The Town of Chicago is incorporated with…

The Town of Chicago is incorporated with a population of three hundred and fifty on August 12, 1833, at the estuary of the Chicago River.

The first boundaries of the new town are Kinzie, Desplaines, Madison, and State Streets, which include an area of about three-eighths of a square mile (one square mile).

Within seven years, the town will boast a population of over four thousand.

Chicago’s first non-native settler was Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a Haitian of African and French descent who had settled on the Chicago River in the 1770s and married a local Potawatomi woman.

In 1795, following the Northwest Indian War, the area of Chicago had been ceded by the local natives in the Treaty of Greenville to the United States for a military post.

Fort Dearborn, which had been built in 1803,  is to remain in use until 1837, after being rebuilt in 1816, having been destroyed in the Fort Dearborn massacre during the War of 1812.

The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi had ceded the land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis.