5 - Chicago’s “Dream City”

Summary

Ten years after his first tour of the United States and six after his first tour of Europe, Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in what turned out to be one of his last triumphant presentations. Once a small Indian village on the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago pushed and promoted itself past older Eastern rivals who wanted to host the nation’s Columbian celebration by recounting its quintessential American rise from meager beginnings to a bustling center of trade, commerce, stockyards, and railways, and by insisting that it was the nation’s window to the future. Chicago might have no culture, one citizen remarked, but when it got some it would “make it hum.”

Persuaded, Congress gave Chicago exclusive rights to official commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and then passed a bill authorizing the World’s Columbian Exposition of “arts, industries, manufactures, and the products of the soil, mine, and sea,” which President Benjamin Harrison signed in the spring of 1890, the first year in which the value of the nation’s manufactured goods surpassed that of its agricultural commodities. A year later, six thousand workers were employed on projects sponsored by forty-four nations and twenty-six colonies and provinces. “Make no little plans,” instructed Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect charged with coordinating the mammoth effort to transform seven hundred acres of Jackson Park into a wonderland of promenades, canals, lagoons, plazas, parks, streets, and avenues as well as four hundred buildings.