The First Peoples of Chicago

To get an idea of how Chicago began, we need to understand the settlement of the  North American continent and how the area we know as our great city fits into this history.

The earliest peoples who came to the American continent arrived and lived here long before the first Europeans came in the early 16^th century. In fact, according to Simon Worrall in an article for the National Geographic:

“Right now we can solidly say that people were across the Americas by 15,000 years ago. But that means people were probably already well in place by then; and there’s enough evidence to suggest humans were widespread 20,000 years ago.”  

To clearly see how populated this area of the future America was, please see the map below showing where the numerous tribes lived:

Gallatin, Albert, and American Antiquarian Society.
Map of the Indian tribes of North America,
aboutA.D. along the Atlantic, & about 1800 A.D.
westwardly. [Washington, D.C.: The Society, 1836],
The Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2002622260/>.

About 7,000 years ago, these early inhabitants of America were the first to discover and make use of the place we now call Chicago (at the heart of the portage system created by the proximity of the Des Plaines River, Mud Lake, the Chicago River and Lake Michigan):

“…this system of trails and waterways was first utilized by prehistoric man. Over 7000 years ago southern Indians met with those from the north to trade for copper, and later by Indians traversing the Midwest in hunting, trapping, trading and war parties.” ¹

Map of the Chicago Portage, showing Mud Lake, photograph
 of a sign at Chicago Portage National Historic Site, 25 March 2012,
Roger Deschner, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/
Map_of_Chicago_Portage.JPG  

As noted above, the indigenous peoples were in the Chicago area using the portage as part of an extensive trading system in about 5,400BC, long before and Europeans were aware of this continent. The French arrived in the “New World” in the early sixteenth century. In my post of June 17, 2017, I wrote about the fur trade in North America and how it influenced Chicago. In this post, I mentioned the French practice of intermarrying with the Native American population. This practice had a great influence on the population of early nineteenth century Chicago.

The English came to North America early in the seventeenth century and soon established a fur trading empire on the Atlantic Coast of what is now Canada. The French fur trade operated in the interior of Canada and down to the Great Lakes and even areas south. But it wasn’t long before tensions between the two countries in Europe over land erupted in North America; both countries wanted its riches and to claim to it as their own.

To get a clearer idea of which areas of the North American continent were controlled by the  French and which the English, the map below shows each area of influence in the early 18^th century:

By Pinpin [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
 or CC BY-SA 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Both colonial powers began building forts to “protect” their areas of interest in the upper Ohio River valley, claimed by both countries in the early to mid 1700s. Isolated skirmishes broke out and a full-fledged war began in 1754 which ended in an English victory. From that time on, the French influence in the North American fur trade diminished.

However, the French practice of intermarriage with their native trading partner communities produced a major impact on subsequent generations in this area of the US and Canada, including the Illinois territory. The children of these unions were some of the earliest settlers of Chicago as we will see in our next post.

So now we come to the early eighteenth century in the Chicago area. What has happened to the fur trade since the English defeated the French in 1754?  “English and Scottish merchants, now settled in Montreal, took over control of the fur trade and allied themselves with the remaining French traders.”2   But the new country of America wanted to extend its territory and get in on the lucrative fur trade. Many far sighted American leaders recognized the potential of the Chicago portage.  

At this time there was no actual community in the territory of Chicago. But this was about to change as the nineteenth century dawned. The US government established the first permanent settlement, Fort Dearborn, in 1803 as a foothold in this area.

By J Seymour Currey - The Story of Old Fort Dearborn

 p. 27 ([1]) after a drawing of a model by Albert L. Van den Berghenin

 1898 that appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune

on March 5, 1899. Public Domain,

 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14934632

With the building of this fort, US soldiers were the first Americans to occupy the area. But by 1804 the soldiers had company, “A Scots-Irish fur trader from Quebec, John Kinzie, arrived in Chicago in 1804, and rapidly became the civilian leader of the small settlement that grew around the fort."¹

Another reason for the building of Fort Dearborn was the presence of the Native Americans, mainly members of the Potowatami tribe. The American attitude toward the land on this continent was that all of it was open to settlement without regard to any earlier inhabitants. In these early days of the seventeenth century, the number of settlers was small due to the difficult swampy and muddy terrain around Chicago which made it almost inaccessible much of the year. But advances in transportation, including planned canals, promised to open the flood gates to more American pioneers. The US government was looking ahead and this posed problems for the original peoples who had long occupied this land. Before long, tensions erupted and skirmishes broke out that culminated in 1812 with the Potowatamis burning Fort Dearborn. 

This attack was the beginning of the end for the tribes living in this area. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 which legalized the driving of Indians to reservations west of the Mississippi. A steady stream of settlers would soon be coming to start building a village out of the mud.

By Rufus Blanchard, from drawing
by George Davis http://publications.newberry.org/
frontiertoheartland/items/show/155, Public Domain,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50827303

This time in American history, the 1820s and 1830s is when the Chicago area started its journey to become a magnet to entrepreneurs who were drawn to the promise of this village with its geographic position as a transportation hub that made it the center of the Midwest economy for many years.  We will cover this period in the next post – “The Early Europeans and Americans who Settled the Chicago Area.”

Notes

1  The Chicago Portage and Laughton Trading Post Area, "The Waterway West", June 1975, online, http://drupal.library.cmu.edu/chicago/node/132

2 Encyclopedia of Chicago, “Fur Trade,” online, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/492.html