The city of Chicago acquired the valuable but eroding Fort Dearborn lands from the federal government in 1839. By 1833, American forces had crushed the band of Sauk and Fox Indians led by Chief Black Hawk and forced Native Americans to relinquish their lands east of the Mississippi River.60 Fort Dearborn, therefore, became largely obsolete except that it housed the army engineers who worked to clear the mouth of the Chicago River. In 1838, Chicagoans petitioned the federal government to relinquish the fort because it was “useless for a military post.”61 In 1839, the Secretary of War granted 90 percent of the Fort Dearborn land to the city, reserving only a small parcel south of the mouth of the Chicago River for military buildings. The Fort Dearborn Addition to Chicago consisted of valuable waterfront lots and public lands. The addition consisted of seventy-six acres extending northeast from the intersection of State and Madison Streets to Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, most of which the city subdivided into lots and sold to private parties.62
President Martin Van Buren, however, ensured that some of the Fort Dearborn Addition lands were reserved for the public. Campaigning for reelection, the New York Democrat worried that he would lose western votes if eastern speculators bought up too much choice waterfront land in Chicago. Van Buren therefore ordered the General Land Office to designate the block west of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Madison Streets a “public square,” which became known as Dearborn Park. The land office marked the parcel east of Michigan Avenue “public ground.” This ground became known as North Lake Park since it adjoined a strip of lakeshore land to the south, between Madison and Twelfth Streets. The land had been set aside just three years earlier when the state’s canal commissioners elected not to sell it, instead deeming the space “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings or other Obstruction Whatever.” In 1844, the canal commissioners transferred control of that public space to the city of Chicago. By 1847, the land had become known as Lake Park, a popular promenading ground.63 The Fort Dearborn Addition therefore extended the city’s park space and endowed it with additional lakeshore and riverfront lots. But these assets were imperiled because the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to open the Chicago River Harbor had precipitated the erosion of the shoreline.
The city of Chicago had contradictory political and environmental imperatives. The city required a harbor. Yet, the acts of dredging the river and extending piers into Lake Michigan caused the erosion of valuable lake shore lands south of the mouth of the river. The city’s position highlights a common environmental and economic tension: the transformation of a landscape often simultaneously increases its value and sows the seeds of its destruction. Even if those goals were contradictory, though, the city had little choice. It had to simultaneously maintain the harbor and protect valuable private and public lands on the lakeshore, and it attempted to achieve these goals—without imposing heavy taxes on its population—by appealing to the federal government for lakeshore protection.
Within months of acquiring the Fort Dearborn Addition, the city of Chicago asked the federal government for the remaining federal lands as compensation for damage done to the shoreline. The mayor and Common Council complained to Congress that the “extension of piers forming the harbor … have caused such a change in the action and effect of the water on this shore of Lake Michigan that … land … on the south side [of the piers] … is rapidly disappearing.” To save “a large portion of the best part of our city” from the lake waters, the petition requested that Congress grant the city additional federal lands to compensate the city for the cost of “erecting a permanent barrier against this invasion.” The petition fell on deaf ears.64
If Lake Michigan’s currents posed a threat to the Chicago River Harbor, so too did the shifting sands of congressional politics. From 1839 to 1841, Congress, mired in sectional conflict over the distribution of internal improvement funds, allocated not a cent for harbor improvement. Meanwhile, in Chicago, sand crept around the north pier into the river’s mouth, clogging the channel and putting commerce in peril. In 1842, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Francis Sherman, and the Common Council petitioned Congress for harbor improvement money. Anticipating a debate over the national significance of the harbor, the mayor and aldermen highlighted Chicago’s emerging position as a gateway between east and west. “The agricultural prospects of all of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri,” noted the petition, “are … greatly dependent upon facilities for business … on the southwest part of Lake Michigan: which lake is part of the great channel by which the staples of these States will best reach the eastern market.”65
Indeed, the city of only about six thousand residents already boasted annual imports in excess of $1.5 million and exports of $348,362. The petition warned, however, that “serious and immediate evils threaten the … harbor for the purposes of commerce.” Critically, “the action of the wind … has formed a sand-bar across the pier.”66 Congress granted a modest ten thousand dollars in 1843 for Chicago harbor repairs.67 Even so, it mattered little in the grand scheme of things. For the harbor to remain open Congress would have to continually pour money into dredging and pier renovations designed to preserve the harbor from an incessant barrage of wind, water, and sand (Table 1).
Growing increasingly frustrated with Congress’s lack of sustained funding for harbor improvements, the Chicago Common Council challenged the federal government’s control of what remained of Fort Dearborn. In April of 1845, on motion of the lawyer and Whig alderman J. Young Scammon, the Chicago Common Council ordered that “the street commissioner be directed forthwith to open the street (Michigan Avenue) and remove the obstructions therefrom.”68 So ordered, Street Commissioner Phillip Dean would have to extend the city’s street grid through the Fort Dearborn reservation. In order to carry out this order, Dean needed to destroy up to eight Fort Dearborn buildings—a feat that had not been repeated since Pottawatomie warriors burned the fort in 1812. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the buildings Dean would have to wreck to execute the Common Council’s order was the Office of Public Works, which housed the army engineers.
Table 1. Federal Spending on Chicago River Improvement, 1833–1843
| Year | Federal Appropriation |
| 1833 | $25,000 |
| 1834 | $30,000 |
| 1835 | $30,000 |
| 1836 | $25,000 |
| 1837 | $30,000 |
| 1838 | $40,000 |
| 1839 | $0 |
| 1840 | $0 |
| 1841 | $0 |
| 1842 | $30,000 |
| 1843 | $10,000 |
Sources: The data from 1833 to 1842 are from Jesse B. Thomas, Statistical Report, in Chicago River-and-Harbor Convention, ed. Robert Fergus (Chicago: Fergus Printing Co., 1882), 192; the data from 1843 is from Mendelsohn, “The Federal Hand in Urban Development,” 259.
Before city workers began wielding their axes and sledge hammers, however, U.S. government agent Charles Schlatter secured an injunction from the district court judge to halt the destruction of federal property. Four years later, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Chicago, that the city’s right to build streets did not endow it with the power to seize federal lands.69 In the meantime, Schlatter voluntarily removed several federal buildings in 1845 and 1846