tunes were amassed
within an astonishingly short period. Here the growth of large private
fortunes was marked by much greater celerity than in the East, although
these fortunes are not as large as those based upon land in the Eastern
cities.

MARSHALL FIELD AND LEITER.

The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and
Levi Z. Leiter. In 1895 the Illinois Labor Bureau, in that year
happening to be under the direction of able and conscientious officials,
made a painstaking investigation of land values in Chicago. It was
estimated that the 266 acres of land, constituting what was owned by
individuals and private corporations in one section alone--the South
Side,--were worth $319,000,000. This estimate was made at a time when
the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the
panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation
or rise. The amount of $319,000,000 was calculated as being solely the
value of the land, not counting improvements, which were valued at as
much more. The principal landowner in this one section, not to mention
other sections of that immense city, was Marshall Field, with
$11,000,000 worth of land; the next was Leiter, who owned in that
section land valued at $10,500,000.[169] It appeared from this report
that eighteen persons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of
land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth--or
one-half of the entire business center of Chicago. Doubling the sums
credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the
improvements to the value of the land), this brought Field's real estate
in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiter's to nearly
the same. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the
inventory of Field's executors reported to the court early in 1907. The
executors of Field's will placed the value of his real estate in Chicago
at $30,000,000. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land
which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the
millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere.

FIELD'S MANY POSSESSIONS.

Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the
executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of
which heirs were in boyhood. The factors constituting this fortune are
various. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the
executors made the