Chicago A prairie bog AND raising Chicago

This piece comes from ... Chicagology ...
a very intersting site I discovered ...

Read "Raising Chicago", click here. Below is largely an excerpt from this piece ...

Chicago being a prairie bog, the early citizens faced many problems. Early on, Chicago’s population and commerce growth was hindered by lack of good transportation infrastructure. "During spring Chicago was so muddy from the high water that horses would be stuck, past their legs in the street. It was dependent largely upon a few dirt roads so bottomless and hazardous much of the time that one of them — marked by broken wheels, wrecks of wagons, and the bones of dead horses — was called the Slough of Despond".

There were comical signs to warn people of the mud ...
“Fastest route to China” or “No Bottom Here” ...

Folklore has it ... A gentleman who, passing by a street, discovers a man buried up to his shoulders in mud. The gentleman asks the man, “Can I help you?” ... “No, thank you,” the man replies, “I have a good horse under me.”

To address these transportation problems, the board of Cook County commissioners, decided to improve two country roads toward the West and Southwest. The first road went west, crossing the “dismal Nine-mile Swamp,” crossed the Des Plaines River , and went southwest to Walker’s Grove, now known as Plainfield. There is a dispute about the route of the second road to the South.

In 1855 the city council decided that the streets should be raised to a level of four to fourteen feet above the lake. This meant adding several feet of earth under the existing structures. The process took more than 20 years to complete and was accomplished by literally raising the city. Buildings were lifted up by “dozens of men turning dozens of jacks in unison so that new foundations could be built underneath.

The task of raising Chicago was best reported by the Chicago Press & Tribune in their 20 March 1860 issue...
The entire front of first-class buildings on the north side of Lake Street between La Salle and Clark streets is now rising to grade at the rate of about twelve inches per day. It will be at its full height by tomorrow night, when it will constitute a spectacle not many of our citizens may see again, if ever, a business block covering nearly one acre, and weighing over twenty-five thousand tons resting on six thousand screws, upon which it has made an upward journey of four feet and ten inches. Probably its parallel enterprise cannot be be found the world over. It will be worth seeing tomorrow, and the contractors are, we learn, preparing to accomodate the public and give them an opportunity of looking and passing in among the forest of iron screws.