The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [83]
Chicago in 1880 was the regional hub for the entire Midwest. All the major grain-producing states—Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska—used the city as their in-transit wholesale distribution center. If Roosevelt had looked at a railroad map of the trans-Allegheny West, in fact, he would have seen clearly that Chicago was the crossroads—or like a fist with all the ubiquitous track lines extending outward like fingers. The novelist Theodore Dreiser referred to late-nineteenth-century Chicago as the “magnet” city of the Midwest and West. Pioneers overlanding to California by covered wagon or railroad, or on foot, usually began their journey in Chicago. The city had been built on the bottom lip of Lake Michigan and rebuilt after the great fire of 1871. Freighters carried timber and iron ore south from Wisconsin and Minnesota to the city’s cargo ports, warehouses, and railroad yards. Not only did railroads converge there, but the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, opening up the agricultural markets of the Midwest. In just four years the first skyscraper—the Home Insurance Building—would be erected on the corner of LaSalle and Adams streets. The city was expanding at an amazing clip.
The eye of Chicago seemed to be looking everywhere across America. As the historian William Cronon pointed out in his landmark study Nature’s Metropolis (1991), Chicago in the late nineteenth century oversaw an economic domain that stretched from the Sierra Nevada to the Appalachians, and from Duluth, Minnesota, in the north to Cairo, Illinois, in the south. All the varied ecosystems of the Great Plains about which Roosevelt would later be so enthusiastic—the Sandhills of Nebraska and the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma, the Great Basin of Nevada and the Badlands of the Dakotas—were all linked to Chicago in one way or another.25 Given his predilection for the outdoors, Theodore wasn’t elated with Chicago; he itched to leave for the neighboring prairies. Having conquered the Adirondacks, the North Woods, and Mount Desert Island, he craved the fabled pastoral life of the Great Plains, which Washington Irving had written about in A Tour on the Prairies (1835).26 As a fan of Zebulon Pike, he had a headful of frontier myths about discovering the headwaters of the Red and Arkansas rivers (he never quite found them on this Midwest tramp). Over the coming weeks, Theodore and Elliott would hunt grouse, with the euphoria of treasure hunters, in three separate locales: Huntley, Illinois; Carroll, Iowa; and Moorhead, Minnesota, which sat on the border of the Dakota Territories.
The Roosevelt boys’ guide in Illinois was “a man named Wilcox”—his first name remains unknown—whom Theodore mentions only perfunctorily in the diaries he kept.* Clearly, to Theodore’s mind, Wilcox was no Bill Sewall or Moses Sawyer. But in a letter of August 22 to his sister Anna—posted from the Wilcox farm in Illinois—T.R. did reflect on the hardworking midwesterners he was meeting. Huntley was a tiny village with only one paved street. From the town center there was plenty of cropland to be seen in every direction, but there were virtually no woods—only a few scattered trees. “The farm people are pretty rough but I like them very much,” he wrote to Anna. “Like all rural Americans they are intensely independent;