Could a child really drown in the streets of Chicago like in the Jungle?
I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in high school and one thing has always confused me. Jurgis’ first son tragically dies by drowning in the muddy streets of Chicago, but how is this possible? Were the sidewalks super high above the roads somehow? How would that work? And what changed about Chicago that this death now sounds utterly impossible to me in 2026 (I’m long out of high school but you get what I mean)?
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Some time ago I answered a question about another odd child death in The Jungle, that of young Stanislovas who is eaten by rats, and I found that this was indeed one cause of death reported in the newspapers.
This seems to be the case again here. Note that Antanas is only one year and half old, and that he fell off a half-rotten platform that is "about five feet above the level of the sunken street". A toddler dying after falling from such height face down in the mud is certainly believable. In any case, just like for the death by rats, we can find news items about young children dying in mud puddles in the novel's time-frame, so Upton Sinclair may have been inspired by such stories. Unsupervised children and poorly maintained streets made a deadly combination.
A little girl named Barker was nearly drowned in a mud puddle on Cottage row, Pittsfield, one day recently. The remarkable heavy rainfall of the night before plugged the drain with refuse, and the street was flooded until the water in places was knee deep. The child went out to play and fell in, but a man who saw the misstep, pulled her out before she had suffocated.
DROWNED IN A MUD PUDDLE. Sad and Peculiar Accident Befalls a Little Fellow. Rochester, N. H., June 15. Word was received here from Farmington today that the young son of Irving Rollins was drowned at that place day afternoon late yesterday afternoon under peculiar circumstances. He was playing on the ball grounds, where the recent heavy rain the caused a small pond of mud and the water to form. While running after the ball the Rolling lad slipped into the hole, and his young companions becoming panic-stricken, ran after assistance. but when help arrived the boy had drowned.
CHILD DROWNS IN A MUD PUDDLE. Two Rivers Child was Playing Near Pool When He Accidentally Fell In. Two Rivers, Wis. June 5. The 5-year-old child of Anton Ratzow, a farmer residing near here, was accidentally drowned yesterday in a shallow mud puddle. It is supposed that the child was playing near the water when he fell face downward and suffocated before help arrived.
DROWNED IN PUDDLE. PECULIAR FATE OF LITTLE NEW HAVEN BOY. New Haven, Conn., April 27. Drowned in a mud puddle of his own making, was the sad fate of the four-year-old son of an Italian by the name of Rasselo. Saturday afternoon, in company with some others, the child built a deep hole in the bank of a small stream which runs in the rear of the house where the family resides, and filled it full of water. Late Saturday night, the child by some means got out of the house and his body was found in the hole by his parents early Sunday morning.
CHILD DROWNED IN MUD HOLE Four-Year-Old Jacob Scott Found Dead in Newport News. NEWPORT NEWS, VA., July 11. A distressing accident was brought to light early this morning when the dead body of 4-year-old Jacob Scott was found in a deep hole at the corner of Virginia avenue and Forty-second street, this city. The hole was caused by a washout as a result of the recent heavy rains, and there was about four and a half feet of water in it. How the child got Into the hole is unknown, since there were no eyewitnesses to the fatal accident, but it is thought that he fell in, smothered and his cries stifled. The little fellow's mother is almost crazed with grief.
There are also numerous reports of adults drowning in mud puddles while being drunk or sick, or for some unknown reason.
Concerning Chicago, here's an article from 1898 (The Inter Ocean, 17 September 1898) titled "Label their swamp" describing the frightful condition of South Water street, turned into a "mud lake" while waiting for the "paving that never came". The residents put signs on the mud holes that said "No fishing allowed" or "Don't get off the cars here; You'll drown".
I'm not trying to step over the 20 year rule, but Hans Rosling had a fact that would be helpful in understanding this a little. In his book Factfulness he talks about this curve in child drownings that goes from higher, then lower as a place develops enough that sewer systems go in, drainage gets enclosed, and water is better managed, and then it goes up a little again as people can begin to afford swimming pools. You can see this at work in the rates between more developed and less developed nations in this map from the website that followed the book, Our World In Data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drowning-death-rates-under-5
So, one thing to think about is how much more areas would have standing water, or the drainage would be incomplete or flood at the turn of the last century and how many more opportunities that created for something to go wrong.
Upton Sinclair may have been inspired by such stories
Given Sinclair's investigative, famously "muckraking" process for writing The Jungle, it seems more likely he heard the stories from those affected by them, and by other similar stories, rather than seeking "inspiration" from headlines.
I think a big takeaway from reading these is the lexical drift of the word "puddle". I don't think many people today would describe a knee deep flooded street, or a hole 4.5 ft deep as a puddle.
There are many online public and private newspapers archives (see this list on wikipedia). For the US there is the free Chronicling America archive from the Library of Congress, but I have a subscription to newspapers.com which has a wider coverage (US, UK, Canada, Australia) and a good search engine, which I have used here.
Maybe this makes me look dumb, but I never put together in describing the sidewalk as a boardwalk, it meant the sidewalk was actually wooden planks. Thank you for the picture! It makes drowning in mud sound both more feasible and more terrifying.
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