Shadows of Chicago: The True Story of Three Men and the Crimes that Shocked America

By Matthew Drew

Shadows of Chicago is the extraordinary true story of three childhood friends and witnesses to the Great Chicago Fire who became early-twentieth century celebrities, only to have their lives end tragically. Shadows of Chicago exposes shocking facts that prove each of the three men were entangled in the most notorious crimes in the nation's history. The most famous of the three friends, Charles "The Old Roman" Comiskey, was the craftiest player/manager in professional baseball history and the true founder of the American League. His life spiraled out of control when he became wrapped up in the infamous Black Sox Scandal. The second, James "Big Jim" Horan, rises to the rank of First Fire Marshal of Chicago and establishes himself as the most influential trailblazer in American firefighting. His great deeds are cut short when he, along with twenty-two other firefighters, became involved in the most tragic fire in American history. The third, Fred Busse, ascends to Postmaster under President Theodore Roosevelt, and then due to a bizarre accident, becomes Mayor of Chicago. As mayor, after he crumbles the most notorious vice district in America's history, the Levee, his life takes a turn for the worse. A portion of the proceeds from each copy will go towards the Ende, Menzer, Walsh & Quinn Retirees Widows and Children's Assistance Fund to help the widows and orphans of Chicago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Drew
• Release date: Aug 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311781758

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By

Matthew Drew

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Shadows of Chicago: The True Story of Three Men and the Crimes That Shocked America

Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Matthew Drew

Front cover illustration Copyright © 2013 Matt Cosgrove

Interior Design by Michael Kleen

Published at Smashwords.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an article or review.

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To my supportive family and friends.

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Chapter 1

THE GREAT FIRE

Baseball was the wildest sport in America. Young ball players played untamed from one side of the country to the other. That was until more and more organized leagues began to assemble.

In 1871, the nation’s focus was on the hottest organized team, the unbeatable Cincinnati Red Stockings and their ongoing rampage from coast-to-coast. To the surprise of everyone, a relatively unknown team (also from the Midwest) threatened to end their first-place streak.

The Chicago White Stockings, in their first true year in organized baseball, surprised everyone with a win against the champs, even finishing third in the league. The Red Stockings won the league championship again, but many sports writers predicted Chicago would take it the following year. No one could have predicted that the following season a natural catastrophe would keep the White Stockings from winning a league championship for years to come.

On the Southwest Side of Chicago, children adored their White Stockings, even though most never had a hot ticket to a game. Regardless if they saw a game or not, they dressed like their favorite players by wearing white flannel caps, shirts, stockings, and blue trousers. They also mirrored their favorite players’ style to outwit their peers, like the cheating-over technique to force players to hit to their weak side, sacrifice hitting, tag-dodging slides, or plank-style diving catches. Some of the more aggressive techniques sacrificed the body so much they’d end up as road kills.

As children sought to perfect the skills of their favorite players, they were also inventing new ways of winning. One unique method was trash-talking the other team members—an insult directed at one’s family member could throw off the best player’s game. Besides the trickery, children were adapting to faster and faster play that relied on quicker and quicker thinking. Much of the speedy, imaginative play developing on the wild prairies on the Southwest Side of Chicago would have a direct influence on the future of the professional baseball league.

Many of baseball’s most influential pioneers began playing a field nicknamed the Sandlot, located just southwest of the city. The Sandlot resembled nothing like the diamonds children play on today; instead, it looked more like a trampled dirt prairie, speckled with wild grass. The rough ground caused balls to jet in every direction, creating a menace to those fielding them. The ricocheting balls must have been even more difficult to retrieve with their bare hands, and if the kids were lucky enough to have gloves, they were worn, tattered, sometimes hand-me-downs from older brothers. The rest of the equipment was just as improvised.

It must have been especially challenging to play at the Sandlot on October 8, 1871. On the unusually hot, sunny afternoon, the field’s rugged ground must have been worse than ever, since most of the grass had been depleted from weeks of baking, arid weather. But, for young Charles Comiskey, Fred Busse and Jim Horan, the challenging conditions made the game more exciting.

At only twelve-years-old, Jim Horan and Charles Comiskey amazed others with their aggressive play, crushing the ball and snagging anything hit their way. Meanwhile, Fred Busse, a few years younger, played unnoticeably in the background, secretly admiring his friends’ aggressiveness on the field.

Young Fred Busse was particularly thrilled to watch Jim Horan’s play. His mom and Jim Horan’s mom were close friends and he looked up to him for as long as he could remember.

The Sandlot was the boys’ innocent escape from the weekly brawls between the ethnic groups surrounding their neighborhood. It was common for them to see gangs armed with butcher knives, rusty hooks, awls, and various farm tools looking for a fight. The hottest rivalry was between ethnic immigrants and the Nativists, a ragtag group of rowdy, mostly Protestant, ethnic Anglo-Saxons who shared a common hatred for anti-American cultures. Together they banded together to fight off enemies encroaching on their prairie land, mostly the Irish and Germans.

