made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. The variety of Field's possessions and his numerous forms of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work.
The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Field was the son of a farmer. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. In 1860 he was made a partner. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its contracts at a time of distress. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. It was established that Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the