Chicago Cook Illinois United States
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Marquette and Joliet reach Lake Michigan near the site of present-day Chicago, inhabited by the Wea (Ouiatenon), a division of the Miami people.
The name "Chicago" is the French version of the Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa ("Stinky Onion"), named for the plants common along the Chicago River.
Trade links and seasonal hunting migrations link these Algonquian peoples with their neighbors, the Potawatomis to the east, Fox to the north, and the Illinois to the southwest.
The Miami had begun migrating south around Lake Michigan from Wisconsin from the mid-seventeenth century, likely a result of their being invaded by the more powerful Iroquois, who travel far from their territory of New York for better hunting during the beaver fur trade.
The early French explorers notice many linguistic and cultural similarities between the Miami bands and the Illiniwek, a loose confederacy of Algonquian-speaking people.
Marquette and his party return to the Illinois Territory in late 1674, becoming the first Europeans to winter in what will become the city of Chicago.
As welcomed guests of the Illinois Confederation, the explorers had been feasted en route and fed ceremonial foods such as sagamite, a native stew made from hominy or Indian corn, used in ceremonies to celebrate welcomed guests by tribes such as the Peoria, Huron, Osage, and early Caddo tribes of Arkansas.
The first French explorers journey from Canada to the region that is today the city of Chicago, Illinois, find the area inhabited by a vigorous, populous Algonquian nation in the early seventeenth century.
A number of Algonquian peoples, including the Mascoutens and Miamis, inhabit the Chicago area at the beginning of its recorded history.
Trade links and seasonal hunting migrations link these peoples with their neighbors, the Potawatomis to the east, Fox to the north, and the Illinois to the southwest.
The name "Chicago" is the French version of the Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa ("wild leek"/"skunk"), named for the plants common along the Chicago River.
Chicago's location at a short, swampy portage between the Chicago River (flowing originally into the Great Lakes) and the Des Plaines River (flowing into the Mississippi), has attracted the attention of many French explorers traveling in the area, such as Louis Jolliet and Henri Joutel, who feel that the area has a great potential as a transportation hub.
French Jesuits in 1696 build the Mission of the Guardian Angel to Christianize the local Wea and Miami people, and for a time there is a French fort (Fort Chécagou), commanded by Pierre de Liette.
The Illinois tribes' name for themselves is "Inoka," as documented in the French Jesuit dictionaries of Illinois.
The Illinois themselves speak various dialects of the Miami-Illinois language, a member of the Algonquian language family. (What we know today about the Illinois comes to us mainly from the Jesuit Relations, the reports which these missionaries who lived among the various native nations sent back to their superiors in France.)
Once on Canadian soil, Hull had issued a proclamation ordering all British subjects to surrender, or "the horrors, and calamities of war will stalk before you".
This has led many of the British forces to defect.
The senior British officer in Upper Canada, Major General Isaac Brock, feels that he should take bold measures to calm the settler population in Canada, and to convince the natives who are needed to defend the region that Britain is strong.
Hull, knowing of British-instigated native attacks on other locations, orders the evacuation of the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn (Chicago) to Fort Wayne.
After initially being granted safe passage, the inhabitants (soldiers and civilians) are attacked by Potowatomis on August 15 after traveling only two miles (three point two kilometers) in what is known as the Battle of Fort Dearborn.
The fort is subsequently burned.
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.
In Illinois, it runs ninety-six miles (one hundred and fifty-four kilometers) from the Chicago River in Bridgeport, Chicago to the Illinois River at LaSalle-Peru.
The canal crosses the Chicago Portage, and will help establish Chicago as the transportation hub of the United States, before the railroad era.
Canals are the highways of the day.
The Erie Canal and the Illinois and Michigan Canal cement cultural and trade ties to the Northeast rather than the South.
Before the canal, farming in the region was limited to subsistence farming.
The canal will make agriculture in northern Illinois profitable, opening up connections to eastern markets.
With the expansion of agriculture, the canal creates the city of Chicago.
Without the initial stimulus of the canal, Chicago would not have attracted the populations, railroads and the industry that it will.
The canal also influences Illinois's north border.
The first known Europeans to travel the area, Father Marquette and Louis Joliet, had gone through the Chicago Portage on their return trip.
Joliet had remarked that with a canal they could remove the need to portage and the French could create an empire spanning the continent.
The first quantitative survey of the portage had been performed in 1816 by Stephen H. Long.
It was on the basis of these measurements that he was able to make a specific proposal for a canal.
With several slave states recently admitted to the Union, Nathaniel Pope and Ninian Edwards had seen the opportunity to make Illinois a state.
They had proposed moving the border northward from the southern tip of Lake Michigan to allow the canal to be within a single state.
They believed that the canal would firmly align Illinois with the free states and so Congress granted them statehood even though Illinois did not meet the population requirements.
In 1824, Samuel D. Lockwood, one of the first commissioners of the canal, had been given the authorization to hire contractors to survey a route for the canal to follow.
Construction on the canal had begun in 1836, although it was stopped for several years due to an Illinois state financial crisis related to the Panic of 1837.
The Canal Commission had a grant of two hundred and eighty-four thousand acres (one hundred and fifteen thousand hectares) of federal land which it sold at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre (three hundred and nine dollars per square kilometer) to finance the construction.
Still, money had to be borrowed from eastern U.S. and British investors to finish the canal.
Most of the canal work has been done by Irish immigrants who previously worked on the Erie Canal.
The work is considered dangerous and many workers have died, although no official records exist to indicate how many.
The Irish immigrants who toiled to build the canal are often derided as a sub-class and are treated very poorly by other citizens of the city.
Pinkerton had emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, to the United States in 1842 and in the following year had settled in Dundee Township, Illinois, fifty miles northwest of Chicago on the Fox River.
He built a cabin and started a cooperage, sending for his wife in Chicago when their cabin was complete.
As early as 1844, Pinkerton worked for the Chicago abolitionist leaders, and his Dundee home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Pinkerton first got interested in criminal detective work while wandering through the wooded groves around Dundee, looking for trees to make barrel staves, when he came across a band of counterfeiters—who may have been affiliated with the notorious Banditti of the Prairie.
After observing their movements for some time he had informed the local sheriff, who arrested them.
This later led to Pinkerton being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois.
In 1850, he partners with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North-Western Police Agency, which will later become Pinkerton & Co, and finally Pinkerton National Detective Agency, still in existence today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a subsidiary of Securitas AB.
Pinkerton's business insignia is a wide open eye with the caption "We never sleep."
...Chicago in 1851.