s wrote, "It is a long way out there but we are coming."

The press of the city responded generously and some of its editors
perceived and stated the historical significance of this pilgrimage of
poets, artists, and historians to "the sparsely settled Border of
Esthetic Culture." A trainload of men who painted, sculptured and
composed, men who were entirely concerned with the critical or esthetic
side of life, an academy of arts and letters rolling westward, was a new
and wondrous phase of national exploration. The invasion was also
capable of comic interpretation and a few graceless wags did allude to
it as "a missionary expedition to Darkest Illinois."

To Fuller, to Chatfield-Taylor and to me, this joke was not altogether
pleasant. We knew all too well the feeling of some of the writers who
were coming. Several of them were seeing "the West" for the first time
in their lives, others had not been in Chicago since the World's Fair in
'93. All were conscious of the effort involved in reaching the arid and
unknown frontier.

The entire Middle West had only ten resident members of the Institute
although a large proportion of its membership was drawn from the
Southern and Central Western States, "All trails lead to New York and
there are no returning footsteps," commented Fuller. "Once a writer or
painter or illustrator pulls his stakes and sets out for Manhattan,
Chicago sees him no more."

All this was disheartening to those of us who, twenty years before, had
visioned Chicago as a shining center of American art, but we went
forward with our preparations, hoping that a fairly representative
delegation could be induced to come.

Some thirty-five arrived safely, and the Dinner of Welcome in Sculpture
Hall not only set a milestone in the progress of the city, but was in
itself a beautiful and distinctive event.

The whole panorama of western settlement and its city building unrolled
before me, as Charles L. Hutchinson, President of the Art Institute,
rose in his place, and in the name of the most aspiring of Chicago's men
and women, welcomed the members of the American Academy and the National
Institute as representatives of American Art and American Literature.
Once again and for the moment our city became a capital in something
like the character of Boston a generation before. This conception was
illusory, of course, but we permitted ourselves the illusion and
accepted the praise which our visitors showered upon us