Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [55]
Perhaps they husbanded fire in the manner of the Blackfeet, who had once inhabited the country west of Illinois. Around the time of the White City, naturalist George Grinnell wrote of the them:
Within the memory of men now living ... fire used to be carried from place to place in a "fire horn." This was a buffalo horn slung by a string over the shoulder like a powder horn. The horn was lined with moist, rotten wood, and the open end had a wooden stopper or plug fitted to it. On leaving camp in the morning, the man who carried the horn took from the fire a small live coal and put it in the horn, and on this coal placed a piece of punk [a fungus that grows on birch trees, which the Blackfeet gathered and dried], and then plugged up the horn with the stopper. The punk smouldered in this almost air-tight chamber, and, in the course of two or three hours, the man looked at it, and if it was nearly consumed, put another piece of punk in the horn. The first young men who reached the appointed camping ground would gather two or three large piles of wood in different places, and as soon as some one who carried a fire horn reached camp, he turned out his spark at one of these piles of wood, and a little blowing and nursing gave a blaze which started the fire. The other fires were kindled from this first one, and when the women reached camp and had put the lodges up, they went to these fires, and got coals with which to start those in their lodges. The custom of borrowing coals persisted up to the last days of the buffalo, and indeed may even be noticed still.
At the World's Columbian Exposition, the Native American exhibits were installed in or near the Anthropological Building. According to historian Robert Rydell, "The Native Americans who participated in the exhibits ... were the victims of a torrent of abuse and ridicule. With Wounded Knee only three years removed, the Indians were regarded as apocalyptic threats to the values embodied in the White City." The verbal threats, perhaps, weren't the worst they had to endure. As it so happened, Rydell notes, "several of the exhibits of Dakota, Sioux, Navajos, Apaches, and various northwestern tribes were on or near the Midway Plaisance, which immediately degraded them."
The Midway Plaisance, a mile-long entertainment district, led up to the entrance of the White City proper. The cultures deemed by the organizers as "barbarous and semi-civilized" were jumbled there along with food concessions and the Ferris wheel: a Moorish mosque, a Tunisian village, an Egyptian temple, a bazaar from India selling Benares brassware and inlaid metalwork, the huts of South Sea Islanders, a settlement of Laplanders complete with reindeer that pulled sleds around a circus ring. The official history of the exposition notes: "Here was an opportunity to see these people of every hue, clad in outlandish garb, living in curious habitations, and plying their unfamiliar trades and arts with incomprehensible dexterity.... There were three thousand of these denizens of the Midway gathered from all quarters of the earth."
If, in the future, the honky-tonk sideshows and game booths of midways would be most garishly lit, in 1893 this very first midway claimed a smaller portion of electric light than other areas of the fair, although that didn't stop it from being enormously popular in the evening. As visitors arriving from Chicago walked along the mall toward the entrance to the White City, they could sample chapati and yogurt, Cracker Jack, stuffed cabbage, hamburgers, or steamed clams while they watched boxing matches, donkey races, beauty contests, camel drivers, belly dancers, and sword fighting in a street typical of Algiers. They could listen to