Wayne -
I don't have any idea about the answer to your question. But I was reading a little on the early days of golf and came across this article from 1900 in "Outing" magazine. I thought it was a neat little snapshot of those very early times, at least from one man's perspective. The article is called "The Development of Golf in the West" and it's by H.C. Charfield-Taylor. It starts:
"A club whizzed through the air — a sharp click—and Charles B. Macdonald drove the little sphere of gutta percha far over the water of Lake Michigan in approved St. Andrews fashion. I looked at Macdonald in amazement, and then followed his eyes in the direction of the Lake. He may have seen the ball, but I would have to take his word for it. That drive, however, started the golf craze in the West.
Macdonald teed another ball and handed his driver to me. I attempted to imitate his actions, and after a series of contortions which would have done honor to the rubber-man in Barnum’s side-show, tore up a foot of turf without in any way disturbing the equanimity of the little white object I had striven so viciously to hit. Macdonald laughed, and I said “damn.” That was in April, 1892 — and I have been saying it ever since.
Macdonald had come up to Lake Forest to lay out a golf course. With supreme contempt he eyed the trees and flower beds, and said the ground would never do. Finally he decided it was worth while trying — if only to give the game a start — and after a few glances about the place, he started out to pace off the holes. And what a course it was! The first hole was eighty yards in length, the longest a hundred and seventy-five.
Part of the course was amongst the trees and flower-beds of the adjoining places of Mr. C. B. Farwell and Mr. John Dwight, and the rest in a small park by the shore of the lake, where a sliced ball invariably went over the bluff and fell some two hundred feet to the beach below; but, such as it was, it had the honor of being the first golf course west of the Allegheny Mountains.
Macdonald did not play that first day. He merely drove a few balls to show me how the trick was done, and drove stakes in the ground to show where the holes were to be. When he went back to town, he left behind a collection of ancient Scottish clubs— relics of his college days at
St. Andrews— and a few old halls.
On the following Saturday, Urban H. Broughton, an English resident of Chicago, came up for a visit. He had played —at Sandwich, or some such place—and was keen to have a go at the game. The hole-cups were not yet in place, and it was raining torrents—but that did not dampen our ardor. In a blinding storm, we waded around the nine holes, losing most of Macdonald’s balls, and playing the game with the singular modification that holing out meant hitting the stake in the fewest number of strokes. I have heard vague rumors of some Scotchmen driving balls in Jackson Park, at an earlier date, until stopped by the police— but they were Scotchmen, and they were only driving balls, so I believe that that attempt in the rain was the first authentic golf game ever played in the West...
[After a bit about how few people played or understood the game, the article continues]
In ’93 it was a little better. But the coming of Sir Henry Wood, the British Commissioner General, to the Exposition, lent a certain dignity to the game—and during that year the Chicago Golf Club was conceived. Macdonald, who had never thoroughly approved of the unassuming efforts of the Lake Forest golfers, had, been casting about for a place where it would be possible to take a full swing without over driving the hole. Finally he discovered an Englishman with a farm of meadowland. The Englishman was J. Haddon Smith, the step-father of Miss “Johnny” Carpenter—the well-known player—and the farm was at Belmont, a suburban waystation, about twenty miles from the city.
Meantime, people had begun to hear of golf, so, with the assistance of such Scottish experts as James B. Forgan and Herbert and Lawrence Tweedie, a few Americans who were bold enough to try the experiment were "corralled" by Mr. Macdonald, and the Chicago Golf Club sprang into being. This was in the autumn of '93 - too late for the effort to bear visible fruit that year".
The article goes on to describe the growth of golf at Lake Forest and at the new clubs that were springing up in the area, but only makes a brief mention of the Chicago Golf Club opening in 1895, so I won't include more of it.