City of Big Shoulders

A History of Chicago

Robert G. Spinney

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501748349
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

" Condensed yet energetic and substantial history of Chicago. Spinney has a firm sense of historical narrative as well as a keen eye for entertaining and illuminating detail."?  Publishers Weekly

A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. Spinney brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places—from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls—that make this incredible city one of the best places in the world. 

City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600s to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city—from the tycoons and the politicians to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world.

In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the twenty-first century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called "the wild-garlic place" burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city?

Chapter 1

The Early World of Chigagou, 1600–1750

Before there was a city of Chicago, Native Americans knew about a marshy area they called Chigagou, meaning “the wild-garlic place.”¹ To these American Indians, Chigagou was an inhospitable place, and few wanted to live on the area’s marshy land. About four miles from the Lake of the Illinois (Lake Michigan), the mud and bogs gave way to a vast, twelve-mile-wide prairie swamp. Within this swamp was a five-mile-long depression so inglorious that later settlers could think of no better name for it than Mud Lake. The soil was not especially fertile, and the long, bitterly cold winters made for short growing seasons. The flat prairie offered no hills and few trees to shield inhabitants from the howling wind; winter wind chill factors of twenty degrees below zero were as common in 1390 as they were in 1990. The combination of soggy swampland, flat prairie, and routine flooding meant that the area would suffer from drainage problems for centuries to come.²

The ancestors of the Native Americans who settled in this region came from Siberia. Crossing the Bering Strait, they sojourned in the territory that would be known as Alaska and western Canada before moving south. Archaeologists tell us they were originally native Siberians, Mongols, or Asians. Perhaps, then, we could call these early explorers, conquerors, and settlers Siberian Americans, the first of many immigrants to a swampy area that would someday stand as one of the largest cities in the world.

Because of the inclement environment, it is little surprise that, although many Native Americans traveled to and from the region of Chigagou, few chose to settle there. For good reason, the American Indians preferred living on dry land, especially land near trees. The few Illiniwek, or Illinois, Indians who lived in the area subsisted on both agriculture and hunting. They spent their winters huddled in log cabins covered with sewn reed mats that repelled both rain and snow. Chigagou was simply one of many small gathering places. Its geographic location suggests it was a place that American Indians passed through while traveling. Most of the Illinois lived farther south and closer to the great river that would later be known as the Mississippi River. It was here—near present-day St. Louis—that Illinois settlements dotted the land, not in the dismal swamps of Chigagou. At least for the American Indians, what distinguished the swamplands near the Lake of the Illinois from other locales was the abundance of wild garlic that thrived there.

The Illinois Indians claimed most of the surrounding area, but they established no large settlement at Chigagou. Sometime around 1650, Iroquois tribes from the territories that would become Indiana and Ohio attacked and decimated the Illinois. Only a few Illinois Indians remained, and so the neighboring Miami moved to occupy the Chigagou area. Such intertribal warfare was common among North American Indian tribes. Even in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when Native Americans in the Indiana-Illinois area found themselves warring with increasing frequency with settlers, the pace of intertribal warfare continued unabated. American Indians routinely fought among themselves even while they fought the settlers.³

The Miami were only the latest victors in a long process of war, defeat, and relocation. When the first French missionaries and settlers came to Chigagou in the late 1600s, it was the Miami that they encountered. According to the French, the Miami men were friendly, dark, strong, wearing little clothing, and often covered with tattoos.⁴ The Miami abandoned the area around 1800, moving to warmer lands formerly held by the Iroquois. They were replaced in the Chigagou area by the Potawatomi, who had begun moving southward from the area of present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the late 1600s. The Potawatomi would be the last tribe to make its home in the Chigagou area, remaining there until evicted by settlers in 1833. A multicultural people, the Potawatomi were closely related to the Chippewa and Ottawa and had also assimilated aspects of Sac (or Sauk), Fox, and Kickapoo cultures.

