letter to Margaret. The day was cold “but clear, bright and beautiful, a splendid day to live and work in.” Workers were putting in “the embellishments,” he wrote. “A lot of ducks were put in the lagoons yesterday, and they are floating around contentedly and quite like life this morning.” Olmsted had ordered more than eight hundred ducks and geese, seven thousand pigeons, and for the sake of accent a number of exotic birds, including four snowy egrets, four storks, two brown pelicans, and two flamingoes. So far only the common white ducks had been introduced into the waters. “In two or three days,” Burnham wrote, “all the birds will be in the water, which already commences to be still more beautiful than last year.” The weather remained lovely: crisp, clear, and dry. On Monday, April 10, he told Margaret, “I am very happy.”
Over the next few days his mood changed. There was talk that other unions might join the carpenters’ strike and bring all work in Jackson Park to a halt. Suddenly the exposition seemed dangerously far from ready. Construction of the sheds for the stock exhibits at the south end of the grounds had yet to begin. Everywhere Burnham looked he saw rail tracks and temporary roads, empty boxcars and packing crates. Tumble-weeds of excelsior roved the grounds. He was disappointed with the unfinished appearance of the park, and he was peeved at his wife.
“Why do you not write me every day?” he asked on Thursday. “I look in vain for your letters.”
He kept a photograph of Margaret in his office. Every time he walked by it, he picked it up and stared at it with longing. So far that day, he told her, he had looked at it ten times. He had counted on a rest after May 1 but realized now that the intensity would persist until long afterward. “The public will regard the work as entirely done, and I wish it were, so far as I am concerned. I presume anyone running a race has moments of half despair, along toward the end; but they must never be yielded to.”
Margaret sent him a four-leafed clover.
There was disarray in the fairgrounds, but not next door on the fifteen acres of ground leased by Buffalo Bill for his show, which now bore the official title “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” He was able to open his show on April 3 and immediately filled his eighteen-thousand-seat arena. Visitors entered through a gate that featured Columbus on one side, under the banner “PILOT OF THE OCEAN, THE FIRST PIONEER,” and Buffalo Bill on the other, identified as “PILOT OF THE PRAIRIE, THE LAST PIONEER.”
His show and camp covered fifteen acres. Its hundreds of Indians, soldiers, and workers slept in tents. Annie Oakley always made hers very homey, with a garden outside of primrose, geranium, and hollyhock. Inside she placed her couch, cougar skins, an Axminister carpet, rocking chairs, and assorted other artifacts of domestic life. And of course a diverse collection of guns.
Buffalo Bill always began his show with his Cowboy Band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Next came the “Grand Review,” during which soldiers from America, England, France, Germany, and Russia paraded on horseback around his arena. Annie Oakley came next, blasting away at an array of impossible targets. She hit them. Another of the show’s staples was an Indian attack on an old stagecoach, the Deadwood Mail Coach, with Buffalo Bill and his men coming to the rescue. (During the show’s earlier engagement in London, the Indians attacked the coach as it raced across the grounds of Windsor Castle carrying four kings and the prince of Wales. Buffalo Bill drove.) Late in the program Cody himself demonstrated some fancy marksmanship, dashing around the arena on horseback while firing his Winchester at glass balls hurled into the air by his assistants. The climax of the show was the “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin,” during which Indians who once had slaughtered soldiers and civilians alike staged a mock attack on a cabin full of white settlers, only to be vanquished yet again by Buffalo Bill and a company of cowboys firing blanks. As the season advanced, Cody replaced the attack with the even more dramatic “Battle of the Little Big Horn … showing with historical accuracy the scene of Custer’s Last Charge.”
The fair was hard on Colonel Cody’s marriage. The show always kept him away from his home in North Platte, Nebraska, but his absence wasn’t the main problem. Bill liked women, and women liked Bill. One day his wife, Louisa—“Lulu”—traveled to Chicago for a surprise conjugal visit. She found that Bill’s wife already had arrived. At the hotel’s front desk a clerk told her she would now be escorted up to “Mr. and Mrs. Cody’s suite.”
