Sarah Vowell
speaker
165 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 28 Jun
Sarah Vowell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
On the return trip, at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois River and then the Des Plaines.
They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this very spot, right where the river meets the Great Lakes, just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker.
And Joliet then had a vision.
His map of North America, an oddly pretty, delicate ink drawing he made in 1674, is concerned with one thing and one thing only, water.
His America is all Great Lakes and Mississippi.
Look close and you can see what he saw.
There's Lake Michigan, and at only one spot, the future site of Chicago.
Does it connect to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi?
This is what Joliet saw, that this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and thus the Atlantic and the Gulf.
All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between rivers.
He wrote, we could go with facility to Florida in a bark and by very easy navigation.
Thus, Joliet's map isn't so much a map as a prophecy.
Stick your ear up against it and you can practically hear cash registers ring.
Surprisingly, they only built a bridge here in 1920.
Engineers also strained out the Chicago River and put in massive landfills over there, so the lake is further from the corner than it was in Joliet's day.
And I like to picture Joliet sometimes walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge, a go cup in his hand from either the Starbucks over there from the north side of the river or the Starbucks over there on the south side of the river, spitting coffee-laced saliva into the Chicago River, knowing it'll float with facility all the way past New Orleans and to the ocean from there.
The first person to get cracking on Joliet's dream was Chicago's first permanent settler, Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a trader who built a cabin here on the north side of the river in 1779, a century after Joliet paddled by.
DuSable's mother was an African slave and his father was French.
He lived here on what is now the site of a 35-story office tower called the Equitable Building.
With his Pottawatomie wife Catherine, DuSable's marriage bed was itself a map of America, the mixing of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes.
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