The Jungle

urgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him
stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of
Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward—stories to make
your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there
four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much
health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be
beaten. “That is well enough for men like you,” he would say,
“silpnas, puny fellows—but my back is broad.”

Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man
the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they
cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would
go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would
stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in
him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too
slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and
restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important
occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company’s “Central
Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival
in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this
he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at
the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in
that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a
month—yes, many months—and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say,
“but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings,
fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more
for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms”—and he would
clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the
rolling muscles—“that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”

“It is plain,” they would answer to this, “that you have come from the
country, and from very far in the country.” And this was the fact, for
Jurgis had never seen a city, and scarcely even a fair-sized town,
until he had set out to make his fortune in the world and earn his
right to Ona. His father, and his father’s father before him, and as
many ancestors back as legend could go, had lived in that part of
Lithuania known as Brelovicz, the Imperial Forest. This is a great
tract of a hundred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been
a hunting preserve of the nobility. There are a very few peasants
settled in it, holding title from ancient times; and one of these was
Antanas Rudkus, who had been reared himself, and had reared his
children in turn, upon half a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst
of a wilderness. There had been one son besides Jurgis, and one sister.
The former had been drafted into the army; that had been over ten years
ago, but since that day nothing had ever been heard of him. The sister
was married, and her husband had bought the place when old Antanas had
decided to go with his son.

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a horse
fair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get
married—he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into;
but here, without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than
the exchange of half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the
face with embarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to
him for his wife—and offering his father’s two horses he had been sent
to the fair to sell. But Ona’s father proved as a rock—the girl was yet
a child, and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in
that way. So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and
summer toiled and tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest
was over, he saw that it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight’s
journey that lay between him and Ona.

He found an unexpected state of affairs—for the girl’s father had died,
and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis’ heart leaped as he
realized that now the prize was within his reach. There was Elzbieta
Lukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona’s stepmother, and
there were her six children, of all ages. There was also her brother
Jonas, a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm. They were
people of great consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the
woods; Ona knew how to read, and knew many other things that he did not
know, and now the farm had been sold, and the whole family was
adrift—all they owned in the world being about seven hundred rubles
which is half as many dollars. They would have had three times that,
but it had gone to court, and the judge had decided against them, and
it had cost the balance to get him to change his decision.

Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she loved
Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America,
where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and
the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless—they would
live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country
where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis
figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were
where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and
marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor,
a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he
did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials—he might do as
he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man. So America was
a place of which lovers and young people dreamed. If one could only
manage to get the price of a passage, he could count his troubles at an
end.

It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and
meantime Jurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and
tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work
upon a railroad in Smolensk. This was a fearful experience, with filth
and bad food and cruelty and overwork; but Jurgis stood it and came out
in fine trim, and with eighty rubles sewed up in his coat. He did not
drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona; and for
the rest, he was a quiet, steady man, who did what he was told to, did
not lose his temper often, and when he did lose it made the offender
anxious that he should not lose it again. When they paid him off he
dodged the company gamblers and dramshops, and so they tried to kill
him; but he escaped, and tramped it home, working at odd jobs, and
sleeping always with one eye open.

So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last
moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona’s.
Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer
of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that
it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up
and nearly murdered the man, and then come away.

There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children—and
Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time on the passage;
there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got
them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of
their precious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear. This
happened to them again in New York—for, of course, they knew nothing
about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a
man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel
and keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away.
The law says that the rate card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it
does not say that it shall be in Lithuanian.

It was in the stockyards that Jonas’ friend had gotten rich, and so to
Chicago the party was bound. They knew that one word, Chicago and that
was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.
Then, tumbled out of the cars without ceremony, they were no better off
than before; they stood staring down the vista of Dearborn Street, with
its big black buildings towering in the distance, unable to realize
that they had arrived, and why, when they said “Chicago,” people no
longer pointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or
laughed, or went on without paying any attention. They were pitiable in
their helplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any
sort of person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a
policeman they would cross the street and hurry by. For the whole of
the first day they wandered about in the midst of deafening confusion,
utterly lost; and it was only at night that, cowering in the doorway of
a house, they were finally discovered and taken by a policeman to the
station. In the morning an interpreter was found, and they were taken
and put upon a car, and taught a new word—“stockyards.” Their delight
at discovering that they were to get out of this adventure without
losing another share of their possessions it would not be possible to
describe.

They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street which
seemed to run on forever, mile after mile—thirty-four of them, if they
had known it—and each side of it one uninterrupted row of wretched
little two-story frame buildings. Down every side street they could
see, it was the same—never a hill and never a hollow, but always the
same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and
there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud
shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a
railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing,
and rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great
factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, and immense
volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys, darkening the air above and
making filthy the earth beneath. But after each of these interruptions,
the desolate procession would begin again—the procession of dreary
little buildings.

A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note
the perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time,
and upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute,
as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields
were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And
along with the thickening smoke they began to notice another
circumstance, a strange, pungent odor. They were not sure that it was
unpleasant, this odor; some might have called it sickening, but their
taste in odors was not developed, and they were only sure that it was
curious. Now, sitting in the trolley car, they realized that they were
on their way to the home of it—that they had traveled all the way from
Lithuania to it. It was now no longer something far off and faint, that
you caught in whiffs; you could literally taste it, as well as smell
it—you could take hold of it, almost, and examine it at your leisure.
They were divided in their opinions about it. It was an elemental odor,
raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There
were some who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were
others who put their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants
were still tasting it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a
halt, and the door was flung open, and a voice shouted—“Stockyards!”

They were left standing upon the corner, staring; down a side street
there were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half a
dozen chimneys, tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the very
sky—and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily,
and black as night. It might have come from the center of the world,
this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smolder. It came as if
self-impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was
inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great
streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing,
curling; then, uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the
sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.

Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, like
the color, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of
ten thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first—it sunk
into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like
the murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest;
it suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It
was only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by
animals, that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the
distant grunting of ten thousand swine.

They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time for
adventures just then. The policeman on the corner was beginning to
watch them; and so, as usual, they started up the street. Scarcely had
they gone a block, however, before Jonas was heard to give a cry, and
began pointing excitedly across the street. Before they could gather
the meaning of his breathless ejaculations he had bounded away, and
they saw him enter a shop, over which was a sign: “J. Szedvilas,
Delicatessen.” When he came out again it was in company with a very
stout gentleman in shirt sleeves and an apron, clasping Jonas by both
hands and laughing hilariously. Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly
that Szedvilas had been the name of the mythical friend who had made
his fortune in America. To find that he had been making it in the
delicatessen business was an extraordinary piece of good fortune at
this juncture; though it was well on in the morning, they had not
breakfasted, and the children were beginning to whimper.

Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage. The two families
literally fell upon each other’s necks—for it had been years since
Jokubas Szedvilas had met a man from his part of Lithuania. Before half
the day they were lifelong friends. Jokubas understood all the pitfalls
of this new world, and could explain all of its mysteries; he could
tell them the things they ought to have done in the different
emergencies—and what was still more to the point, he could tell them
what to do now. He would take them to poni Aniele, who kept a
boardinghouse the other side of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he
explained, had not what one would call choice accommodations, but they
might do for the moment. To this Teta Elzbieta hastened to respond that
nothing could be too cheap to suit them just then; for they were quite
terrified over the sums they had had to expend. A very few days of
practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to
make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high
prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other
corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful
dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis. What had made the
discovery all the more painful was that they were spending, at American
prices, money which they had earned at home rates of wages—and so were
really being cheated by the world! The last two days they had all but
starved themselves—it made them quite sick to pay the prices that the
railroad people asked them for food.

Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie “back of the yards.” There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a “boardinghouse”
for the occupancy of foreigners—Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or
Bohemians. Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were
cooperative. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each
room—sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty or
sixty to a flat. Each one of the occupants furnished his own
accommodations—that is, a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses
would be spread upon the floor in rows—and there would be nothing else
in the place except a stove. It was by no means unusual for two men to
own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by
night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very
frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.

Mrs. Jukniene was a wizened-up little woman, with a wrinkled face. Her
home was unthinkably filthy; you could not enter by the front door at
all, owing to the mattresses, and when you tried to go up the
backstairs you found that she had walled up most of the porch with old
boards to make a place to keep her chickens. It was a standing jest of
the boarders that Aniele cleaned house by letting the chickens loose in
the rooms. Undoubtedly this did keep down the vermin, but it seemed
probable, in view of all the circumstances, that the old lady regarded
it rather as feeding the chickens than as cleaning the rooms. The truth
was that she had definitely given up the idea of cleaning anything,
under pressure of an attack of rheumatism, which had kept her doubled
up in one corner of her room for over a week; during which time eleven
of her boarders, heavily in her debt, had concluded to try their
chances of employment in Kansas City. This was July, and the fields
were green. One never saw the fields, nor any green thing whatever, in
Packingtown; but one could go out on the road and “hobo it,” as the men
phrased it, and see the country, and have a long rest, and an easy time
riding on the freight cars.

Such was the home to which the new arrivals were welcomed. There was
nothing better to be had—they might not do so well by looking further,
for Mrs. Jukniene had at least kept one room for herself and her three
little children, and now offered to share this with the women and the
girls of the party. They could get bedding at a secondhand store, she
explained; and they would not need any, while the weather was so
hot—doubtless they would all sleep on the sidewalk such nights as this,
as did nearly all of her guests. “Tomorrow,” Jurgis said, when they
were left alone, “tomorrow I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get
one also; and then we can get a place of our own.”

Later that afternoon he and Ona went out to take a walk and look about
them, to see more of this district which was to be their home. In back
of the yards the dreary two-story frame houses were scattered farther
apart, and there were great spaces bare—that seemingly had been
overlooked by the great sore of a city as it spread itself over the
surface of the prairie. These bare places were grown up with dingy,
yellow weeds, hiding innumerable tomato cans; innumerable children
played upon them, chasing one another here and there, screaming and
fighting. The most uncanny thing about this neighborhood was the number
of the children; you thought there must be a school just out, and it
was only after long acquaintance that you were able to realize that
there was no school, but that these were the children of the
neighborhood—that there were so many children to the block in
Packingtown that nowhere on its streets could a horse and buggy move
faster than a walk!

It could not move faster anyhow, on account of the state of the
streets. Those through which Jurgis and Ona were walking resembled
streets less than they did a miniature topographical map. The roadway
was commonly several feet lower than the level of the houses, which
were sometimes joined by high board walks; there were no
pavements—there were mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and
ditches, and great hollows full of stinking green water. In these pools
the children played, and rolled about in the mud of the streets; here
and there one noticed them digging in it, after trophies which they had
stumbled on. One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies
which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the
strange, fetid odor which assailed one’s nostrils, a ghastly odor, of
all the dead things of the universe. It impelled the visitor to
questions and then the residents would explain, quietly, that all this
was “made” land, and that it had been “made” by using it as a dumping
ground for the city garbage. After a few years the unpleasant effect of
this would pass away, it was said; but meantime, in hot weather—and
especially when it rained—the flies were apt to be annoying. Was it not
unhealthful? the stranger would ask, and the residents would answer,
“Perhaps; but there is no telling.”

A little way farther on, and Jurgis and Ona, staring open-eyed and
wondering, came to the place where this “made” ground was in process of
making. Here was a great hole, perhaps two city blocks square, and with
long files of garbage wagons creeping into it. The place had an odor
for which there are no polite words; and it was sprinkled over with
children, who raked in it from dawn till dark. Sometimes visitors from
the packing houses would wander out to see this “dump,” and they would
stand by and debate as to whether the children were eating the food
they got, or merely collecting it for the chickens at home. Apparently
none of them ever went down to find out.

Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys.
First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up
again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous
arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A
little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and
not yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with
the near-by soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun;
and then, when winter came, somebody cut the ice on it, and sold it to
the people of the city. This, too, seemed to the newcomers an
economical arrangement; for they did not read the newspapers, and their
heads were not full of troublesome thoughts about “germs.”

They stood there while the sun went down upon this scene, and the sky
in the west turned blood-red, and the tops of the houses shone like
fire. Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset, however—their
backs were turned to it, and all their thoughts were of Packingtown,
which they could see so plainly in the distance. The line of the
buildings stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out
of the mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming
away to the end of the world. It was a study in colors now, this smoke;
in the sunset light it was black and brown and gray and purple. All the
sordid suggestions of the place were gone—in the twilight it was a
vision of power. To the two who stood watching while the darkness
swallowed it up, it seemed a dream of wonder, with its talc of human
energy, of things being done, of employment for thousands upon
thousands of men, of opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy.
When they came away, arm in arm, Jurgis was saying, “Tomorrow I shall
go there and get a job!”