Nativists, both young and old, along with many other white-Anglos, believed the Irish were a dangerous, worthless race of mongrels. Much of this hatred had existed through centuries of conflicts in Europe between the Irish and English. More recent prejudices in the States existed because the Irish immigrants were seen as stupid peasant farmers who spent all their time drinking, fighting, and committing violent crimes. Although many Irish were proven troublemakers, others didn’t realize they provided an enormous hand in building the nation. For instance, the Irish recently fought heroically on both sides of the Civil War and worked tenaciously building roads and waterways—most notably, the Illinois and Michigan Canal.¹ Nevertheless, the Irish in Chicago would spend the next half century shrugging off racist attacks. Many storefront signs would read No Irish Need Apply, and seemingly endless racial slurs such as Turkey and Paddy would resound throughout the streets. As a result of the prejudices, the Chicago Irish found kinship in parish-centered neighborhoods with their own kind.

Crime was not the only thing fueling many of the Nativists’ hatred towards newly-arrived ethnic groups. Much of the hatred stemmed from the drunken behavior of Irish and Germans in public. To stop their seemingly bizarre drinking routine, mobs of Nativists, along with a band of conservative Christian groups, spearheaded heated protests throughout the city.

Once the mobs found their rants and raves were met with jokes and laughs, they called on their main supporter, the mayor of Chicago, Roswell Mason, to enact anti-liquor laws on Sundays. The mayor already had the Nativists’ support because he sought to end the amount of saloons during his administration. With the help of the mayor, the Nativists were able to slow down the amount of drinking on Sundays.

This especially infuriated the Germans who spent every Sunday at beer gardens, some of the liveliest places in the city. The neighborhood biergartens imitated the ones they remembered from southern Germany: most had open air areas with trees, wooden benches, and gravel ground, where day and night you could hear loud laughing, blaring folk music. The smell of pipes and cigars permeated the air.

German and Irish alike saw no problem with their festive drinking habits, as long as it didn’t interfere with work the next day. They were able to find jobs, despite the many efforts of Nativists and other xenophobic Chicagoans to keep them out of their workforce. The Irish typically found jobs as laborers; while many Germans became butchers in the stockyards or small business owners. Although the Irish and Germans had similar struggles, they typically banded with their own kind in separate neighborhoods. This was true with Jim Horan’s and Charles Comiskey’s Irish families, and Fred Busse’s German family. They started off away from where they were not wanted.

Even though the three friends were born in the U.S. like other Nativists, they still always had to watch their backs walking to their homes near the block of 100 West 18th Street, several blocks south of the Sandlot.

Despite the inherent dangers of walking the streets, that hot, sunny October 8th afternoon, the day must have seemed normal. However, nothing seemed normal to the U.S. Weather Service in Chicago as they tracked the unusually dry conditions for that time of year. Only 5.27 inches of rain fell in the city from July to October, instead of the average 9-plus inches that normally fell during that time period. So unusual were these conditions that the dry weather caused the leaves to drop as early as July.²

Jim Horan, Charles Comiskey, and Fred Busse walked home that day along the sidewalks, a series of rotting wood planks haphazardly placed along the sides of the road. These planks were designed to protect citizens from getting stuck in the mud or trampled by horses or buggies. They were so prevalent that they connected most of the wood houses and storefronts throughout Chicago. All in all, the entire city was like an archaic town, consisting of buildings slapped together with little or no regard for fire-resistant materials or construction methods. In addition, stored between many of these buildings were bundles of firewood, the same type residents used to burn in fireplaces, as well as coal for furnaces. As a result, just about all of the buildings sat like powder kegs waiting for a minor spark that could trigger a major city-wide inferno. Strangely, this ominous warning was revealed to readers in the morning Tribune that day.

When young Horan, Comiskey, and Busse returned home that day, each of them probably went to sleep early so they would be well rested for school the following morning. Shortly after falling asleep at about 9:00 p.m., a fire broke out in the O’Leary barn a few blocks away.

Minutes after, they woke up to the sounds of screaming men, women, and children. To their horror, they discovered their neighbors wearing torn, filthy pajamas, their bodies covered in soot, quickly moving from the fire burning behind them. The peculiar scene was illuminated by the enormous fire only a couple of blocks away.

The same streets the boys may have walked earlier that afternoon were now engulfed by a red-orange fire spiraling a hundred feet into the sky. The clear, star-filled night was draped by a dense-black smoke cloud speckled with glowing embers. The fire below reflected off the dark smoke cloud, making the scene even more astonishing to their young eyes. They must have felt terrified as they stared at the terrible beauty of the rising inferno.

Young Horan, Comiskey, and Busse were awestruck as the fire sprawled quickly throughout the city. It traveled from building to building along the dry wood sidewalks, racing in the direction of the oxygen-rich east wind originating from the Iowa plains. As the 30mph wind pushed the fire north, masses of superheated air rose from the flames, causing a whirling motion upon contact with the cooler surrounding air from Lake Michigan. One observer who witnessed the whirling fire said, The fire came from the air above, more than [what burned] from the earth.

