had to pay any taxes for the water, and he had built
the icehouse out of city lumber, and had not had to
pay anything for that. The newspapers had got
hold of that story, and there had been a scandal;
but Scully had hired somebody to confess and take
all the blame, and then skip the country. It was
said, too, that he had built his brick-kiln in the
same way, and that the workmen were on the city payroll
while they did it; however, one had to press closely
to get these things out of the men, for it was not
their business, and Mike Scully was a good man to
stand in with. A note signed by him was equal
to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he
employed a good many men himself, and worked them
only eight hours a day, and paid them the highest
wages. This gave him many friends—all
of whom he had gotten together into the “War
Whoop League,” whose clubhouse you might see
just outside of the yards. It was the biggest
clubhouse, and the biggest club, in all Chicago; and
they had prizefights every now and then, and cockfights
and even dogfights. The policemen in the district
all belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing
the fights, they sold tickets for them. The man
that had taken Jurgis to be naturalized was one of
these “Indians,” as they were called; and
on election day there would be hundreds of them out,
and all with big wads of money in their pockets and
free drinks at every saloon in the district. That
was another thing, the men said—all the
saloon-keepers had to be “Indians,” and
to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business
on Sundays, nor have any gambling at all. In
the same way Scully had all the jobs in the fire department
at his disposal, and all the rest of the city graft
in the stockyards district; he was building a block
of flats somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man
who was overseeing it for him was drawing pay as a
city inspector of sewers. The city inspector of
water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year,
but somebody was still drawing his pay. The city
inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper at the War
Whoop Cafe—and maybe he could make it uncomfortable
for any tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!
Even the packers were in awe of him, so the men said.
It gave them pleasure to believe this, for Scully
stood as the people’s man, and boasted of it
boldly when election day came. The packers had
wanted a bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not
been able to get it till they had seen Scully; and
it was the same with “Bubbly Creek,” which
the city had threatened to make the packers cover
over, till Scully had come to their aid. “Bubbly
Creek” is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms
the southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage
of the square mile of packing houses empties into
it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred
or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind,
and the filth stays there forever and a day.
The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo