Fort Dearborn was erected across the river from the old DuSable estate to guard the Chicago Portage and formally claim the territory for the young United States of America.Īt that time, the Chicago River turned south at what is now Michigan Avenue, forcing sailors to navigate around a sandbar the shape of an elephant’s trunk to get in and out of the harbor.
military built - and after a devastating battle with the Potawatomi, rebuilt an outpost. In 1795, as part of the Treaty of Greenville, a confederation of Native American tribes granted the United States rights to a six-mile parcel of land at the mouth of the Chicago River. The Kinzie Mansion, which John Kinzie purchased from Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, and Fort Dearborn, painted circa 1900 by an unidentified artist. Word of the “Chicago Portage” spread quickly, and it soon became a popular route for French and British fur traders and missionaries. “All that needs to be done is to dig a canal through but half a league of prairie from the lower end of Lake Michigan to the River of St. “We could easily sail a ship to Florida,” he wrote in his journal. The shortcut could accelerate travel and trade between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, the two major transportation networks of the North American continent.Ī city built at the mouth of that canal would be poised for greatness. Jolliet immediately recognized the significance of the portage. Marquette and Jolliet paddled to what is now the suburban town of Lyons, slogged across the muddy portage to the Chicago River, put their boats back in the water, and continued on to Green Bay. If they headed instead for the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, they would come to a portage where they could carry their canoes across a few miles of swampy marshland and arrive at the Great Lakes in a fraction of the time. They paddled upstream in their birchbark canoes, headed for the Fox River and Green Bay, until some local Miami people tipped them off to a valuable shortcut.
In 1673, a French missionary and a French-Canadian explorer - Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet - were returning to Canada after a mapping expedition that had brought them along the Mississippi River into present-day Arkansas and Mississippi. The Algonquian people called the slow and meandering river that led to the Great Lakes Checagou in reference to the pungent wild leek that grew along its bank. Among them were Woodland, Archaic, and Upper Mississippian peoples and later the Miami and Potawatomi.īack then, the area teemed with beaver, black bear, fox, and deer. Native American peoples traversed Chicago’s waterways for hundreds of years before the arrival of the first Europeans. Marquette and Jolliet were on a mapping expedition exploring the Mississippi River, when local Miami people showed them a shortcut to the Great Lakes, which became known as the Chicago Portage.
0 kommentar(er)
