Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: lattfneau [From " Society in America."] CHICAGO looks raw and bare, standing on the high prairie above the lake shore. The houses appeared all insignificant, and run up in various directions, without any principle at all. A friend of mine who resides there had told me that we should find the inns intolerable at the period of the great land sales, which bring a concourse of speculators to the place. It was even so. The very sight of them was intolerable, and there was not room for our party among them all. I do not know what we should have done (unless to betake ourselves to the vessels in the harbor) if our coming had not been foreknown and most kindly provided for. We were divided between three families, who had the art of removing all our scruples about intruding on perfect strangers. None of us will lose the lively and pleasant associations with the place which were caused by the hospitalities of its inhabitants. I never saw a busier place than Chicago was at the time of our arrival. The streets were crowded with land speculators, hurrying from one sale to another. A negro, dressed up in scarlet, bearing a scarlet flag, and riding a white horse with housings of scarlet, announced the times of sale. At every street corner where he stopped, the crowd flocked round him; and it seemed as if some prevalent mania infected the whole people. The rage for speculation might fairly be so regarded. As the gentlemen of our party walked the streets, storekeepers hailed them from their doors, with offers of farms and all manner of land lots, advising them to speculate before the price of land rose higher. A young lawyer of my acquaintance there had realized five hundred dollars per day the five preceding days, by merely making out titles to land. Another friend had realized, in two ...