The little community, which had absurdly been called a city ten years before, had at this time barely ten thousand people--as many as are now employed by a couple of its department stores. It was exhausted by a desperate struggle with mud, dust, floods, droughts, cholera, debt, panics, broken banks, and a slump in land values. Other cities ridiculed its ambitions and called it a mudhole. Its harbor, into which six small schooners ventured in 1847, was obstructed by a sand-bar. And the entire region, for miles back from the lake, was a dismal swamp--the natural home of frogs, wild ducks, and beavers. The six years between 1837 and 1843 had been to Illinois a period of the deepest discouragement. There was little or no money that any one could accept with confidence. Trade was on a barter basis. The State was hopelessly in debt. It had borrowed $14,000,000 in the enthusiasm of its first land boom, and now had no money to pay the interest. Even as late as 1846 there was only $9,000 in the State treasury. Buffalo was at this time the chief grain market of the United States. We were selling a little wheat to foreign countries--much less than is grown to-day in Oklahoma. Hulled corn was the staff of life in Iowa. The Mormons had just started from Illinois on their 1,500-mile pilgrimage to the West, through a country that had not a road, a village, a bridge, nor a well. The sewing-machine had recently been invented by Howe, and the use of ether had been announced by Dr. Morton; but there was no Hoe press, nor Bessemer steel, nor even so much as a postage stamp. And in the Old World the two most impressive figures, perhaps, were Livingstone, the missionary, who was groping his way to the heart of the Dark Continent, and DeLesseps, the master-builder of canals, who was now cutting a channel through the hot sand at Suez. In Chicago, there was at this time no Board of Trade. The first wheat had been exported nine years before--as much as would load an ordinary wagon. There was no paved street, except one short block of wooden paving. The houses were rickety, unpainted frame shanties, which had not even the dignity of being numbered. There was a school, a jail, a police force of six, a theatre, and a fire-engine. But there was no railroad, nor telegraph, nor gas, nor sewer, nor stock-yards. The only post-office was a little frame shack on Clark Street, with one window and one clerk; and one of the lesser hardships of the citizens was to stand in line here on rainy days. [Illustration: THE McCORMICK REAPER OF 1847, ON WHICH SEATS WERE PLACED FOR THE DRIVER AND THE RAKER]