From Pre-Columbian times, as today, the Chicago area was a crossroads. Archeological artifacts suggest that small bands of Native Americans regularly visited the southwestern bank of Lake Michigan, coming from throughout the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Lakes to hunt or trade. They were speakers of the Algonquin language, and lived throughout the Great Lakes regions, alongside a different tribal group, the Iroquois. They traveled by water, including along rivers later named the Illinois, the Kankakee, the St. Joseph, the Wabash, the Des Plaines and the Fox, but few settled along the swampy lakeshore until about 1630, just before the arrival of French explorers and missionaries.
In 1673, French traders and explorers reported finding a series of small villages composed of Algonquin-speaking people they called the Illinois, a native population they estimated to number about 12,000 or 13,000. In the next century, more new arrivals, including the Potawatomi, the Odawa, and the Ojibwe formed permanent villages along the Des Plaines, Chicago and Calumet Rivers, while a growing stream of French explorers, fur traders and missionaries passed through the portage between the Great Lakes and the rivers leading to the Mississippi.
They traveled by water, including along rivers later named the Illinois, the Kankakee, the St. Joseph, the Wabash, the Des Plaines and the Fox, but few settled along the swampy lakeshore until about 1630, just before the arrival of French explorers and missionaries.
In 1673, French traders and explorers reported finding a series of small villages composed of Algonquin-speaking people they called the Illinois, a native population they estimated to number about 12,000 or 13,000. In the next century, more new arrivals, including the Potawatomi, the Odawa, and the Ojibwe formed permanent villages along the Des Plaines, Chicago and Calumet Rivers, while a growing stream of French explorers, fur traders and missionaries passed through the portage between the Great Lakes and the rivers leading to the Mississippi.
The French and French-Canadians established networks of forts, trading posts and missions in the area they called “Checagoua” a translation “Shikaawa,” the name used by the local people. Some married into Native American families and became part of the local villages, including the man recognized as Chicago’s first non-native settler, Haitian Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, who married a Potawatomi woman named Kitahawa. The French left after the Revolutionary War, but DuSable stayed and established a permanent trading post and home at the mouth of the Chicago River.
Under the 1875 Treaty of Greenville, Ohio between the native tribes and the new U.S. government, the Indians gave up control of all land south of the Ohio River to the United States. They retained their claims to the land around the Great Lakes but ceded three strategic locations in Illinois to the United States: the portage connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the land at the mouth of the Illinois River, and the mouth of the Chicago River, where the United States established Fort Dearborn in 1803.
Less than ten years later, U.S. Army abandoned Fort Dearborn at the start of the War of 1812, and the military family members living there fled on foot. Broken promises to the local Potawatomi led them to mount an attack on the fleeing Americans, killing nearly all of them.
In 1816, the Odawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomi came together as the Council of the Three Fires to negotiate terms for control of the land north of the Ohio with the Americans. Among other provisions, the new Treaty of St. Louis gave the United States control of a portage area defined by North and South Indian Boundary Lines 20 miles apart, extending diagonally from Lake Michigan to the chain of rivers leading to the Mississippi and destinations west. The North Indian Boundary Line ran through present-day Rogers Park and West Ridge, along the route of Rogers Avenue.
The treaty granted Americans safe passage within the corridor, giving eastern settlers access to U.S. lands in the Louisiana Territory acquired in 1803. Sadly, some newcomers remained in Illinois, violating the agreement with homesteads north of the Indian Boundary Line in today’s Evanston, Wilmette, Skokie, Rogers Park, West Ridge, and further west.
For more than a decade, new treaties took more land out of Indian control and pushed Native Americans west across the Mississippi River. Resistance to these measures culminated in the 1832 Black Hawk War, but the Indians lost this conflict, and the subsequent Treaty of Chicago forced the Potawatomi to cede the last of their Northeastern Illinois land. At the concluding peace treaty ceremony in 1835 held before the Potawatomi relocated to the west and north, 500 warriors in full dress gave their final tribal dance in two-year-old Chicago.
The treaty opened the way for land sales to an influx of settlers and speculators arriving in ever-greater numbers from the Eastern United States in the wave of western expansion before the Civil War. The Chicago Land Office opened in 1835, and land sales in Cook County began. On October 1, 1839, the first sales of land in Rogers Park and West Ridge were recorded.
Until 1890, Native Americans were excluded from the United States Census, creating the misconception that none remained in Chicago, but many did. Those who remained were not considered U.S. citizens until 1924. In 2020, the Census reported more than 71,000 Native Americans in Cook County, more than 216,000 in the Chicago-Naperville Metropolitan Area.
Sources:
1. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, developed under the auspices of the Newberry Library and the Chicago History Museum, 2004. See entries titled “The Potawatomi,” “Treaties,” “Chicago in the Middle Ground,”and “The Black Hawk War.”
2. Digital Research Library of Illinois Journal, blog post by Dr. Neal Gale, “The 1816 Treaty of St. Louis and the 1821 and 1833 Treaties of Chicago” posted January 16, 2018 at https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-treaty-of-1816-of-st-louis-and-the-treaties-of-chicago.html.
3. Timeline provided by Matthew Beaudet, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Buildings.