Because Native Americans could find plenty of other lands that were warmer, drier, less windy, and closer to major rivers, Chigagou was never the site of a major settlement. European settlers saw the area differently, however. For Europeans, the cold swamp would become one of the most important geographical spots in all of North America.

White traders quickly realized that the Chigagou swamp straddled what amounted to a mini-continental divide. East of Chigagou, rivers flowed eastward toward the Atlantic Ocean, and, west of the swamp, rivers flowed westward toward the Mississippi River. Because no river flowed from North America’s Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, Europeans could only reach the Mississippi River, and thereby access the heart of the North American continent, by an arduous overland route. But a marsh located about six miles southwest of present-day downtown Chicago, near today’s Midway Airport, was a place where westward- and eastward-flowing rivers met. Flowing eastward from this marsh, which was known as the portage, was a small, lazy river that merged with several other streams and eventually emptied into Lake Michigan. On the west side of the marsh, the Des Plaines River flowed westward into the Illinois River, and the Illinois continued westward into the Mississippi River. This natural intersection of river systems created a convenient, all-water connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River that would make long overland journeys unnecessary. During the dry season, travelers could simply carry canoes across the short span of dried swamp, and, during the wet season, they could paddle across the flooded swamp.

Until the advent of the railroad in the mid-1800s, water travel was by far the most efficient mode of travel for settlers and traders. Overland travel was extraordinarily slow and difficult, as few roads existed, and most of these were little more than beaten trails. Mud, rivers, and forests hindered overland travel, permitting caravans of goods to travel perhaps ten or fifteen miles per day. This is why the discovery of the Chigagou portage was tantamount to discovering a gateway or an entrepôt into the vast North American interior. Europeans could now enter the North American continent at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, travel down the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, cross the lakes to Chigagou, negotiate the Chigagou area’s small local rivers and portage, and then link up with the Mississippi River. Once Europeans realized they could access the heart of North America via this all-water route, Chigagou took on new importance.

Europeans first saw Chigagou in 1673. By this time, European colonists had been living in Virginia for more than sixty years and in Massachusetts for more than fifty. Although about 120,000 white immigrants called North America home by this time, most were British and therefore occupied the British-controlled lands along the Atlantic coast. By contrast, France possessed much more expansive lands in what is now Canada and the Great Lakes region.

The French had not sent families to the Americas to establish permanent colonies. French missionaries and fur trappers sought converts and beaver but not homesteads. Aided by the extensive lake and river system of the Great Lakes area, they reached deep into North America, while few British colonists strayed more than eighty miles from the Atlantic Ocean. In the long run, Britain’s strategy of planting a self-reproducing population in the Americas would prove more effective in conquering a continent than France’s strategy of sending out trappers and missionaries. Taking the exploitive (or extractive) approach was common to European conquering powers; Spain had become Europe’s preeminent power in the 1500s by laying claim to the new lands its agents explored. Looking to claim the heart of the continent for France, two Frenchmen passed through Chigagou in 1673. They immediately realized the area’s value.

Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary for the Roman Catholic Church in his mid-thirties, and Louis Joliet, a French explorer not yet thirty years of age, had different reasons for wanting to visit the native people of the region. Marquette hoped to convert the natives to Christianity, while Joliet sought to map the vast unknown heartland of North America and to claim new territory for France. Both men were seasoned explorers, and Marquette spoke six American Indian languages. The Frenchmen were also skilled cartographers: using only a compass and an astrolabe, they would draw the first trustworthy map of this corner of the globe. After a chance meeting with several Illinois Indians on the shore of what is now Lake Superior, the two men set out to travel to the Illinois Indians’ home. Joliet carried with him orders from France: find “the great river” that flowed somewhere in the west. If he found it, he could claim it and its extensive basin for his country.

