Reading two: frontier behaviour on the margins of civilization

A second reading of the wooded islands can be found in the popular detective novels written about the fair. In this penny literature, these islands, like the ‘frontier’ regions of the fair, serve as a site for lawlessness, inversions of proper behaviours and freedom for those who seek it.

Certainly, the best-known feature of the Chicago fair was its ‘white city’ – an urban ensemble that glorified Anglo-Saxon civilization and American empire. But the outermost margins of the fair displayed exhibits of raw materials and people that seemed far removed from western civilization (see

Figure 8.2). On the southern margin of the fairgrounds [A], ‘Indian villages’ were erected next to miniature replicas of Yucatan pyramids and Colorado cliff houses. These kinds of exhibits played to the romance of a lost frontier, repre­senting a way of life most Americans by the turn of the century understood was over, commemorated only in lithographs, memorialized as national monuments (as were the cliff dwellings), or serving as settings for exotic archaeological studies. Popular romances like Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, with its noble Indian lover and dramatic Spanish heroine, reinforced the fantasy of the frontier as a bygone and romantic way of life, albeit one which, on the ‘frontier’ zones of the Columbian exposition, visitors could experience much as they experienced the streets of Cairo in the Midway Plaisance. These romantic depictions of the frontier west were surrounded by other exhibits representing modernizing frontier life: a US government model Indian school,

8.3

View of the intramural railway, 1893

a ‘Michigan loggers camp’, a collection of windmills, a stock pavilion, storage sheds, and acres of livestock enclosures which blurred the boundaries between the fairgrounds and the adjacent stockyards and meat-processing plants of southern Chicago. These displays showed raw, unprocessed nature being transformed by the agents of industry and government (see Figure 8.3).

The northern edge of the fairgrounds held a similar grouping of ‘frontier’ exhibits [B]. Beyond the pavilions of the western and northern states, a small body of water held an encampment of Inuit families, near a group of Pottowatomis (the indigenous people of the Chicago region). These displays were linked not by colonnades, but by a rattling elevated railway, the agent of civilization to come. Visitors chancing on the ‘frontier’ regions of the fair witnessed first-hand the relationship between raw material and manufactured good. They could see civilizing forces at work in the model schools run by the Department of Indian Affairs cheek by jowl with anthropological exhibits of the ‘typical’, pre-conquest ‘Indian villages’.

In short, the idea of frontier is recapitulated several times in the plan of the fair: in these southern and northern margins of the exposition grounds, but also along the entire periphery of the exposition, along the path

of the intramural railway; in the popular entertainments of the Midway Plaisance along the fair’s western ‘panhandle’ (particularly exhibits like ‘Sitting Bull’s Cabin’); and in the very centre of the fair, where the wooded islands represented a wilderness reserve with its ‘hunter’s camp’ [C]. Outside the official exposition grounds, additional frontier elements sprang up – most notably, Buffalo Bill’s ‘Congress of Rough Riders’, a ‘wild west show’ with cowboys and Indians, western scouts and sharpshooters. This very popular attraction was located on 62nd street just outside the fairgrounds proper [D]. The penny detective novels set their action in these borderland areas.10

People mixing

In the penny novels, the Chicago fairgrounds became a microcosm of the American west, populated with different kinds of people, speaking many languages and with distinctive and often alien cultures. It was full of oppor­tunists and shady dealers, and rubes and hicks from the countryside. ‘Don’t think me silly, dear’, the novelist Emma Murdoch van Deventer has a spinster aunt say to her adventurous charge, ‘but, really, Chicago is such a wicked, dangerous place, especially now’.11

To be sure, the forces of law and order are at work in the fair­grounds, as professional detective Dave Brainerd tells his young friend Carl Masters,

here are… three hundred and odd picked detectives, a squad at every gate, and every gate and every district connected by telephone with the main office here. Let a suspicious character appear, click goes the nearest telephone, sending the man’s description to headquarters, and then, click, click, click, to every district, every gate, every man, goes this description.12

‘All the same’, replied Masters, ‘to the man who can speak several tongues, and is an adept at disguise, this Fair, with its citizens from every clime, will be a better place for concealment than London, Paris, and New York rolled into

one’.13

Tracked by the detective heroes, the villains in these novels move easily from the highly regulated world of promenades and exhibit halls to the borderlands of the wooded isles and the margins of the fair. The contrast between one world and the other hints at the appeal of the frontier to the citified Easterner – for men from the ‘eastern establishment’ like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, the American west represented above all a space of imagination, of ‘otherness’, where ‘civilized’ encounters ‘savage’ and comes out stronger for the encounter.14

