Life — August 7, 1919 — page 12: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Satire on Seth Bone's "Discovery" of Chicago This 1906 *Life* magazine page satirizes aviator Seth Bone's claim to have "discovered" Chicago. The text mocks the absurdity: Bone escaped police, placed himself in the hands of criminals, and conveniently "found" Chicago—a major American city that obviously already existed. The cartoon's central joke: treating an inhabited place as newly "discovered" echoes colonial-era rhetoric. The proposed monument caricatures this pretension. The illustrations labeled "Native Filipino" and "Native Chicagoan" appear to mock Bone's boasting by sarcastically presenting Chicago's inhabitants as exotic "natives"—inverting the colonial "discovery" narrative. The satire critiques both Bone's self-aggrandizement and American imperial attitudes toward newly-acquired territories like the Philippines (then a U.S. possession).