During 1673, the priest-and-explorer pair, assisted by five additional travelers, traversed northern Wisconsin for a month before coming upon the Mississippi River. Traveling south by canoe on the river, they journeyed for another month and explored as far as the Arkansas River before turning back. By that time, they had concluded that the great river emptied into the Gulf of Mexico and not the Pacific Ocean, as some had conjectured. The prospect of paddling their canoes upstream for several hundred miles against the flow of the mighty Mississippi was unappealing, however, especially as the summer sun beat upon them and Marquette suffered from dysentery. Upon reaching the Illinois River, a Native American boy who was traveling with the Frenchmen suggested that the party travel up the tributary. The Illinois River would speed their return to Lake Michigan, the boy told them. Unbeknownst to the French explorers, the Illinois River proved to be a tributary of the Mississippi that cut across present-day Illinois in an east-to-west direction. The Frenchmen paddled up the Illinois River, and a party of American Indians escorted them to the Des Plaines River, another westward-flowing river that originated in a swampy portage. On the opposite side of the swamp, Native Americans directed the men to an eastward-flowing river that drained into Lake Michigan. At last they had reached their destination, and their four-month-long journey over 2,500 miles was a success.

Marquette and Joliet had been the first white men to see Chigagou and the critical portage area, and they owed their “discovery” to the Illinois Indians. Marquette described his contact with the native people: “They received us very well, and obliged me to promise that I would return to instruct them.”⁵ Accordingly, the French priest returned in the fall of 1674 only to become snowbound in Chigagou in the winter of 1674–1675. He spent the winter there, becoming the first European to reside in the area. He was also the first European to die there. At the age of thirty-seven, the “black robe,” as the Jesuit missionaries were called, took ill and died in 1675. The Native Americans to whom he had preached buried him along Lake Michigan.

Although they were the first to map the territory, Marquette and Joliet did not “discover” Chigagou. Not only had the Native American Indians known about “the wild-garlic place” for some time, but other Europeans were in the area as well. When Marquette wintered in Chigagou in 1674–1675, for example, he met two French traders. One of these traders, Pierre Moreau, called the Mole, was a fur trader who specialized in selling liquor to the Native Americans—an illegal but financially rewarding activity. Moreau’s partner is known to us only by his nickname: the Surgeon. Marquette’s diaries tell us that the Mole and the Surgeon befriended the Jesuit missionary, built a cabin for him on the bank of the Chicago River, near the Damen Avenue Bridge today, so he could survive the winter, and provided food when his health failed.⁶ There may have been earlier French fur trappers who had passed through Chigagou long before these Frenchmen saw the swampy land. It was Marquette and Joliet, however, who first recorded their journey in diaries, drew maps of their travels, and realized that they had passed through previously unmapped land.

Marquette was concerned about his Christian mission to the Indians, and he seemed not to realize the strategic and commercial possibilities of the Chigagou area. This was not so for Joliet, who wrote to his superiors to suggest that a canal be built through the portage and that colonies be established in the area. He explained that New France now possessed “a very great and important advantage, which perhaps will hardly be believed. It is that we could go with facility to Florida in a bark, and by very easy navigation. It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through half a league of prairie, to pass from the foot of the Lake of the Illinois [Lake Michigan] to the river Saint Louis [the Illinois River].”⁷ French officials scoffed at Joliet’s plans, however, probably finding it difficult to imagine a canal set in the barren wilderness of Chigagou. Only 6,700 Frenchmen sojourned in all of North America at the time, and France could spare none of them for highly speculative dreams like Joliet’s. It would be almost a century and a half before other men would bring to fruition Joliet’s proposal for a portage canal.

