James O’Shaughnessy, Jr. regularly reported on the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago for the St. Joseph Herald. In a letter dated June 24, he describes riding on the great Ferris Wheel, which had opened on the Midway Plaisance only three days earlier. Bumping into people from his Missouri hometown while on the Columbian Exposition fairgrounds would have been surprise enough, but doing so in the confines he describes is quite a coincidence! At the end of his letter, O’Shaughnessy mentions Jay P. Knight, business manager of the Herald, and Charles Fremont (“Mont”) Cochran, Missouri State Senator and editor of the competing newspaper the St. Joseph Gazette.
The monster of the Midway had grown men cowering on the floor in fear. [Image from the Chicago Herald July 16, 1893.]
The Ferris wheel, the completion of which was so impatiently waited for, has at last been successfully accomplished, and the wheel is now making regular trips and proving very popular. It is one of the most ambitious and wonderful products of modern engineering skill and fairly out rivals the famous Eiffel Tower of the Paris exposition.
It is a perfect wheel or rather two wheels, 250 feet in circumference, revolving as easily and evenly as much smaller wheels are made to do.
To ride on it is quite another thing than looking at it and more impressionable. It made a trial trip last week and since then has been revolving regularly.
In getting in one of the cars I felt some trepidation, probably because of the vague uncertainty of a trial trip. The cars are as big as a Frederick Avenue streetcar; each one holds sixty people. The wheel began to revolve so smoothly that I was first aware of its motion by the increase of my horizon. I was looking into the faces of the crowd that thronged Midway, then over their heads, and I was aware that the car was ascending. Soon the great crowd filling the street throughout its length dropped away till it looked like a black ribbon. A stiff breeze come in from the lake, but it was not bracing, with the tops of all the surrounding buildings beneath and insensibly sinking further. I noticed more timid people moving to the middle of the car trying to appear as if they did it simply because they were no longer interested in the magnificent prospect. I voluntarily followed them and bumped up against a familiar group. There was Charlie Berry sitting exactly in the center of the car, measuring the distance to either side with his eye, and John Owens and R. A. Brown with him.
“Don’t you think these chairs ought to be screwed to the floor?” he asked.
Then I turned around and recognized for the first time that there was someone in the car that I knew. He tried to smile, but it was the first time he had ridden on a Ferris wheel. He let go of the chair with one hand long enough to shake mine, but grabbed it again as a little Donkey boy from Cairo in the next car sounded a blast from his Hindoo reed. The cars on the wheel are so much more like a street car than one of the kind used on the Maple Leaf route, that Owens and Brown who were stopping over on their way to New York to complete the reorganization of the street railway company seemed much more comfortable.
This is something like the tower in Krug park, Owens remarked, looking down and into the Deutsches Dorf where a brass band was playing the same airs that are familiar at New Ulm park. But it didn’t remind Brown of anything else and I sympathized with him. Charlie Berry was just going to say something as the car swung to the perihelion. Just then Brown reached up and felt for a hand strap; there wasn’t any hanging from the roof of that car and he might have lost his balance and toppled out 278 feet to the ground. That was too much for the man who manages half the business of a great railroad as if it were mere boy’s play. With a little sigh like the kind affected in comic opera, he slid off the chair to the floor. The view afforded by the height just then was one to be remembered. Below were the nations of the earth, fantastic picturesque and grotesque, to the west and north the prospect of a city—endless—lost in the smoke and vapor of commercial activity, while to the east rested the wonderful city in white and back of it the purplish green lake, flecked with sails and streaked with the train of steam craft. Softly and noiselessly as we ascended the big periphery we went down it to where the great crowd surged along babbling in every tongue, and the enchanting view was supplanted by the emblazoned facades, dull elevations and primitive walls of the villages of many nations.
Berry recovered his seat by the time we reached the landing to debark, and his unusually good spirits returned.
“I’d give $2,” he said, “if Jay P. Knight and Mont Cochran had been a long, for you wouldn’t have had any fun with me. They would have laid down the floor all the way.”
“To the east rested the wonderful city in white.” [Image from Picturesque World’s Fair. W.B. Conkey, 1894. Digitally edited.]
SOURCE
O’Shaughnessy Jr., James “World’s Fair” St. Joseph (MO) Herald Jun. 25, 1893, p. 1.