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"The Typical American Town"
by
. . .
Not long ago Chicago had a celebration. It placed a statue to “Black Jack Logan” on the lake front. This statue, which is by St. Gaudens, represents a large-moustached man on a slimly-built horse that has his right hoof elevated to his ear, apparently endeavoring to paw a fly therefrom. Of course, it is understood that any natural horse which stood in that way, would fall down and skin his pasterns and hocks and stifles and barrel and withers and other parts of him known to the veterinarians. I am no horse doctor.
The large-moustached man has on cavalry boots which are dug into the stirrups and his legs are very stiff and calm. He holds a flag in his right hand–holds it far up and away and its folds are blown by the wind. Every child knows that a United States flag and staff weigh only two ounces and a man on horse-back can swing it around as if it were a feather. These things do not enter into the rapt dream of St. Gaudens. Nothing enters into his dream save poetry to be expressed in bronze and the dollars that are to come therefrom. The statue is well enough in its way. Let it go at that.
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There was a celebration. Troops came and marched from many states. Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic tramped along and the people cheered them. I suppose that one quarter of the heroes who are drawing $160,000,000 a year in pensions from the government were on hand. I have been unable to find out anything that “Black Jack” did, other than the fact that he came back from the front in 1863, and legged for Abraham Lincoln, thereby getting into politics and staying in until he died. Also he scoured the country carefully and found everybody that was connected with him by blood or marriage and put him or her into office. At one time Logan and family were drawing enough money from Uncle Sam to draw a respectable navy. As the orators were orating and the cannon were barking and the sweating people on the sidewalks were shouting, they knew not and cared not for what, I thought of some lines which opened a Washington letter in the Boston Globe many years ago, when John A. Logan was in the United States Senate. There was a tariff discussion on and he took a part. These were the lines: “Pranced there in, on the arena of the great debate, like a trick mule in a circus or a spavined nightmare on the track of a beautiful dream, Logan of Illinois.” They fitted him.
A part of that celebration consisted of fireworks which were given at the Coliseum, a large building which stands in the southern part of the city and is used as a place of entertainment. John T. Dickinson, formerly of Texas, and now of the earth, is the president of the Coliseum Company, and engineered the display. It takes money to have fireworks and the company of “big-bugs” who bossed the entire marksman’s contest, told him so. With that hustle which made him a marked man in Austin and other large cities in which he lived before he broke into Chicago, Dickinson rushed out and raised the money. He got subscriptions from prominent merchants, collected the funds and turned them over to William R. Harper, who was chairman of the committee on arrangements and committee on glory and pretty nearly everything else. The fireworks were touched off and fizzed and banked and spluttered, and the people cheered some more.
The fellows who furnished the Catherine wheels and sky rockets and so forth, sent in their bills, which were audited and marked correct and Harper was requested to settle. He refused. The fireworks were not a success, he said. The fireworks men represented to him that whether the display was a success or a heart-breaking failure sawed no frozen water whatever. They were not entrusted with the management of the affair. They had furnished the goods and wanted their money. Harper refused. Dickinson jumped in once more and carried to Harper testimonials from the men who had furnished the money, saying that there never had been any fireworks so good as those fireworks. Harper refused. Harper was then bombarded with orders from the subscribers directing him to pay out the $2,500 which he held to their credit. He refused.