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
Chicago school teachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago's first resident, DuSable, was a black man.
And just think, it only took 204 years for the town to elect its first black mayor.
In 1803, the United States established Fort Dearborn at what would become the corner of Michigan and Wacker to protect the portage of the Chicago River.
During the War of 1812, hundreds of Potawatomi Indians descended upon the soldiers and their families and killed them, burning down the fort.
The site of Chicago was then abandoned for four years.
When soldiers arrived to rebuild the fort, they first had to bury the scalped human remains, which still lay there.
Today the site of the fort is weirdly commemorated here with these little bronze markers embedded in the sidewalk at Michigan and Wacker.
so the tourists can dance around its former perimeter as if learning to cha-cha-cha.
And over here, there's a wildly racist relief sculpture commemorating the defense of Fort Dearborn, where a soldier from the fort is kind of battling off this savage Indian brave while a mother and child are kind of cowering behind him, basically waiting to die.
And underneath that,
is a plaque that says the people of the fort were brutally massacred by the Indians.
They will be cherished as martyrs in our early history.
What it doesn't say is that those Indians technically hadn't given over their rights to this land, but it looks like they ran out of room to put that on the plaque.
Now I'm going to walk around here back onto the bridge.
And I'm looking west across the Chicago River.
And if you look downriver at the turn in the river a few blocks west, you can see the site of the old Saganash Hotel right over there.
During the first half of the 19th century, at the Sauginash Hotel, Chicagoans seemed to be play-acting the juiciest bits of the country's spanking new constitution every night.
Historian Donald L. Miller writes, "...at the Sauginash and its neighboring hotels, men and women of every color and class were welcome, and whiskey, song, and dance were the great democratizers."
Visitors from more civilized parts were shocked to see Indian braves spinning the white wives of fort officers around the dance floor of the Saganash to the frenzied fiddling and toe-tapping of hotel owner Marc Beaubien, or white and Indian women drinking home-distilled liquor straight from the bottle.
To add an edge to the evenings, local white traders would put on feathered headdresses and spring into the crowded tavern with war whoops and raised tomahawks, scaring the wits out of tight-buttoned Easterners.
Showing 41–60 of 165 · page 3 of 9
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