a frequent visitor to the fair, called Krupp’s biggest gun “a fearful hideous thing, breathing of blood and carnage, a triumph of barbarism crouching amid the world’s triumphs of civilization.”
Mrs. Taylor adored the Court of Honor and was struck by the oddly sober manner people adopted as they walked among its palaces. “Every one about us moved softly and spoke gently. No one seemed hurried or impatient, all were under a spell, a spell that held us from the opening of the fair until its close.”
In the Midway she found a very different atmosphere. Here Mrs. Taylor ventured into the Street in Cairo, open at last, and witnessed her first belly dance. She watched the dancer carefully. “She takes a few light steps to one side, pauses, strikes the castanets, then the same to the other side; advances a few steps, pauses, and causes her abdomen to rise and fall several times in exact time to the music, without moving a muscle in any other part of her body, with incredible rapidity, at the same time holding her head and feet perfectly rigid.”
As Mrs. Taylor and her companions left the Street, she sang quietly to herself, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” like a frightened child easing past a graveyard.
The fair was so big, so beyond grasp, that the Columbian Guards found themselves hammered with questions. It was a disease, rhetorical smallpox, and every visitor exhibited it in some degree. The Guards answered the same questions over and over, and the questions came fast, often with an accusatory edge. Some questions were just odd.
“In which building is the pope?” one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair.
“The pope is not here, madame,” the guard said.
“Where is he?”
“In Italy, Europe, madame.”
The woman frowned. “Which way is that?”
Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, “Three blocks under the lagoon.”
She said, “How do I get there?”
Another visitor, hunting for an exhibit of wax figures, asked a guard, “Can you tell me where the building is that has the artificial human beings?”
He began telling her he did not know, when another visitor jumped in. “I have heard of them,” he said. “They are over in the Woman’s Building. Just ask for the Lady Managers.”
One male visitor, who had lost both his legs and made his way around the fair on false limbs and crutches, must have looked particularly knowledgeable, because another visitor peppered him incessantly with questions, until finally the amputee complained that the strain of answering so many questions was wearing him out.
“There’s just one more thing I’d like to know,” his questioner said, “and I’ll not trouble ye anymore.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I’d like to know how you lost your legs.”
The amputee said he would answer only on strict condition that this was indeed the last question. He would allow no others. Was that clear?
His persecutor agreed.
The amputee, fully aware that his answer would raise an immediate corollary question, said, “They were bit off.”
But a deal was a deal. Chuckling, the amputee hobbled away.
As the fair fought for attendance, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West drew crowds by the tens of thousands. If Cody had gotten the fair concession he had asked for, these crowds first would have had to pay admission to Jackson Park and would have boosted the fair’s attendance and revenue to a welcome degree. Cody also was able to hold performances on Sundays and, being outside the fairgrounds, did not have to contribute half his revenue to the Exposition Company. Over the six months of the fair an average of twelve thousand people would attend each of Cody’s 318 performances, for a total attendance of nearly four million.
Often Cody upstaged the fair. His main entrance was so close to one of the busiest exposition gates that some visitors thought his show
Ten riders, including “Rattlesnake” Pete and a presumably reformed Nebraska bandit named Doc Middleton, set out from the Baline Hotel in Chadron on the morning of June 14, 1893. The rules of the race allowed each rider to start with two horses and required that he stop at various checkpoints along the way. The most important rule held that when he crossed the finish line, he had to be riding one of the original horses.
The race was wild, replete with broken rules and injured animals. Middleton dropped out soon after reaching Illinois. Four others likewise failed to finish. The first rider across the line was a railroad man named John Berry, riding Poison, who galloped into the Wild West arena on June 27 at nine-thirty in the morning. Buffalo Bill, resplendent in white buckskin and silver, was there to greet him, along with the rest of the Wild West company and ten thousand or so residents of Chicago. John Berry had to settle for the saddle alone, however, for subsequent investigation revealed that shortly after the start of the race he had loaded his horses on an eastbound train and climbed aboard himself to take the first hundred miles in comfort.
Cody upstaged the fair again in July, when exposition officials rejected a request from Mayor Carter Harrison that the fair dedicate one day to the poor children of Chicago and admit them at no charge. The directors thought this was too much to ask, given their struggle to boost the rate of paid admission. Every ticket, even half-price children’s tickets, mattered. Buffalo Bill promptly declared Waif’s Day at the Wild West and offered any kid in Chicago a free train ticket, free admission to the show, and free access to the whole Wild West encampment, plus all the candy and ice cream the children could eat.
Fifteen thousand showed up.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West may indeed have been an “incongruity,” as the directors had declared in rejecting his request for a concession within Jackson Park, but the citizens of Chicago had fallen in love.
The skies cleared and stayed clear. Roadways dried, and newly opened flowers perfumed the air. Exhibitors gradually completed their installations, and electricians removed the last misconnects from the elaborate circuits that linked the fair’s nearly 200,000 incandescent bulbs. Throughout the fairgrounds, on Burnham’s orders, clean-up efforts intensified. On June 1, 1893, workers removed temporary railroad tracks that had scarred the lawns near the lagoon and just south of the Electricity and Mines buildings. “A strikingly noticeable change in the general condition of things is the absence of large piles of boxes stacked up in the exterior courts around Manufactures, Agriculture, Machinery, and other large buildings,” the
Although such interior exhibits were compelling, the earliest visitors to Jackson Park saw immediately that the fair’s greatest power lay in the strange gravity of the buildings themselves. The Court of Honor produced an effect of majesty and beauty that was far greater than even the dream conjured in the Rookery library. Some visitors found themselves so moved by the Court of Honor that immediately upon entering they began to weep.
No single element accounted for this phenomenon. Each building was huge to begin with, but the impression of mass was amplified by the fact that all the buildings were neoclassical in design, all had cornices set at the same height, all had been painted the same soft white, and all were so shockingly, beautifully unlike anything the majority of visitors ever had seen in their own dusty hometowns. “No other scene of man’s creation seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honor,” wrote James Fullerton Muirhead, an author and guidebook editor. The court, he wrote, “was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.” Edgar Lee Masters, Chicago attorney and emerging poet, called the Court “an inexhaustible dream of beauty.”
The shared color, or more accurately the shared absence of color, produced an especially alluring range of
