Just hours earlier, Bessie had gone to sleep in her family’s elegant home near Lake Michigan. About a mile away, in a crowded neighborhood across the Chicago River, Catherine O’Leary, her husband, Patrick, and their five children were also sound asleep.
On the surface, the Bradwell and O’Leary families seemed to live in two separate worlds. Bessie’s father, James, was a judge who had been friends with President Abraham Lincoln. Her mother, Myra, had founded a successful newspaper.
Unlike Bessie’s parents, the O’Learys did not have famous friends. Neither Catherine nor Patrick could read or write. Like tens of thousands of others in Chicago, they were immigrants from Ireland. They lived in a plain, unpainted house that had just two rooms for the family of seven.
But both the Bradwells and the O’Learys were, in their own ways, successful. Like Bessie’s mother, Catherine O’Leary ran a growing business—a small dairy. Each morning, she milked the four cows she kept in the family’s barn behind the house. She’d then deliver fresh milk to customers. Like the Bradwells, the O’Learys were respected by those who knew them. Both families had high hopes for the future.
As did the city of Chicago itself.
In less than 40 years, Chicago had grown from a mosquito-ridden trading post into a city of 330,000 people.
Powering the city’s growth was a new way of traveling—trains. In the years since Bessie was born, railroads had completely changed life in America. Suddenly, everyone—and everything—seemed to be moving.
Cross-country trips that had taken months by horse and buggy now took just days.
By the late 1860s, thousands of miles of railroad tracks crisscrossed the United States. And in the middle of the action was Chicago. Few cities had grown as fast.