tain mazes of litigation, always achieves greater distinction than his colleague who devotes himself to that branch of practice, which is designed to keep clients out of court, but the latter is, perhaps, the more useful public servant of the two, and certainly deserves no less honorable mention because of his having led a less turbulent and eventful life.

One of the noted old-time lawyers of this class, generally known and highly esteemed in Chicago, was the late Daniel C. Nicholes, who came here in 1838, and who for more than forty years, was identified with the western bar. He came to the city before its population had reached the twentieth thousand, and lived to see a million people living within its corporate limits. He began his career in Chicago with no other capital than a finished and thorough education, a limited professional training, strict integrity and indomitable energy, and left to his family a handsome fortune, accumulated through his own efforts.

Mr. Nicholes was born March 17th 1817, in the town of Caldwell, Warren county, New York, in the picturesque region of country at the head of lake George. The family to which he belonged, was one of the old families of Massachusetts, where his father and grandfather were born. His grandfather moved soon after the Revolutionary war, to New York State, where his father Daniel Nicholes grew to manhood. His mother, Dianthe (Hawley) Nicholes, was a

descendant of Samuel Hawley, who settled in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1639, and became the progenitor of a family which has given to American history some of its most illustrious characters.

When Daniel C. Nicholes was six years old, his father, who had lived for some years at Caldwell, removed from that place to western New York, where he became one of the early settlers on what was known as "the Holland purchase." The elder Nicholes purchased a farm in what is now Wyoming county, near the village of Gainesville, where the son spent his early boyhood and received a fair English education. The limited educational advantages which he had enjoyed, did not, however, satisfy his ambition, and, not finding his father in sympathy with his purpose to pursue a collegiate course, he left home when he was eighteen years of age, determined to make his way through college by his own efforts. He at once began teaching school, and his earnings, from this and other kinds of labor, were utilized to defray his expenses while fitting himself for college, at a somewhat noted academy in the village of Wyoming.

For ten years he was alternately teacher and pupil, a year or more of this time being spent in South Carolina, where he conducted a private school in the family of a wealthy planter. In 1846 he completed his collegiate course and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from Union

years prior to that time he had applied himself to the study of law in connection with other studies. After his graduation he accepted a position as teacher in the Temple Hill academy at Mt. Morris, N. Y., where he continued his law studies, and in 1847 he was admitted to the bar at Ithica, N. Y. He began practicing in the latter place and remained there one year, meeting with fair success for a young practitioner. Believing, however, that better opportunities for rapid advancement awaited active, energetic, and capable young men farther west, he determined to change his location, and in 1848 came to Chicago.

Here he again found it necessary to engage in teaching school to replenish his finances, and in company with his brother, Ira J. Nicholes, who had accompanied him to the west, he built up a private educational institution, of high character, which became known as the "Nicholes English and Classical school." The enterprise proved a popular one, and the originators soon found it necessary to employ a large corps of teachers to assist them in the conduct of a school, in which instructions given in the English branches, vocal and instrumental music, the sciences, the classics and modern languages.

were

In 1849, Mr. Nicholes returned to New York State, where he was married on the 18th of October, to Miss Amanda M. Wheeler, a daughter of

Daniel Wheeler-prominent in Gainsville and Wyoming county as a merchant and business man-whom he had first met as a pupil in the academy at Mt. Morris, when he was a teacher in that institution. Returning then to his western home, with a cultured and intelligent lady as help-meet and companion, he began in real earnest the struggle to win an honorable place in his profession, and at the same time to build up the fortune which his good judgment and business instincts led him to believe was within the grasp of every young man then in Chicago, who made a proper use of his opportunities.

While taking the active charge and management of his school, Mr. Nicholes was becoming acquainted with. the enterprising men of Chicago, and soon opened a law office for the transaction of business which began to come to him as the result of this acquaintance. His business increased rapidly, and at the end of two years he abandoned the school enterprise, and devoted his whole time and attention to the practice of law, and the management of important interests which had been entrusted to his

partnership with his son, Charles W. Nicholes, which continued up to the time of his death, on the 6th of May, 1889.

Becoming interested in the early years of this practice in real estate transactions, conveyancing, the examination of titles to lands, and the management of trusts, he devoted the most active years of his life largely to that branch of the business, while his associates looked after matters which found their way into the courts. He became a large investor of the funds of eastern capitalists, who remember him as a man of exact rectitude, sterling integrity, and unerring business sagacity.

The basis of his own handsome fortune was laid in the founding of the town of Englewood, now a suburb of Chicago, having a population of

thirty thousand people. This town he laid out in 1852, secured for it improved railroad facilities, was chiefly instrumental in making it an educational centre through the location there of the Cook County Normal school, and contributed in various ways to its rapid and substantial growth.

Looked upon by his associates at the bar as a scholarly man, and a thoroughly well-informed, upright and honorable lawyer, and by the general public as an eminently successful man of affairs, as well as a kind-hearted Christian gentleman, judged by any of the standards of measurement by which we estimate success in life, Mr. Nicholes earned a conspicuous place among the worthy self-made men of Chicago.

HOWARD LOUIS CONARD.

ONE of the first hotels built in Chicago was the old "Mansion House," located at the corner of Lake and Dearborn Streets, directly opposite its more pretentious neighbor, the "Tremont House," which has three times risen from its own ashes, and still ranks among the leading hotels of the city. It was at the "Mansion House" that many of the early visittors to Chicago were entertained during the first decade of the city's ex

istence; and such of these early visitors as still survive will remember the genial "host" of those days, whose early death alone prevented his name becoming one of the most conspicuous among those of the builders of the metropolis.

Charles W. Cook, who, in the parlance of the day, "kept" the Mansion House, came to Chicago in 1835 from New York State.

He was born at Berkshire, in Tioga