The fire winds funneling from the sky scorched buildings in seconds. The newly created fires spread through entire neighborhoods in minutes, creating a sickening stench of burnt timber, and animal and human flesh. Most of the sounds were the roar of the fire and the screaming people escaping the flames.³

As some survivors scurried away from the flames, firefighters remained to fight back the spreading inferno. Their attempts to drench the encroaching hundred-foot fire walls with hoses were futile because the hoses didn’t provide the necessary amount of water needed to make an effective offensive stance. This was due to the hundreds of feet of hose charged at the same time, requiring too much water pressure from the horse-drawn engines and hydrants; because fire engineering laws rule that water pressure is adversely affected the longer the length of hose. Even if the firefighters had used shorter lengths in this case, most of the small engines weren’t powerful enough to draw the enormous amount of water necessary from the hydrants. Moreover, the water mains were not large enough to sustain the streams necessary soak such a gigantic fire.

The three-and-a-half square-mile fire proved to be too much for the sixteen horse-drawn steam engines (although the most modern of the day) of the Chicago Fire Department. On top of that, there were only six hose carts, four hook and ladder companies, and 185 firemen—a little more than half of those working this particular day. The few working firefighters were on a first-shift system, 24 hour breaks between shifts.⁴ To add to the difficulties, some firemen worked multiple shifts that kept them awake for several days in a row and most had fought a fire that almost burnt down the city the night before.⁵

There were 28 major fires during the week, making the situation so dire that the First Fire Marshal Robert A. Williams had spent the past several days pressing city government for emergency measures. His appeal to city council for greater resources, particularly John Comiskey (Charles’s father), fell on deaf ears just as it had in the past.

For the last year, with the help of the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners, Marshal Williams had lobbied unsuccessfully for more fire hydrants, floating steam engines on the Chicago River, a limitation of wood as a building material, and larger water mains. Additionally, he requested 15,000 feet of new hose, but he received only 10,000 feet. More importantly, he said the fire department was spread too thin, incapable of protecting its 36 square miles. Regardless of what would have happened if his requests were granted, or if political maneuvering were to blame for the fire, it’s important to recognize the red tape involved when fighting for the city’s safety.⁶

Even though the fire department and politicians knew there was a drastic need to improve safety measures, this day the firefighters were not equipped to contain such a massive blaze. As a result, they were forced to defend areas by using a method similar to a controlled burn, frequently used in wilderness firefighting. The tactic used in this case was to remove fuel from the path of the fire so it would burn itself out.

This process was initiated with the help of Civil War hero General Philip Sheridan along with other soldiers, who purposely ignited and exploded whole blocks of buildings in an attempt to plug the fire’s path of destruction.⁷ In other areas they purposely directed the fire east toward Lake Michigan by stacking fuel along a trail until the fire drowned in the water. All along the lakefront the fires followed the controlled trails until they sizzled, steamed, and expired in the cool water.

Despite firefighter and civilian efforts to control the fire, it raged for two days and nights. The agonizing fight ended on the morning of October 10th after light rains doused what remained of the flames. After the last flame was extinguished, 15,700 buildings were destroyed from Harrison Street north to Fullerton Avenue, and from the Chicago River east to Lake Michigan. The only buildings not ruined were on the outskirts of town, including the Union Stockyards.

As a result of the devastation, 100,000 men, women and children were left homeless. For years, according to many estimates, it was calculated that up to 300 people perished.⁸ Experts now agree that the death toll could have been as much as five times higher when considering the large amount of undocumented citizens.

Ruins of Chicago. View of Clark Street looking north after the Chicago Fire of 1871; Chicago Fire; 1871; Lithographer--Gregson. Chicago History Museum, #i02968

For days after the fire, young Horan, Comiskey, and Busse watched hundreds of homeless refugees lugging their few valuables past their homes, away from the still-smoking destruction. They and their families had escaped homelessness and possibly death only because the wind blew north instead of south. It was a humbling experience to know they were at the mercy of such a powerful, unforeseen force. At the same time, it was such a horrific experience that it would haunt them the rest of their days. No one would be affected more than Jim Horan.

¹ The Illinois Michigan canal was built mostly by Irish immigrants. Many died during its construction. The project connected the Chicago River with the Mississippi, increasing trade throughout the Midwest.

² The Weather Doctor Almanac 2000, www.islandnet.com

³ Sawislak, Karen. Smoldering City: Chicago and the Great Fire, 1871-1874. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

⁴ Bales, Richard F. The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow. McFarland Press.

⁵ Sawislak.

⁶ Sawislak & Bales.

⁷ General Sheridan, who lived in Chicago since 1867, was assigned all police authority during and sometime after The Great Fire by the ineffectual Mayor Rowell Mason. Many people, including Civil War veterans questioned this decision, having witnessed some of Sheridan’s brutality, including his massacre of Southerners and the Cheyenne Tribe.

⁸ Bales.

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Chapter 2

FROM THE ASHES

At midnight, the first night of the Great Chicago Fire, Conley’s Patch, the Irish south side ghetto that ran from 12th to