see him personally and ask if she has been there, as I know she was in the habit of calling upon him quite often.”
He added a postscript in ink: “Have you written her Lafayette friends asking them if they have heard from her? If not I should think it well to do so. Let me hear from you at all events.”
Holmes promised Minnie a voyage to Europe, art lessons, a fine home, and of course children—he adored children—but first there were certain financial matters that required their mutual attention. Assuring her that he had come up with a plan from which only great profit would result, Holmes persuaded her to transfer the deed to her Fort Worth land to a man named Alexander Bond. She did so on April 18, 1893, with Holmes himself serving as notary. Bond in turn signed the deed over to another man, Benton T. Lyman. Holmes notarized this transfer as well.
Minnie loved her husband-to-be and trusted him, but she did not know that Alexander Bond was an alias for Holmes himself, or that Benton Lyman actually was Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel—and that with a few strokes of his pen her beloved Harry had taken possession of the bulk of her dead uncle’s bequest. Nor did she know that on paper Harry was still married to two other women, Clara Lovering and Myrta Belknap, and that in each marriage he had fathered a child.
As Minnie’s adoration deepened, Holmes executed a second financial maneuver. He established the Campbell-Yates Manufacturing Company, which he billed as a firm that bought and sold everything. When he filed its papers of incorporation, he listed five officers: H. H. Holmes, M. R. Williams, A. S. Yates, Hiram S. Campbell, and Henry Owens. Owens was a porter employed by Holmes. Hiram S. Campbell was the fictive owner of Holmes’s Englewood building. Yates was supposed to be a businessman living in New York City but in reality was as much a fiction as Campbell. And M. R. Williams was Minnie. The company made nothing and sold nothing: It existed to hold assets and provide a reference for anyone who became skeptical of Holmes’s promissory notes.
Later, when questions arose as to the accuracy of the corporation papers, Holmes persuaded Henry Owens, the porter, to sign an affidavit swearing not only that he was secretary of the company but that he had met both Yates and Campbell and that Yates personally had handed him the stock certificates representing his share of the company. Owens later said of Holmes: “He induced me to make these statements by promising me my back wages and by his hypnotizing ways, and I candidly believe that he had a certain amount of influence over me. While I was with him I was always under his control.”
He added, “I never received my back wages.”
Holmes—Harry—wanted the wedding done quickly and quietly, just him, Minnie, and a preacher. He arranged everything. To Minnie the little ceremony appeared to be legal and in its quiet way very romantic, but in fact no record of their union was entered into the marriage registry of Cook County, Illinois.
Dreadful Things Done by Girls
THROUGHOUT THE SPRING OF 1893 the streets of Chicago filled with unemployed men from elsewhere, but otherwise the city seemed immune to the nation’s financial troubles. Preparations for the fair kept its economy robust, if artificially so. Construction of the Alley L extension to Jackson Park still provided work for hundreds of men. In the company town of Pullman, just south of Chicago, workers labored around the clock to fill backlogged orders for more cars to carry visitors to the fair, though the rate of new orders had fallen off sharply. The Union Stock Yards commissioned Burnham’s firm to build a new passenger depot at its entrance, to manage the expected crush of fairgoers seeking a crimson break from the White City. Downtown, Montgomery Ward installed a new Customer’s Parlor, where excursive fair visitors could loiter on soft couches while browsing the company’s five- hundred-page catalog. New hotels rose everywhere. One entrepreneur, Charles Kiler, believed that once his hotel opened, “money would be so plentiful it would come a runnin’ up hill to get into our coffers.”
At Jackson Park exhibits arrived daily, in ever-mounting volume. There was smoke, clatter, mud, and confusion, as if an army were massing for an assault on Chicago. Caravans of Wells-Fargo and Adams Express wagons moved slowly through the park, drawn by gigantic horses. Throughout the night freight trains huffed into the park. Switching locomotives nudged individual boxcars over the skein of temporary tracks to their destinations. Lake freighters disgorged pale wooden crates emblazoned with phrases in strange alphabets. George Ferris’s steel arrived, on five trains of thirty cars each. The Inman steamship line delivered a full-sized section of one of its ocean liners. Bethlehem Steel brought giant ingots and great slabs of military armor, including a curved plate seventeen inches thick meant for the gun turret of the dreadnought
From Baltimore came a long dark train that chilled the hearts of the men and women who monitored its passage across the prairie but delighted the innumerable small boys who raced open-jawed to the railbed. The train carried weapons made by the Essen Works of Fritz Krupp, the German arms baron, including the largest artillery piece until then constructed, capable of firing a one-ton shell with enough force to penetrate three feet of wrought- iron plate. The barrel had to be carried on a specially made car consisting of a steel cradle straddling two extra-long flatcars. An ordinary car had eight wheels; this combination had thirty-two. To ensure that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s bridges could support the gun’s 250,000-pound weight, two Krupp engineers had traveled to America the previous July to inspect the entire route. The gun quickly acquired the nickname “Krupp’s Baby,” although one writer preferred to think of it as Krupp’s “pet monster.”
A train with a more lighthearted cargo also headed for Chicago, this one leased by Buffalo Bill for his Wild West show. It carried a small army: one hundred former U.S. Cavalry soldiers, ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians, another fifty Cossacks and Hussars, 180 horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen other animals. It also carried Phoebe Anne Moses of Tiffin, Ohio, a young woman with a penchant for guns and an excellent sense of distance. Bill called her Annie, the press called her Miss Oakley.
At night the Indians and soldiers played cards.
Ships began converging on U.S. ports from all over the world bearing exposition cargoes of the most exotic kind. Sphinxes. Mummies. Coffee trees and ostriches. By far the most exotic cargo, however, was human. Alleged cannibals from Dahomey. Lapps from Lapland. Syrian horsemen. On March 9 a steamer named
Bloom had been able to open his village as early as August 1892, well before Dedication Day, and within a month had covered his costs and begun reaping a generous profit. The Algerian version of the
With his usual flare for improvisation, Bloom contributed something else that would forever color America’s perception of the Middle East. The Press Club of Chicago invited him to present a preview of the
Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time:
Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the
