The Changing Imperial Landscape
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the site of the portage remained a backwater as great imperial powers fought to establish dominion over the center of North America.6 In 1763, at the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the French lost their tenuous grip on most of their lands east of the Mississippi River to the British—who, in turn, lost their holdings south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi to the Americans after the Revolutionary War. Throughout these imperial transfers, the Chicago Portage remained a lonely wilderness crossroads for Francophone and Native American traders. In fact, it did not have a permanent settler until 1779, when a black man thought to have been born in St. Domingue, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, established a farm and trading post on the north bank of the river. Du Sable took the daughter of a Potawatomi chief as his wife, and he prospered.7
Figure 1. Map of Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. Chicago sits on the cusp of the subcontinental divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. After the construction of the Erie Canal in 1825, it was possible to travel by water from Chicago to New York City. The completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal between the Chicago River and the Illinois River in 1848 made it possible to travel from Chicago to New Orleans via water. Chicago thus became a key hub for waterborne commerce in North America. Map created by Jason LaBrosse.
Figure 2. Map of the Chicago Portage. The lower portion of this map depicts contemporary waterways and boundaries of the city of Chicago. The upper portion of the map is a detailed representation of the land route, or portage, that travelers used to drag their boats through to pass between the South Branch of the Chicago River in the Great Lakes watershed and the Des Plaines River in the Mississippi River watershed. The Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848) replaced the portage route. Map created by Jason LaBrosse.
Du Sable’s French and Native American Chigagou became the Anglo-American settlement of Chicago during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars for the Great Lakes region. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, the British retained numerous forts in the area that would come to be Indiana and Illinois, trading with Native Americans and encouraging many of them take up arms against the United States in an effort to contain American settlement. To resist American control of the Great Lakes region, Native American tribes banned together, forming the “Western Confederacy.” After a decade of conflict known as the Northwest Indian War, the United States military won a resounding victory against the Western Confederacy and their British allies at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 in present-day Maumee, Ohio. In the subsequent Treaty of Greenville (1795), the Native Americans ceded much of Ohio, the site of Detroit, and the small area that would become downtown Chicago.8
To counter the British presence in the western Great Lakes region, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn in 1803 at the spot where the sluggish Chicago River dribbled across a sandbar and into Lake Michigan. Fort Dearborn became a site of battle when the United States declared war on the British in 1812. Six hundred British-allied Native Americans ambushed ninety-four white Americans and their Miami guides, burning the fort and killing fifty-two people. The carnage of what Anglo-Americans dubbed the “Fort Dearborn Massacre” fed many whites’ hostility toward Native Americans.9
The U.S. Army rebuilt Fort Dearborn in 1816–1817 as a defense against the region’s Native Americans, a move that foreshadowed a broader shift from coexistence with, to removal of, Native Americans.10 The policy of removal in this region followed the transformation of the region’s political economy from fur trading to farming.11 Fort Dearborn thus became an instrument of removal, opening lands to Anglo-American farmers.
In 1832, the U.S. military used the fort as a staging ground for a war against the Sauk chief Black Hawk, who was resisting American settlement in northwestern Illinois. Fort Dearborn’s proximity to Lake Michigan made it a natural choice for shipping soldiers and supplies to the region. Yet, the sandbar that La Salle had lamented in the 1680s prevented ships from entering the mouth of the Chicago River. Ships anchored a mile off the coast, and men shuttled their cargos to shore on smaller boats. These complications notwithstanding, American forces—Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis among them—defeated Black Hawk. The federal government and Native Americans negotiated the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. Native Americans exchanged five million acres of land in northeastern Illinois and southeast Wisconsin to the United States government for five million acres west of the Mississippi. With that, Native American tribes were driven from the region that would soon be dominated by the city of Chicago.12
At the time, Saint Louis’s geographical strengths—its proximity to the Ohio and Missouri Rivers and its easy connection to the bustling port of New Orleans—suggested that it would dwarf Chicago as an economic force. In light of the nation’s growing sectional crisis, however, Yankee merchants became increasingly reluctant to invest capital in the slave state of Missouri, instead favoring Illinois.13 Meanwhile, Illinoisans engineered a new economic geography for Chicago—one conducive to transportation of people, goods, and information—by building a canal and establishing a harbor in the Chicago River.
Remarkably, these monumental projects were completed in a polity where city, state, and federal governments shared authority, and at a time when questions about the balance of power pushed the nation ever closer to cataclysm. It is not surprising that political leaders failed to reach definitive agreements over which governing body should bear the costs of engineering a new geography for Chicago’s waterways. Instead, the city, state, and federal governments created a patchwork of power over the landscape, sharing authority and costs even as they continually renegotiated their responsibilities for building infrastructure. Oftentimes, lawmakers resolved funding questions by selling land and bonds to private investors to raise money for infrastructure. The Illinois and Michigan Canal offers a case in point.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal
The same year that Hubbard first waded through the muddy Chicago Portage, 1818, Illinois congressional delegate Nathaniel Pope redrew the state’s boundaries in anticipation of a canal. In so doing, he radically altered the political and economic geography of Illinois.
Like most early Illinois settlers, Pope hailed from a slave state and gravitated to the more prosperous and populated southern portion of the territory. Born into a prominent Kentucky family, he traded on his family influence to gain a post as Illinois’s territorial secretary in 1809, a post he held until his 1816 election as territorial delegate to Congress. In that role, Pope negotiated key terms of Illinois’s 1818 bid for statehood, including an eight-thousand-square-mile extension of the state’s northern border. According to the Northwest Ordinance, that border was to extend due west from Lake Michigan’s southern tip, thereby depriving Illinois of the Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago Portage.14
Pope could envision the canal imagined by French explorers soon becoming a reality. President James Madison had spoken of the possibility in his 1814 inaugural, and in an 1816 treaty the federal government had forced the Potawatomi Indians to relinquish a twenty-mile-wide strip of land for a canal between Ottawa and the Chicago River.15 Pope, determined to pluck that canal from the as-yet-to-be organized territory of Wisconsin, requested a forty-mile extension of the state’s northern border, telling Congress that the lake frontage would “afford additional security to the perpetuity of the Union, inasmuch as the State would thereby be connected with the States of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, through the Lakes.”16
Congress obliged, and Pope’s prediction that water transportation would help seal Illinois to the Union proved true. From the 1850s on, migrants and capital from New England and New York poured into northern Illinois.17 By the eve of the Civil War, Illinois had begun to shed its southern character and forge bonds of culture, commerce, and politics with the North. Thus,