Fearful that a wider strike could hobble the fair, even destroy it, Burnham began negotiations with the carpenters and ironworkers and agreed at last to establish a minimum wage and to pay time and a half for extra hours and double time for Sundays and key holidays, including, significantly, Labor Day. The union men, in turn, signed a contract to work until the end of the fair. Burnham’s clear relief suggests that his earlier bravado might have been just for show. “You can imagine though tired I go to bed happy,” he wrote to his wife. One measure of his exhaustion was the fact that the contorted syntax he usually worked so hard to suppress had now resurfaced. “We sat from early in the afternoon to nine o’clock. Till the fair is over this trial will not recur I believe, so your picture before me is unusually lovely as it looks up from the desk.”
Burnham claimed the agreement was a victory for the exposition, but in fact the fair’s concessions were a breakthrough for organized labor, and the resulting contracts became models for other unions to emulate. The fair’s capitulation pumped steam into America’s—and Chicago’s—already-boiling labor movement.
Olmsted returned to Chicago accompanied by his usual troika of affliction and found the place galvanized, Burnham everywhere at once. On Thursday, April 13, Olmsted wrote to his son John, “Every body here in a keen rush, the greatest in imaginable outward confusion.” Winds raced over the park’s barren stretches and raised blizzards of dust. Train after train arrived bearing exhibits that should have been installed long before. The delayed installations meant that temporary tracks and roads had to remain in place. Two days later Olmsted wrote: “We shall have to bear the blame of everyone else’s tardiness, as their operations are now everywhere in our way. At best the most important part of all our work will have to be done at night after the opening of the Exposition. I cannot see any way through the confusion but there are thousands of men at work under various chiefs & I suppose by & by the great labor will begin to tell together.”
He assigned some of the blame for the incomplete landscape to himself, for failing to install a trustworthy overseer in Chicago after the death of Harry Codman. On April 15, 1893, he wrote to John, “I am afraid that we were wrong in leaving the business so much to Ulrich & Phil. Ulrich is not I hope intentionally dishonest but he is perverse to the point of deceiving & misleading us & cannot be depended on. His energy is largely exhausted on matters that he sh’d not be concerned with. … I cannot trust him from day to day.”
His frustration with Ulrich grew, his distrust deepened. Later, in another note to John, he said, “Ulrich is unwittingly faithless to us. The difficulty is that he is ambitious of honors out of his proper line; cares more to be more extraordinarily active, industrious, zealous & generally useful, than to achieve fine results in L.A. [Landscape Architecture].” Olmsted grew especially leery of Ulrich’s slavish attentiveness to Burnham. “He is all over the grounds, about all sorts of business, and Mr. Burnham & every head of Department is constantly calling for ‘Ulrich!’ In going over the works with Burnham I find him constantly repeating to his Secretary: ‘Tell Ulrich to’—do this & that. I remonstrate, but it does little good. I can never find him at the work except by special appointment and then he is impatient to get away.”
At heart what Olmsted feared was that Burnham had transferred his loyalty to Ulrich. “I suppose that our time is out—our engagement ended, and I fear that Burnham is disposed to let us go and depend on Ulrich—for Burnham is not competent to see the incompetency of Ulrich & the need of deliberate thought. I have to be cautious not to bore Burnham, who is, of course, enormously overloaded.”
Other obstacles quickly appeared. An important shipment of plants from California failed to arrive, worsening an already critical shortage of all plants. Even the fine weather that prevailed in the first couple of weeks of April caused delays. The lack of rain and the fact that the park’s waterworks were not yet completed meant Olmsted could not plant exposed portions of the grounds. The wind-blown dust—“frightful dust,” he said, “regular sandstorms of the desert”—continued and stung his eyes and propelled grit into his inflamed mouth. “I am trying to suggest why I seem to be accomplishing so little. …” he wrote. “I think the public for a time will be awfully disappointed with our work—dissatisfied & a strong hand will be required here for weeks to come to prevent Ulrich’s energies from being wrongly directed.”
By April 21 Olmsted was again confined to bed “with sore throat, an ulcerating tooth, and much pain preventing sleep.”
Despite all this his spirits began slowly to improve. When he looked past the immediate delays and Ulrich’s duplicity, he saw progress. The shore of the Wooded Island was just now beginning to burst forth in a dense profusion of new leaves and blossoms, and the Japanese temple, the Hoo-den, crafted in Japan and assembled by
