The Motto of the 
graduating class of ’96 was:
 “Vim, Vigor, Victory.”
Badger State Banner
18 June 1896


1896 was the last year of a severe depression that had begun with the bank Panic of 1893. At its height 19% of American workers had lost jobs, the middle class lost homes on foreclosed mortgages by the thousands, 15000 companies shut down, more than 500 banks failed. The worst of it occurred in the mid-western states like Wisconsin.

By 1896, however, times began changing. The progress of science and affluence put forth promise and portent. The Klondike Goldrush began in earnest after Kate Carmack and Skookum Jim found motherlodes in Bonanza Creek. Tens of thousands stampeded north for their fortune. In that year too scientists used x-rays for the first time to reveal the skeleton in a live human body. In that year history recorded the first time that an automobile killed a pedestrian, a mother holding the hand of her child, as she crossed a road.

Our story takes place twenty-five years earlier in 1871 when America was at new heights of prosperity. A Panic very like the one of 1893 was just two years off, and its depression would darken lives for a decade.

But in 1871, as I say, America reveled in prosperity and optimism: the centennial of our Independence on the horizon, new railroads flung for miles and miles each new day, our banks and granaries bursting, our hopes at a peak, rising on our soaring ambitions. Chicago, America’s new Rome, is coming into its heyday. The Palmer House Hotel, newly built, had just opened a week before the events which we shall relate. Its enormous marbled gold-leafed frescoed lobby, comfortably trafficked hundreds of patrons at a time, or directed them aside into elegant salons for dining, drinking, shopping or barbering, also splendid in marble, gold-leaf, and frescoes of the French pastorals, princesses playing at shepherdesses.

The story that follows is the true account of the events of October 8, 1871, including the fate of that new hotel in Chicago.