The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

herself. For example, she rejected an invitation from the Committee on Ceremonies and instead, on a whim, went to lunch at the German Village.

Chicago society, however, was just getting warmed up. The infanta was royalty, and by God she would get the royal treatment. That night the infanta was scheduled to attend a reception hosted by Bertha Palmer at the Palmer mansion on Lake Shore Drive. In preparation, Mrs. Palmer had ordered a throne built on a raised platform.

Struck by the similarity between her hostess’s name and the name of the hotel in which she was staying, the infanta made inquiries. Upon discovering that Bertha Palmer was the wife of the hotel’s owner, she inflicted a social laceration that Chicago would never forget or forgive. She declared that under no circumstances would she be received by an “innkeeper’s wife.”

Diplomacy prevailed, however, and she agreed to attend. Her mood only worsened. With nightfall the day’s heat had given way to heavy rain. By the time Eulalia made it to Mrs. Palmer’s front door, her white satin slippers were soaked and her patience for ceremony had been extinguished. She stayed at the function for all of one hour, then bolted.

The next day she skipped an official lunch at the Administration Building and again dined unannounced at the German Village. That night she arrived one hour late for a concert at the fair’s Festival Hall that had been arranged solely in her honor. The hall was filled to capacity with members of Chicago’s leading families. She stayed five minutes.

Resentment began to stain the continuing news coverage of her visit. On Saturday, June 10, the Tribune sniffed, “Her Highness … has a way of discarding programs and following independently the bent of her inclination.” The city’s papers made repeated reference to her penchant for acting in accord with “her own sweet will.”

In fact, the infanta was coming to like Chicago. She had loved her time at the fair and seemed especially to like Carter Harrison. She gave him a gold cigarette case inlaid with diamonds. Shortly before her departure, set for Wednesday, June 14, she wrote to her mother, “I am going to leave Chicago with real regret.”

Chicago did not regret her leaving. If she had happened to pick up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that Wednesday morning, she would have found an embittered editorial that stated, in part, “Royalty at best is a troublesome customer for republicans to deal with and royalty of the Spanish sort is the most troublesome of all… It was their custom to come late and go away early, leaving behind them the general regret that they had not come still later and gone away still earlier, or, better still perhaps, that they had not come at all.”

Such prose, however, bore the unmistakable whiff of hurt feelings. Chicago had set its table with the finest linen and crystal—not out of any great respect for royalty but to show the world how fine a table it could set—only to have the guest of honor shun the feast for a lunch of sausage, sauerkraut, and beer.

Nannie

AANNA WILLIAMS—“NANNIE”—ARRIVED from Midlothian, Texas, in mid-June 1893. While Texas had been hot and dusty, Chicago was cool and smoky, full of trains and noise. The sisters hugged tearfully and congratulated each other on how fine they looked, and Minnie introduced her husband, Henry Gordon. Harry. He was shorter than Minnie’s letters had led Anna to expect, and not as handsome, but there was something about him that even Minnie’s glowing letters had not captured. He exuded warmth and charm. He spoke softly. He touched her in ways that made her glance apologetically at Minnie. Harry listened to the story of her journey from Texas with an attentiveness that made her feel as if she were alone with him in the carriage. Anna kept looking at his eyes.

His warmth and smile and obvious affection for Minnie caused Anna’s suspicions quickly to recede. He did seem to be in love with her. He was cordial and tireless in his efforts to please her and, indeed, to please Anna as well. He brought gifts of jewelry. He gave Minnie a gold watch and chain specially made by the jeweler in the pharmacy downstairs. Without even thinking about it, Anna began calling him “Brother Harry.”

First Minnie and Harry took her on a tour of Chicago. The city’s great buildings and lavish homes awed her, but its smoke and darkness and the ever-present scent of rotting garbage repulsed her. Holmes took the sisters to the Union Stock Yards, where a tour guide led them into the heart of the slaughter. The guide cautioned that they should watch their feet lest they slip in blood. They watched as hog after hog was upended and whisked screaming down the cable into the butchering chambers below, where men with blood-caked knifes expertly cut their throats. The hogs, some still alive, were dipped next in a vat of boiling water, then scraped clean of bristle—the bristle saved in bins below the scraping tables. Each steaming hog then passed from station to station, where knifemen drenched in blood made the same few incisions time after time until, as the hog advanced, slabs of meat began thudding wetly onto the tables. Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage. The yards embodied everything Anna had heard about Chicago and its irresistible, even savage drive toward wealth and power.

The great fair came next. They rode the Alley L along Sixty-third Street. Just before the train entered the fairgrounds, it passed the arena of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. From the elevated trestle they saw the earthen floor of the arena and the amphitheater seating that surrounded it. They saw his horses and buffalo and an authentic stagecoach. The train passed over the fair’s fence, then descended to the terminal at the rear of the Transportation Building. Brother Harry paid the fifty-cent admission for each of them. At the fair’s turnstiles even Holmes could not escape paying cash.

Naturally they first toured the Transportation Building. They saw the Pullman Company’s “Ideal of Industry” exhibit, with its detailed model of Pullman’s company town, which the company extolled as a workers’ paradise. In the building’s annex, packed with trains and locomotives, they walked the full length of an exact duplicate of the all-Pullman New York & Chicago Limited, with its plush chairs and carpeting, crystal glassware, and polished wood walls. At the pavilion of the Inman line a full-sized slice of an ocean liner towered above them. They exited the building through the great Golden Door, which arced across the light-red face of the building like a gilt rainbow.

Now, for the first time, Anna got a sense of the true, vast scale of the fair. Ahead lay a broad boulevard that skirted on the left the lagoon and the Wooded Island, on the right the tall facades of the Mines and Electricity buildings. In the distance she saw a train whooshing over the fair’s all-electric elevated railway along the park’s perimeter. Closer at hand, silent electric launches glided through the lagoon. At the far end of the boulevard, looming like an escarpment in the Rockies, stood the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. White gulls slid across its face. The building was irresistibly huge. Holmes and Minnie took her there next. Once inside she saw that the building was even more vast than its exterior had led her to believe.

A blue haze of human breath and dust blurred the intricate bracing of the ceiling 246 feet above. Halfway to the ceiling, seemingly in midair, were five gigantic electric chandeliers, the largest ever built, each seventy-five feet in diameter and generating 828,000 candlepower. Below the chandeliers spread an indoor city of “gilded domes and glittering minarets, mosques, palaces, kiosks, and brilliant pavilions,” according to the popular Rand, McNally & Co. Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition. At the center stood a clock tower, the tallest of the interior structures, rising to a height of 120 feet. Its self-winding clock told the time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds, from a face seven feet in diameter. As tall as the tower was, the ceiling was yet another 126 feet above.

Minnie stood beaming and proud as Anna’s gaze moved over the interior city and upward to its steel sky. There had to be thousands of exhibits. The prospect of seeing even a fraction of them was daunting. They saw Gobelin tapestries at the French Pavilion and the life-mask of Abraham Lincoln among the exhibits of the American Bronze Company. Other U.S. companies exhibited toys, weapons, canes, trunks, every conceivable manufactured product—and a large display of burial hardware, including marble and stone monuments, mausoleums, mantels, caskets, coffins, and miscellaneous other tools and furnishings of the undertaker’s trade.

Minnie and Anna rapidly grew tired. They exited, with relief, onto the terrace over the North Canal and walked into the Court of Honor. Here once again Anna found herself nearly overwhelmed. It was noon by now, the sun directly overhead. The gold form of the Statue of the Republic, Big Mary, stood like a torch aflame. The basin in which the statue’s plinth was set glittered with ripples of diamond. At the far end stood thirteen tall white columns,