Ruth Russell

Review from Goodreads:

"Episodic and impressionistic history of Chicago, seen through three generations of an Irish immigrant family.

Before we get to them there was a well written and evocative prologue of vignettes from the life of Jean de Brébeuf and Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit missionaries who first visited the place when it was called Chicagou, after the garlic which grew freely there.

The narrative proper began in 1835, a young Irish girl named Jane O'Mara and her widowed mother, brother and younger sister move to the area. She likes it immediately:

'Chicago! Place she'd dreamed about ever since she'd heard there were no nabobs here, and everyone was after getting his chance.'

At that time the metropolis that would become Chicago was little more than a series of muddy streets on the banks of a lake, full of cows and hogs, shacks instead of houses, the wind whistling through them.

The baton is then handed on to Jane's brother James, who becomes an idealistic lawyer. He risks his future by taking the side of an alcoholic inventor against the railways and supporting Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic rival to Abraham Lincoln.

Politics in Chicago were notoriously rowdy and James is in the thick of it. He considers joining the Fenian struggle back in their ancestral home. Eventually the Civil War combines his interests, and James puts together a brigade of Irish troops.

The third part of the story follows the rise of James's son of the same name, very different from his dad he represents the ruthlessness behind the rise of big business in the Windy City, played out against the background of union strife and railways.

To close things out Russell adds a short coda bringing the history up to the era of gangsters and skyscrapers.

On the only other book I can find by Ruth Russell, called What's the Matter With Ireland, the Chicago-based Illinois Catholic Historical Review described her as a “brilliant young writer” whose “powerful book, in language simple and direct, and yet at times dramatic or poetic”

You could say exactly the same for this book."… (meer)