The resurrection of Chicago was certainly the most colossal achievement of human endeavour that ever I witnessed. It was on the 8th of October, 1871, if the legend be true, that Biddy Maloney’s cow, whisking her tail, upset a lamp in a wooden shed in de Koven Street and started the great fire. A fierce wind was blowing from the west, a long, hot summer had dried into tinder the wooden buildings and lumber yards, and in a few minutes the flames were raging beyond the power of man to control them. Between that Sunday night and Tuesday morning an area of nearly three and a third square miles was reduced to a heap of ashes. The winter was near when building would be impossible. The most that could be done was the work of clearance. Then, from the four winds of heaven, were blown builders, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, glaziers. The statistics of the building that began the first day that the frost was out of the ground, the 15th of April, 1872, and ended on the 1st of December of the same year, are simply amazing. Excluding Sundays and counting two hundred working days, it was computed that for each hour of each day of eight hours there was completed one brick, stone or iron building of twenty-five feet frontage and from four to six stories high. Was such a thing possible? Well, we arrived in the spring of 1873, before the new building season was in full blast, and we saw those buildings—that miracle—the Phœnix risen from its ashes. When we had all taken our places in the omnibus and were just moving off, bound for St. Louis, a rough man got in, carrying a small carpet bag—all his luggage. “Whar does this hyar conveyance connect?” he asked. “It’s bound for the St. Louis train.” “Waal! that’s not my road, but I guess it don’t much signify.” “Why, where are you going to?” “Waal! I guess I’m bound to go to the end of the rope, anyways,” said the man, changing his quid with the utmost unconcern. There you have the true pioneer spirit of America which opens up and fertilizes the limitless wilderness. Men such as this who started years ago, without plan or prospect, “bound to go to the end of the rope,” are now rolling in wealth, lords of countless herds, exporters of grain, owners of rich mines, lumber kings, what not? Strong thews and sinews, but above all a stout heart, must these men have. Only think of what is implied by “the end of the rope.” No house to live in, no friend, perhaps not even a dog, to speak to; food coarse and often scanty; exposure by day and by night to sun and rain, wind, snow and frost; cattle straying or attacked by wild beasts; thieving, murdering and scalping Indians; a life of peril and exhausting labour; a cutting of all home-ties; a dearth of all home news; fever and sickness untended and uncared for. That is “the end of the rope.” Who shall say that the man who succeeds—the survival of the fittest—has not earned his success? But how many are bound to go under?