (NCR►

VISIT TO THE UNITED
STA TES.

(From t special Correspondent of the Times.)
C HICAGO, ILLINOIS, SEPT. 23.
When th e P rince quitted Chicago on the 22d for
his shootirig-b ox in the prairies I had a little time
afforded me. to look about this wonderful and
bizarre city, which for marvellously sudden growth
and immense -prospes:ity probably stands unequalled
even in the history of Western enterprise and pro-
gress. San. Fresacisco and St. Paul's in the extreme
west are the a only two cities which afford any parallel
to the rises of Chicago. In 1831 and 1832 Chicago
was only ay. Indian trading post; in 1841 and 1842
it was is. small wooden prairie town of 5,000 inha-
bitants. It is now an immense city with rows of
stately streets, noble public buildings, fine squares
and avenues, the centre of an immense trade with a
rich and thriving population of 150,000 people, to
which the tide of emigration alone adds many
thousands every year. In fact, when one looks on
its great lines of streets and warehouses, its huge
depots for grain and produce of all kinds, its banks,
hotels, churches, hospitals, and public buildings, it
is all but impossible to believe that this has been
the growth of 30 years—that hale and, compara-
tively speaking, young men, the owners of immense
fortunes, who were among the first to settle on the
present site of the city, can recollect when it was
only prairie land on which the Indians hunted
buffalo and deer. Yet there is something in the
very aspect of the town which bears out the asser-
tion of its modern growth. The city in fact is still
building on every side. You can go down none of
the principal streets without finding one or more
gigantic blocks of warehouses, some of iron, some
of massive stone, some even of white marble, being
built upon the sites of little wooden shanties from
the trade carried on in which was realised the for-
tune that now
pays for the erection of these pala-
tial warehouses. If any one can imagine how
Manchester would look with its blocks of factories
built of white stone or red brick and highly deco-
rated, w ith between each two or three blocks a
little pile of wooden huts like travelling caravans
taken off their wheels, hotels erected to resemble
palaces scattered all among the rows of buildings,
with very wide streets and wooden side walks,with
rough stumps of pine trees set along the roads in all
directions to carry telegraphic wires—if they can
imagine these things, with all the aids of glowing
colours and active, commercial, bustling city life,
Picturing too the whole city on the banks of an
inland sea, like Lake Michigan, with bridges,
canals, and wharfs, and crowds of shipping, they can
then form a fair idea of what Chicago is, and all this
in little more than 20 years! It is the most gro-
tesque and whimsical city that I have ever seen ; it
is saich an extraordinary melange of the Broadway
of New York and little shanties, of Parisian build-
begs mixed up in some way with backwoods life. If
the best shops of Regent-street with the best houses
said terraces of Bayswater were profusely inter-
mixed with wooden shanties, and occupied by some
150,000 busy people, and a whole army of brick-
layers put all round such a city to try to build it in
with suburbs of stately stores and streets, larger
than any yet attempted, it would be like Chicago.
Now to detail :—lt is like something that one has
seen everywhere, yet, as a city, it is like nothing
else but itself under the sun. You pass through
streets of houses bigger and handsomer than the
front of the Great Western Hotel, and next door to
them is a group of little mushroom wooden tene-
ments, the dwellings of the first settlers, which one
might jump over, and which are regarded as among
the antiquities of Chicago, though scarcely, even
fser slight wooden buildings, old even now. Whether
as is too frequently the case in these precocious
western cities, Chicago is overbuilding itself or not
I cannot, of course, say; but I can certainly see
that building is going on at a rate that, if it con-
tinues for the next 10 years, must make the city
larger than New York. This over speculation in
land and houses was one of the main sources of in-
jury to Detroit. It is said it cannot have the same
result here, which I am quite inclined to believe
when I think of the State of which Chicago has
become the commercial capital. The State of Illi-
nois is a tract of prairie land of almost precisely
the same size as England and Wales, and which for
fertilitylof soil is not to be equalled by any other
State in the Union, save, perhaps, Wisconsin or the
territory of Minnesota. The two latter, however,
are as yet but poorly settled, though their natural
advantages are said to be equal to those enjoyed by
the settlers here. The State of Illinois grows cot-
ton, tobacco, maize, and wheat of the finest kinds.
The whole State, in fact, is prairie—level meadow
land covered with rich long prairie grass with a
deep, fin e, soft black loamy soil, which lies over the
gravel in depths of from five to six or ten feet. All
that the settler here has to do is to confine his cattle
till thoy eat down the long grass, then plough at
once, and sow his corn year after year, without
manuring, or often even resting the land in any
way. The fable of Jack and the Bean-stack is al-
most realised here in the gigantic crops of Indian
corn, where tine plant, it is said, in eight weeks at-
tains a height of nearly 10 feet, and where the car
of corn is as, massive and heavy as a rolling-pin. I
have been shown some here of only a few weeks'
growth which were more like young bamboos than
plants O. maize. For farming and for dairy and
cattle rearing purposes the prairie land is said to
be the best in the world, and there are farms not
far from Chicago which have their 5,000 and 6,000
herd ofcattle on them. I hope to see one of these
before I quit Illinois.
While driving round the streets of Chicago the
/Prince saw a wooden house being moved. To move
a house may sound rather alarming in England ;
here nothing is more common. Any one who has
built a wooden house too near a stream or tco far
from it, or as he clears his land and wants his farm•
house more in the centre of his crops, simply hoists
the whole establishment by levers into huge
wooden rollers, formed of trunks of trees, and
then traudles it slowly in whatever direction he
may wish. When the ball-room was being built at
Hamilton, the wooden house of a Dutch settler was
found much i n the way, and it was proposed to
him to have it moved back some 20 feet, to be
moved forwrsrd again when the fete was over. As
one not acquainted with the peculiar mode of
mcning houses adopted in Upper Canada and this
COuntry,l. must own I was not a little astonished to
hear that such a wild proposition was ever thought
of by tilt: committee as possible. The Dutchman,
however, unless heavily compensated, refused to
move his dwellings single inch, and the committee
threatened to remove it by force. But to this ex-
trenie measure of violently collaring a dwelling-
house and making it move on, the authorities fortu-
nately did not proceed, but compromised matters by
ban
the end of the ball•room,
over his roof. The Dutchman, whose only aim in
the matter was to extort an exorbitant amount of
compensation from the city, Was enraged at this
manoeuvre, and as his chimneys led right up under
the orchestra, he threatened to light his fires and
smoke the whole ball-room out. As
it was not only
quite easy to carry out this amiable intention, but
very likely that the Dutchman would try it, the
engines were kept in waiting the whole night of
the ball, with the hose so placed as to send a flood
of water down the chimneys on the first token of
combust ion below appearing therefrom. Fortunately
for himself, Mynheer did not attempt to carry his
threats as far as this, so the ball passed off without
any necessity arising of calling in the engines to
their aid. Certainly, from what I have seen now
of the process of house-moving as practised here, it
was scarcely worth the Dutchman's while to make
so great a fuss about so small a matter. Of course,
however, like every obstructive, he contended that
he was only turbulent and annoying on principle.
SY The rates in Chicago are unusually light—only
23 per cent. on real property. Houso•rent, how-
ever, is inordinately dear, and a modest little tene-
ment which might be got in the suburbs of Lon-
don for £25 per annum here fetches £2OO. For
officials with fix; i incomes this is, of cours^, a Trost
serious drawback. I attended another torchlight
procession and political demonstration of the "Wide
Awakes," in favour of " Honest old Alic," the Re-
publican, and, as he will almost certainly prove, the
successful candidate at the approaching Presidential
election. The procession mustered in great num- 1