Below is my partial transcription of key passages from a compilation by the Chicago Public Library in response to my inquiry about the nickname "Windy City." The bracketed comments, and any errors in transcription, are mine.

Note that there is no direct link to Charles Dana until 1933, when the Tribune says his criticism of "'the nonsensical claims of that windy city'" occurred "day in and day out." This does not seem to be a verbatim quote but rather a summation of Dana's truly antagonistic campaign against Chicago. Note, too, that a 7/14/1890 Tribune reply on to a New York letter writer mentions Dana and the nickname but does not link them (instead, it ascribes the use of the nickname to the letter writer). Note, finally, the longtime Tribune reader who writes in a 5/27/1939 letter that the nickname was common by the 1870s.

But the CPL says the packet shows that Dana was a "ringleader" of an anti-Chicago campaign (one of the articles calls him a "mouthpiece" for NY's bid), and that his efforts and the nickname's simultaneous national spread were not a coincidence.

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Chicago Public Library compilation, November 2004

Chicago Daily Tribune, 2/23/1890
[Tribune reprint of external article]Toledo Blade: New York has made fuss enough for a dozen World's Fairs, Chicago is no longer entitled to the name "Windy City."

Chicago Daily Tribune, 3/1/1890
[Tribune reprint of external article]Boston Globe: The World's Far goes to Chicago. Although we should have preferred New York, we are bound to say that under the circumstances the Windy City deserved the prize.
[Tribune reprint of external article]St. Paul Globe: All the West has vouched for the capacity and fitness of the Lake City.
Chicago Daily Tribune, 3/1/1890
[Tribune reprint of external article]New York Sun: [report on the awarding of the Fair to Chicago]: On of the members of the World's Fair Committee said yesterday that Chicago had achieved one result, at all events, but her agitation in Washington, whether she got the fair or not. "She has," he said, "forced New York to recognize her existence and to feel more or less jealous of her, and this is something that never occurred before. All of the talking, blowing and boasting for years has been on the part of the Windy City. New York has paid as little attention to her praise as it has to her censure, and has throughout maintained an attitude of more or less contemptuous indifference. Only the shrewder students of affairs in the newspaper offices considered Chicago's efforts worth watching. All the other New-Yorkers were undisturbed, and the decision in favor of the Western city is an awful facer[?]; but Chicago has lifted herself into the position of a rival of this town now in some ways, no matter what the ultimate success of the World's Fair may be.
[Tribune reprint of external article]Baltimore American: [New York is responding to Chicago's win in a patronizing way.] Utterly ignoring the fact that the Windy City won the battle because it was the better hustler, provincial New York pats her on the head ...

Chicago Daily Tribune 7/4/1890
The Sun and other New York papers during the last week have been printing the most exaggerated accounts of the fatalities in this city during the heated term. ... The Sun affects to be alarmed lest similar heat may occur during the time of the World's Fair. Let it possess its soul in patience. ... Dr. Dana need not be afraid to come. If he is at all nervous let him put a cabbage leaf in his hat and he will be secure.

Chicago Daily Tribune, 7/14/1890
[Letter to the editor]: I see you advertise your sheet as the "leading American newspaper." (Of course it is.) The New York World and the New York papers generally cut no figure when it comes to a game of "Chicago" bluff, which is the rankest bluff of all. (Bluffs only a straight fulsh and rakes the jackpot.) My main object, however, in writing you is to call you down by cold facts in reference to the premeditated scheme "all along the line" of the blathering citizens of Chicago, aided by their equally blathering newspapers, to boom by wind, gall, and misrepresentation their windy city by the lake, including, of course, the part of Illinois they took in to square themselves against Philadelphia. ... [Compares city population totals.] That is not counting underground railroad for New York or annexation with Brooklyn or such picayune trifles as that. But I beg your pardon for speaking of annexation--I forgot the Windy City had a monopoly on that kind of business. Excuse me. ... New York alone today has over a half-million more than Chicago with ten times the influence of the latter city in Europe and every part of the known world, notwithstanding Boss Platt and Quay's World Exhibition. Yours for facts, J.E. Cullen. 903 23d street.
[Editor's response:] The breezy epistle of our New York correspondent suggests plenty of "cold facts" with which to "call him down" from his lofty perch. [Compares population totals, then discusses New York's papers]... Whatever enterprise or journalistic force the New York papers exhibit is chiefly due to the influence of Western men. ... Even the Sun, which shines for all Manhattan Island, was never much of a paper until after Dr. Dana came to Chicago and had his journalistic eye teeth cut. ... This letter-writer calls Chicago "a windy city." Yes the winds blow here from all the four points, bringing vigor in their rush, bracing up its people, filling their lungs with oxygen, and blowing away organic exhalations, and expelling malaria. Its winds bring health with them and make its mortality list the smallest of any large city in the Union. They give us a bracing atmosphere in which vigor, energy, and enterprise become possible. They are the winds of the prairies, blowing across thousands of miles of fertile plains from the snow-clad great Rocky Mountain chain. They are the winds of the great inland seas, full of balm and blessing, and expelling and curing all malaria, a tonic so exhilarating that those who breath it must be up and doing. 'Blow high, blow low, all winds that blow shall make our ruddy hearth fires glow.'"

Chicago Daily Tribune, 1/8/91
This disgraceful charge [that the awarding of the Fair was a Republican conspiracy] by the Sun is a tissue of lies concocted for the malignant purpose of injuring the Fair. It was born of jealousy and inspired by hatred. Mr. Dana knows that this will not be a Republican Fair and that Chicago was not selected as its locality by Republican votes alone. ... Had it gone to New York it would have been political and nothing else, which the Sun, as the organ of the gang, knows only too well.

Chicago Daily Tribune, 2/17/1891
[quoting Promoter-General Handy, who had returned from New York for a meeting of the Publisher's Association]: "Mr. Dana, whose paper threw more cold water on the Fair than any other in New York, appeared to be really surprised that there should be any feeling on the part of Chicago." ... Mr. Handy said the people of New York were friendly, especially the business-men, and that Chicago publishers had called upon Mr. Dana of the Sun and talked over the situation with him.

Chicago Daily Tribune, 10/27/1891
[quoting Rufus Hatch, a former CBOT member who now lives in New York but has returned to observe the building of the World's Fair facilities]: "If some of the men on the New York Board of Trade could see this that would not call Chicago the Windy City." ... [Hatch says New York should not have lobbied for the Fair as aggressively as it did, since it was not as equipped to host it as Chicago was.] "The only ones who wanted it were Tammany men, and that ring is already cursing New York and has cursed her too long. ... They are the ones who inspired the unwarranted attacks being made on Chicago today. And I am surprised that Charles A. Dana, a man as broad and intelligent as he, should allow himself, through the columns of the Sun, to be made the mouthpiece for such orators."

Chicago Daily Tribune, 10/7/1893,
[Dana comes to Chicago, says it did a good job after all, calls Chicago "the White City"]

Chicago Daily Tribune, 6/11/1933
By James O'Donnell Bennett,
hed: Chicago Dubbed 'Windy' In Fight For Fair of '93
The acerbity of that competition axed on us our nickname, "the Windy City." "Don't pay any attention," wrote Charles A. Dana day in and day out in his New York Sun, "to the nonsensical claims of that windy city. Its people could not build a World's Fair even if they won it." Hence the phrase was not, as most persons believe, a characterization of our meteorology but of our citizens. It was derivative."

Chicago Daily Tribune, 5/27/1939,
[letter from long-time Tribune reader]: About the middle of the seventies, Chicago began to be called the Windy City, without arousing the ire of the citizenry. ... The appellation came from the boastful volubility of Chicagoans. Chicago was the biggest, largest, widest, deepest, richest city in the world, etc. When Chicago, by hook and by crook, got the world's Columbian Exposition away from New York, trouble arose. Dana of the New York Sun, who used vitriol instead of ink, excoriated Chicago and all her works. He referred to the Windy City as 'a dingy aggregation of disgraceful hovels situate[d] in a dank and foul morass, disgracing a noble sheet of water; the air polluted not only by natural decay but also by the dense effluvia arising from Chicago's crude and filthy habits.'

Chicago Daily Tribune, 7/7/1939,
[letter from Arthur W. O'Neill, former Tribune copy editor]
School of Thought About "Windy City"
Please allow me to "settle this argument" anent [sic] the origin of Chicago's nickname, the Windy City. I was city editor of the old United Press in 1892-93 and wrote of the news of the Columbian Exposition. During the battle royal between the Chicago and New York newspapers for the prize of housing the great and only World's Fair the Gotham Press, led by Charles A. Dana in his Sun, scoffed, ridiculed and jibed at the superior claims of Chicago, dubbing it the Windy City on that score. But our [Chicago's] wind won.

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