Disarranging Mine

Coincidence: I'm just reading Donald L. Miller's "City of the Century," about Chicago up through 1893, and just finished a passage in which he briefly discusses Robert Todd Lincoln's friendship with Marshall Field and George Pullman (as well as his role in trying to save a friend's library during the fire in 1871).

That book sounds familiar, but I don't think I've read it. I think Robert Todd Lincoln is a most fascinating person. Even though he died 30 years before I was born, I feel like I know him.

It's a marvelously written book: It relates the city's story from Marquette and Joliet's passage up through the World's Columbian Exposition. And it's full of odd connectons I had no notion of: I knew, for instance, that the Peshtigo Fire killed 1,100 people in remote northern Wisconsn the same evening the Chicago Fire began. What I didn't know was that William Ogden, one of Chicago's true founders, also founded (and owned) Peshtigo. Lots of amazing stuff like that iin the book.