Transgression

. . . the Wooded Island. . . was not brilliantly lighted. In fact, under the trees, and among the winding shrub-bordered paths, there were many shadowed nooks and gloomy recesses. And yet it was towards the Wooded Island that the brunette and her companion led me, wondering much, and keeping at a distance to avoid the glances often sent back by the little adventuress.15

Expressing hesitation and seduction in the same breath, Carl Masters tracks the mysterious June Jenrys to the dark and unpopulated wooded islands. In another detective story, the boy Billy Stubbs is taken in hand by the good- hearted Jack Rackstraw and led to a safe spot for the night as they cross the wooded islands:

They never dreamed of danger, as they turned from the wooded island toward the smaller island, containing the Hunter’s Camp. . . . The shadows of the low trees and bushes were reflected in black masses in the water; and where the shrubbery intercepted the light, there were dark and romantic places, resembling hidden dells. They had scarcely set foot on the little island when three or four men leaped out of the shadows and beset them.16

These excerpts show the fluidity of readings allowed by the wooded islands. At one moment, their isolation makes for a romantic setting where a couple might find privacy away from the crowds. Yet the same isolation makes them a dangerous spot, where an evening stroller might be assaulted by bandits or toughs. It is significant that the hero Carl Masters chases his woman of mystery all over the fair, to have her pop up in unexpected and often isolated spots on the margins of the fair. Her evident resourcefulness adds to her appeal, while her penchant for unpopulated areas lends her a captivating aura of vulnerability, at least in the hero’s eyes.

Western slang, clothing, and behaviour reinforce the association between marginal areas of the fair and the American west. When Carl Masters gets a thorough report on what the villains were up to, his informant shows a knack for silent tracking and the accent that goes with this frontier skill,

only I noticed they was always careful not to git into no strong lights; they kept on the shady side of things, ‘specially the tallest one with the big cow-boy hat. . . . Then I… come ahead of ’em jest as they turned to’rds the bridges. ‘I tell ye,’ he declared with enthusiasm in a bad cause, ‘they couldn’t’a struck a better place ‘an that there second bridge! First, there’s the t’other bridge, and that little island on one side, and most everybody goin’ round the Mines on t’other side, ’cause ’twas best lighted; then there was them little bushy islands, an’ all that lagoon on the west of ’em; an’ on the east not a speck of light, ‘cept a few clean acrost to the Lib’ral Arts shop, and most of them little lamps on the island gone out’.17

Opportunity

The frontier spaces of the American west figured in the popular imagination at the turn-of-the-century as an escape valve for adventure and opportunity. While generally this trope was directed towards young men (as in Horatio Alger’s hackneyed ‘Young man, go West!’), the idea of the frontier also presented alternative models for appropriate behaviour on the part of young women. The frontier is after all, by definition a ‘liminal’ space, a space outside the bounds of societal restraints, and the imaginary frontier that fills the pages of these popular novels allows women and children opportunities they were not likely to encounter in the gritty working world of Chicago.18

For example, in Chicago Charlie: the Columbian Detective, the boy hero Billy Stubbs finds himself unexpectedly in Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West Show’, just outside of the fairgrounds and near the midway. ‘. . . there were horses and men all about… A couple of Mexicans . . . hurling their lassos at inanimate objects.’19 As Billy jumps onto a bucking bronco to avoid a scuffle with a knife, he finds himself the centre of the performance. The following day a newspaper headline catches his eye, ‘Rough Riding! The Wild West aston­ished! A wonderful performance not down on the bills!’ Further down, Billy reads that ‘the young rough rider. . . was none other than Gunnison George, celebrated throughout the Rocky Mountain region as the most dare-devil horseman and broncho-buster ever known in the West’.20 And at the end of the article, he finds out that none other than the celebrated William F. Cody of the Wild West show ‘greatly desires to make the acquaintance of the young man’. Young Billy Stubbs makes it big in the virtual west.

It seems then, that in the popular imagination represented by the penny novels, fairgoers had adventures on the fairgrounds – they encountered strange and potentially dangerous people, negotiated class barriers with un­expected ease, found love, became famous, and acted heroically and humourously. When we contrast this imaginary inhabitation of the exposi­tion grounds with the activities that Olmsted envisioned for his elegant promenades and rustic wooded island, the contrast is striking. Olmsted, the social reformer, sees elevating and healthful activities for strictly defined spheres of working and upper class. The readers of penny novels, on the other hand, looked for ‘frontier spaces’ in the expo grounds: spaces of freedom, of cultural and economic diversity, of danger and adventure. This is not to suggest that a liberating reading of the margins of the fair was available only to working-class audiences. On the contrary, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have shown that nineteenth-century upper-class publics in Britain were equally fascinated with the transgressive and adventurous mysteries of ‘darkest London’.21 We could well imagine well-heeled readers in Chicago, Boston or New York feeling the same.22

Updated: 3rd October 2014 — 1:37 pm