Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/398

 382 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

It was not until 1852 that lines of railroad giving connection with the eastern states entered Chicago. For four years before that time the engine " Pioneer," brought here on a brig, had been hauling trains on the Galena & Chicago Union Railway, which was the nucleus of the Northwestern system. Ever since 1837 the citizens had been active over a big internal improvement scheme for a railway system to cover the state as a unit ; and by 1850 a charter had been granted the Illinois Central, assuring a Mississippi Valley system centered in Chicago.

The population when the first magazine was established, in 1845, numbered 12,083. ^ g rew rapidly to 84,113 by 1856. In the early part of this period the people composing it were chiefly native-born, the adventurous sons of Yankees in the seaboard section. When the foreign immigration set in heavily, during the later forties, the newcomers did not produce any marked effect by giving a varied, cosmopolitan character, such as masses of men from other lands have since contributed.

These men from the states near the eastern seaboard had brought with them a tradition of American magazines which dated back to 1741, when Benjamin Franklin had established, on English models, the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle. But that recollection was of magazines that were, almost neces- sarily, of, by, and for a distinct section, many of them having had state names, such as the Massachusetts Magazine. And the magazines which came from the East for Chicago readers in the ante-Civil War days were emphatically of the East. But even these did not begin to come regularly to the West until 1850, after ten literary periodicals had already been attempted in Chi- cago. It should not be surprising that in their literary isolation these pioneers should have undertaken the creation of their own literature, and that their literary journals should have been as sectional in spirit as those they had known in their earlier homes.

This tone in Chicago periodicals was not changed, but really heightened, by the coming of the seaboard city magazines which were then so markedly eastern in character. Mr. George H. Fergus, an old gentleman who today, at an office in Lake Street, continues the business of his father, Robert Fergus, Chicago's