In Africa by John T. McCutcheon

Title: In Africa: Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country by John Tinney McCutcheon

Location: Google Books     Date: 1910

Fans of Chicago Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon, will be particularly interested in his personal account of his African adventures. The book is filled with his whimsical prose and sketches plus many of his personal photographs. What is most interesting to note is that eleven years later, McCutcheon would be elected the first president of the Chicago Zoological Association. In his autobiography, Drawn From Memory, McCutcheon credits his African expedition as the reason he was chosen to be president of the new Brookfield Zoo.

Getting ready for lion shooting.

CHAPTER I

THE PREPARATION FOR DEPARTURE. EXPERIENCES WITH WILLING FRIENDS AND ADVISERS

Ever since I can remember, almost, I have cherished a modest ambition to hunt lions and elephants. At an early age, or, to be more exact, at about that age which finds most boys wondering whether they would rather be Indian fighters or sailors, I ran across a copy of Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent. It was full of fascinating adventures. I thrilled at the accounts which spoke in terms of easy familiarity of “express” rifles and “elephant” guns, and in my vivid but misguided imagination, I pictured an elephant gun as a sort of cannon—a huge, unwieldy arquebus—that fired a ponderous shell. The old woodcuts of daring hunters and charging lions inspired me with unrest and longing—the longing to bid the farm farewell and start down the road for Africa. Africa! What a picture it conjured up in my fancy! Then, as even now, it symbolized a world of adventurous possibilities; and in my boyhood fancy, it lay away off there—somewhere—vaguely—beyond mountains and deserts and oceans, a vast, mysterious, unknown land, that swarmed with inviting dangers and alluring romance.

One by one my other youthful ambitions have been laid away. I have given up hope of ever being an Indian fighter out on the plains, because the pesky redskins have long since ceased to need my strong right arm to quell them. I also have yielded up my ambition to be a sailor, or rather, that branch of the profession in which I hoped to specialize— piracy—because, for some regretful reason, piracy has lost much of its charm in these days of great liners. There is no treasure to search for any more, and the golden age of the splendid clipper ships, with their immense spread of canvas, has given way to the unromantic age of the grimy steamer, about which there is so little to appeal to the imagination. Consequently, lion hunting is about the only thing left—except wars, and they are few and far between.

And so, after suffering this “lion-hunting” ambition to lie fallow for many years, I at last reached a day when it seemed possible to realize it. The chance came in a curiously unexpected way. Mr. Akeley, a man famed in African hunting exploits, was to deliver a talk before a little club to which I belonged. I went, and as a result of my thrilled interest in every word he said, I met him and talked with him and finally was asked to join a new African expedition that he had in prospect. With the party were to be Mrs. Akeley, with a record of fourteen months in the big game country, and Mr.  Stephenson, a hunter with many years of experience in the wild places of the United States, Canada and Mexico. My hunting experience had been  chiefly gained in my library, but for some strange reason, it did not seem incongruous that I should begin my real hunting in a lion and elephant country.

I had all the prowess of a Tartarin, and during the five months that elapsed before I actually set forth, I went about ray daily work with a mind half dazed with the delicious consciousness that I was soon to become a lion hunter. I feared that modern methods might have taken away much of the old- time romance of the sport, but I felt certain that there was still to be something left in the way of excitement and adventure.

The succeeding pages of this book contain the chronicle of the nine delightful months that followed my departure from America.

Chicago’s Left Bank

Title: Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith

Location: Google Books       Date: 1953

This is one of my favorite books on the subject of literary Chicago. Smith has a witty style that matches his topic and, I believe, will grab you from the get go. Tracing the history of Chicago’s literati we get a glimpse of the bohemians in their native environment – Towertown. You’ll love it.

Out In Chicago, the only genuinely civilized city in the New World, they take the fine arts seriously and get into such frets and excitements about them as are raised nowhere else save by baseball, murder, political treachery, -foreign wars, and romantic loves . . . almost one fancies the world bumped by a flying asteroid, and the Chicago River suddenly turned into the Seine.—Henry L. Mencken in the Smart Set.

Chapter I
Montmartre in the Midwest

EVERYTHING in Chicago dates from the Year of the Fire, 1871. Post anno incendii, the chief structure left standing on the north bank of the Chicago River was the waterworks building on East Chicago Avenue. The tall stone tower of this inelegant edifice looked out over the fire-blackened ruins of what had been one of the city’s better residential sections, the Near North Side.

It was only natural that when the rebuilding began, the area in the immediate vicinity of the old water tower should be dubbed “Towertown.” And, like the arch in New York’s Washington Square and the golden dome of Sacre Coeur on Montmartre, that tower was destined to cast a long shadow over the world of arts and letters. In the years between 1912 and 1924, it was the geographical center of what was perhaps the most vital literary and artistic upsurge in the history of the country. At least Papa Mencken thought so; in 1920 he went to England to startle the dilettantes of Fleet Street with the information that the Germans had really won the war and that Chicago, Illinois, was the literary capital of the universe.

The part about Chicago was approximately true, although book critic Harry Hansen, speaking for the city’s better classes, angrily denied the accusation. In those years corn-fed hopefuls from all over the Midwest flowed into the free-and-easy bohemia of the gigantic abattoir by Lake Michigan. They came to read their poems to Harriet Monroe in the studio at 543 Cass Street, to study under Lorado Taft at the Art Institute, and to chase fire-engines for Henry Justin Smith and the Chicago Daily News in return for the privilege of rubbing shoulders in the city room with Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht.

Towertown was the center of this renaissance. It was happily situated between the palaces of a rich residential area, the Lake Shore Drive “Gold Coast,” and the miasmal slums of Little Hell. Little Hell, like the deteriorated areas around New York’s Greenwich Village, was largely Italian, and the cheap spaghetti parlors of the neighborhood had atmosphere to fit the temperament and price to fit the pocketbook of the impoverished artists and writers in the batik-curtained coach houses, studios, and stables of Towertown. North Avenue, main artery of the old German “Nort’ Seit’,” bounded bohemia on the north, and the river, with its many bridges into the Loop, was on the south. Bisecting the whole area was the bright gut of the North Clark Street rialto, traditional main drag of hobohemia and the demi-world, with its saloons, night clubs, gambling joints and “hotels.” Rents were cheap, the Loop was within easy walking distance, and the finest beach in the city was at the foot of Oak Street. All this and Ireland’s, too—for one of the world’s best sea food restaurants was on North Clark Street, and still is.