Despite Marquette’s death and Joliet’s rebuff by his superiors, Chigagou was on the map. More importantly, the rivers that linked Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River were on the map. The French realized that Chigagou and its portage gave them a strategic advantage over their bitter rivals, the British. The British had planted thriving colonies on the Atlantic coast, and those colonists now threatened to move westward and to claim more of North America. British dominance of the Atlantic seaboard prevented competing French colonies there. Chigagou and its portage allowed the French to do an “end run” around the British-controlled colonies. Chigagou could become a base of operations from which the French could access the heart of North America, travel down the Mississippi, and claim all the Mississippi basin, gaining vast new lands for the French crown and restricting Britain’s westward advance across America. French control of the Mississippi River basin, therefore, was part of a seventeenth-century French containment policy aimed at limiting British expansion in North America.

France authorized two men, Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle and Henri de Tonty, to build a chain of forts throughout the middle of North America that would secure those lands for France. La Salle and Tonty passed through Chigagou in 1681–1682, built a stockade and cabin there, constructed several forts nearby, and explored the Mississippi River all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. They audaciously claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France and named it Louisiana after the French king, Louis XIV. Like Joliet, La Salle grasped the strategic importance of the Chigagou portage. Holed up in a cold log hut on the portage during the winter of 1682–1683, La Salle nonetheless prophesied that the area would someday become “the gate of empire” and “the seat of commerce.”⁸ La Salle never lived to bask in his newfound glory as the king’s agent or even to see Chigagou become anything other than a swampy frontier outpost. He was killed in 1684 by a group of frightened French colonists when he misread his maps and they became lost in the wilderness. Tonty was more fortunate: he faithfully built French forts in the Mississippi River valley until his death in 1704.

French trappers continued to work the Chigagou area while French missionaries labored among local Native Americans. As late as 1766, a British captain surveyed the area and reported that France had been busy carrying on trade “all round … by Land and by Water; 1st up the Mississippi and to the Lakes by the Ouisconsing, Foxes, Chigagou, and Illinois Rivers.”⁹ The French proved more adept at sending out pioneering fur trappers, however, than at building a permanent community. Perhaps three hundred small cabins dotted the Chigagou area in 1700. A number of French fur trappers lived there with American Indian wives and reared children. Pierre Pinet, a Jesuit missionary, opened the Mission of the Guardian Angel in Chigagou in 1696, which ministered to the small settlement. Pinet, who uncharitably described his neighbors as “hardened in profligacy,” took special pride in the children he was able to baptize there. Within five years, however, Father Pinet’s mission had closed—perhaps because Pinet criticized the French practice of trafficking alcohol among the Native Americans. The French settlement at Chigagou stagnated, and France’s western empire never materialized. Indeed, we know little about Chigagou between 1700 and 1750, largely because Chigagou never grew into the bustling entrepôt that the French had envisioned. For almost seventy years, the area remained little more than a crossroads where a handful of trappers, explorers, missionaries, and Native Americans wintered.

Chigagou’s future had looked bright in the 1680s when France had intended to make the area the jewel of its North American possessions, perhaps a French version of New York City or Boston. But local Indians began to resent what was beginning to look like a European invasion of the area. Perhaps this is why Native Americans murdered twelve Frenchmen in 1714 in Chigagou. By 1720, Fox Indians had cut off the Europeans’ access to the southern end of the portage, where the Des Plaines River...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Tables
• Preface
• 1. The Early World of Chigagou, 1600–1750
• 2. Chigagou Becomes Chicago, 1750–1835
• 3. Boom, Bust, and Recovery in Early Chicago, 1835–1850
• 4. Chicago Conquers the Midwest, 1850–1890
• 5. Life in a City on the Make, 1850–1900
• 6. The Fire, the Bomb, and the Fair, 1871–1893
• 7. The New Immigration, 1880–1920
• 8. Progressivism and Urban Reform, 1890–1915
• 9. World War I and the Roaring Twenties, 1915–1929
• 10. The Great Depression, World War II, and Suburban Growth, 1929–1955
• 11. Richard J. Daley and the City That Works, 1955–1976
• 12. The Challenges of the Post-Machine Years, 1976–1997
• 13. Glamorous and Grim: Chicago in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index