What Was Chicago?

Before the city, the wild leek.

Chicago is the French spelling of šikaakwa, the Miami-Illinois word for the wild leek. The river was Šikaakwa Siipiiwi, Wild Leek River, because the plant grew thickly along it, and the place at its mouth took the river's name. In 1687 Henri Joutel wrote that the country was named for the garlic that grew "in the forests".

This is a modern estimate of where those forests were: rich, moist, shaded ground along the river system, drawn from the first land surveys, the soils and the streams. It is a habitat model, not a border. Roughly square kilometres of likely wild-leek woodland, and today about people live on it.

The name described the river's woods, not the fort site. The model agrees: the Loop scores low. On a wide screen you can change the model's weights in the panel and watch the map answer.

Whose place it was.

By the 1700s the lakeshore and the portage were held by the Council of Three Fires: the Potawatomi, the Odawa and the Ojibwe. The Myaamia had villages at the portage and the Calumet when the French arrived, and the Inoka, the Illinois Confederation, held the river valley to the south-west.

Homelands overlapped and moved with the seasons, with trade and with war. This map places names, not lines, on purpose.

A mile of mud that made a city.

In a wet spring a canoe could float from the South Branch through Mud Lake to the Des Plaines and on to the Mississippi. In a dry August you carried it. The Calumet route to the south did the same job through Lake Calumet and the Sag.

Both routes are drawn along their modern proxies, the canals that later followed them.

1673: the first map of the idea.

Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette came back from the Mississippi up the Illinois and the Des Plaines and crossed here to the lake in September 1673. Jolliet wrote that a canal of half a league would join the two waters.

Which crossing they used is argued; the portage is the usual answer, the Sag the alternative.

Marquette wintered at the South Branch in 1674 to 1675, the first European to live where the city now stands.

One house on the north bank.

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Black trader of Haitian descent, was settled at the river mouth by the 1780s with a house, barns, a mill, a bakehouse and a dairy. He sold the property in 1800 to Jean Lalime, and John Kinzie took it over in 1804. The site is Pioneer Court, beside the Tribune Tower.

1795: six miles square "where a fort formerly stood".

The Treaty of Greenville, signed in Ohio in 1795 after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, took from the assembled nations sixteen small tracts for posts and portages. One of them was "a piece of land six miles square at the mouth of the Chikago river, where a fort formerly stood". It is the first written claim on this ground by the United States.

Which fort the treaty meant is not known; a French post of the 1680s is the usual guess. This page places the square on Du Sable's settlement at the river mouth, which is a speculation, and gives it no exact corners because the treaty gives none.

A fort across the river.

Fort Dearborn went up on the south bank in 1803. In August 1812 the garrison marched out, was attacked by Potawatomi fighters, and the fort was burned. It was rebuilt in 1816 and closed for good in 1837, the year the city was chartered.

The two sides remember 1812 differently. The bronze markers at Michigan and Wacker record one version.

The first Chicago drawn on paper.

The 1816 Treaty of St. Louis took from the Three Fires a strip twenty miles wide, ten miles either side of the river mouth, running south-west from the lake to the Illinois, so that a canal could be dug. Its edges survive as Rogers Avenue and Forest Preserve Drive on the north and Indian Boundary Road on the south.

Drawn from the surviving street fragments; the far ends are extended along the last known bearing.

1833: the rest of the land.

In September 1833 the Treaty of Chicago, negotiated in a council house across the river from the fort, ceded the remaining land between the lake and the Rock River.

1835: the leaving.

In August 1835, after the last annuity payment, about 800 men danced through the settlement in a final war dance, and most Potawatomi families were moved west, first to Iowa, then Kansas.

Native people never left Chicago. Some families stayed; many returned. The city today has one of the largest urban Native populations in the country.

Then the city drew itself, one annexation at a time.

Every later Chicago was drawn by the city itself, and each line had a reason.

1830: a plat to pay for a canal.

The state's canal commissioners hired James Thompson to lay out 0.375 square miles of streets beside the fort so that lots could be sold to finance the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Chicago began as a real-estate offering. Kinzie, Madison, State and Desplaines were its edges.

1837: a charter for a boom town.

Canal digging began in 1836 and land fever with it. The town of about 4,000 people took a city charter in 1837 with limits at North Avenue, Wood Street, 22nd Street and the lake, ten square miles for a place that could not yet fill one.

1869: services and parks.

Growth after the Civil War pushed the limits to Fullerton, Crawford and 39th. The same year the legislature created the park districts and the boulevard ring that still frames the old city; water, sewers and fire protection followed the boundary out.

1889: the great annexation.

On 29 June 1889 the townships of Lake View, Jefferson, Lake and Hyde Park voted to join, along with the east of Cicero: 125 square miles and 225,000 people in one day. The suburbs wanted lake water, sewers and police; the city wanted the population to win the 1893 World's Fair and to pass Philadelphia as the second city.

1956: an airport on a string.

The last big piece was O'Hare, reached by annexing a strip along Foster Avenue so the airport, which the city had bought as Orchard Field in 1946, would sit inside the city as the jet age opened. Since then the limits have barely moved.

The old limits are drawn from their street boundaries, so they are approximate.

Every Chicago before the city.

The wild-leek woodland the name came from, the six-mile square of 1795, the twenty-mile strip of 1816, the plat of 1830, the charter of 1837, the limits of 1869, the city after 1889, and the limits of today. Each was a real Chicago to the people who drew it.

The leek boundary is a habitat estimate; the strip and the old limits are drawn from surviving streets. All are approximate by construction.