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The Magnificent Medills
The Mccormick-Patterson Dynasty
By Megan McKinney HarperCollins
Copyright © 2011 Megan McKinney
All right reserved. ISBN: 9780061782237
Chapter One
Fertile Soil The city that shaped the great publishing family is more recent
even than the dynasty itself. Founder Joseph Medill was a
ten-year-old Ohio boy in 1833, when a pastoral fur trading
post guarded by the soldiers of Fort Dearborn was incorporated as the
town of Chicago. This tiny community at the far edge of civilization
consisted of no more than three hundred and fifty hardy souls who
resided in the barracks, wigwams and wood cabins near the muddy
banks of the Chicago River; among them were soldiers garrisoned at
the fort and their families, a few natives of the Potawatomi tribe and
assorted traders of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company.
Deer sipped serenely from the river in the early morning, wolves
howled in the prairie at night and Indians lurked behind trees of the
forest on the river's north bank, occasionally venturing across to the
fort, where they peered in and startled soldiers' wives. The only
diversion for this heterogeneous population was to travel to Wolf Point
at a fork in the river, where Mark Beaubien, a gregarious fiddle
playing Creole, owned the Sauganash Hotel, a tavern that throbbed
night and day with vitality. As Beaubien himself said, "I plays de
fiddle like de debble an I keeps hotel like hell." The Sauganash was a
place where all races, ranks and classes gathered for drinking, singing,
dancing, card playing and roulette, mixing as equals. And they
were there every night.
The soldiers, the Potawatomi, Astor's traders and the dancing parties
at Wolf Point were destined to become the stuff of legend when,
as the 1830s progressed, eastern money began betting that Chicago—
not St. Louis, Milwaukee or even Kenosha or Racine—would become
the commercial capital of the northwestern frontier. But only if a navigable
link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River could be
created. While the site was tantalizingly close to the point at which the
continent's two crucial water systems might connect, the village was
virtually isolated. The Chicago River provided a channel to the Great
Lakes, but there was no clear water passage connecting it to the Illinois
River and thus with the great Mississippi. Furthermore, a sandbar
blocked the mouth of the river, making it impossible for large ships to
enter. Removing the sandbar was relatively simple; building a canal
was not. To finance construction of the new passage, large chunks of
public land designated as "canal lots" were sold in an escalating real
estate market as a canal mania that had begun with the astonishing
success of the Erie Canal spread westward. Eastern financiers fueled the
boom by speculating on the swampy land parcels, which they drained
and developed. This fed the upward spiral further, and as property was
sold and resold, the land's skyrocketing value attracted even greater
investment until the economic reversal created by the panic of 1837.
The long awaited channel, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, was
completed in 1848, placing the port of Chicago at a strategic position
in an uninterrupted water passage between the harbor of New York
and the Gulf of Mexico. Goods and raw materials flowed smoothly
from the East through the Erie Canal and Great Lakes, and from the
South via the Mississippi River and the new canal. In the decade that
followed, the city became the nation's great rail center and a system of
turnpikes was laid. The once isolated village became linked, through
water, rail and roadway, to the magnificent riches of lumber, grain and
livestock surrounding it. The year 1848 also saw the opening of the
Chicago Board of Trade, which created a center for buying and selling
those commodities, and in the same year the city's first telegraph
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Magnificent Medills by Megan McKinney Copyright © 2011 by Megan McKinney. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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