Don Wildman

American History Hit with me, Don Wildman.

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It's the 1850s on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan, where not too long ago, this was just a frontier outpost built on marshy ground at the meeting point of great waterways.

Territories utilized by generations of Native peoples, trading, hunting, traveling, living according to the land.

But now this land is American territory.

Property.

And against the odds, a city has risen.

Chicago.

And it's a boomtown.

Buildings are erected as quickly as people arrive.

Brick, limestone, and marble facades supported by timber frames.

When it rains, the streets become wagon-churned mud.

When it's dry, they're clouds of dust.

The humanity, too, is a contrast.

For every rising industrial magnate stepping from mansion to theater to grand hotel, there are tenement blocks of laborers newly arrived from Ireland and Germany, living between shifts in overcrowded, squalid conditions.