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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's the 1850s on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan, where not too long ago, this was just a frontier outpost built on marshy ground at the meeting point of great waterways. Territories utilized by generations of Native peoples, trading, hunting, traveling, living according to the land.
But now this land is American territory. Property. And against the odds, a city has risen. Chicago. And it's a boomtown. Buildings are erected as quickly as people arrive. Brick, limestone, and marble facades supported by timber frames. When it rains, the streets become wagon-churned mud. When it's dry, they're clouds of dust. The humanity, too, is a contrast.
For every rising industrial magnate stepping from mansion to theater to grand hotel, there are tenement blocks of laborers newly arrived from Ireland and Germany, living between shifts in overcrowded, squalid conditions. The rivers, too, are crowded with boats and increasingly choked with waste. It is growth without pause and not enough plan.
An unlikely city rising from uncertain ground and straining against it. Music Hello there, greetings, and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman, your host, and very glad to be speaking today about a city that looms large on the skyline of America's past and present. Consider this. So many towns and cities in this nation were founded after our colonial period.
This is a young nation still, but only one of those cities has become a mega city, a staging ground for so much of what has fueled the advances and innovations which made the United States the superpower it is today. As that city grew in size and influence, it imposed itself upon American culture in every conceivable fashion.
And for that reason, it is often called, by me for one, the only true American metropolis. That city is, of course, Chicago. But the origins of Carl Sandburg's city of big shoulders are historically quite complicated. And it says much about us that the real story of our third largest city is so little understood by so many. So let's understand it.
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Chapter 2: When was Chicago founded and what were its early conditions?
How did Chicago really begin?
We discuss this today with Anne Durkin Keating, an author and scholar who has written extensively on the city in books like Building Chicago, Suburban Developers and the Divided Metropolis, Chicagoland, City and Suburbs of the Railroad Age, Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs, a Historical Guide, and what much of our conversation will concern today, Rising Up from Indian Country, Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago, published in 2012.
Professor Keating, that is a breathless list of books there. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks. Glad to be here.
Before we dive into the past, for our UK listeners especially who might not know much about Chicago, I'm going to fly through a couple of facts about this wonderful town. Located on the western shore of Lake Michigan in the state of Illinois, largest city in Illinois, but not the capital, which is Springfield down south.
It is called the Windy City for a very good reason, and the Second City for questionable ones. It has great culture, world-class museums, cutting-edge restaurants. It was the backdrop for legendary cinema, Sinatra, Ferris Bueller, The Untouchables, today, TV shows like The Bear. It is still the big stop on the Transcontinental Railroad route, which made it an industrial powerhouse.
It's the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bulls, the Blackhawks, the Bears. It's the Obamas, the Bean, deep dish pizza, and the Chicago River made green on St.
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Chapter 3: Who were the first people living in the Chicago area?
Paddy's Day, not to mention it's a very nice place for a bike ride. That about cover it, Anne? That's a great synopsis. We can just stop it right there. As you can tell, I have an adoration for Chicago. But what about you, Anne? What brought you to the history of Chicago as a subject?
I'm a Chicagoan. So I started there. I studied at the University of Chicago for my graduate degrees. but I am fascinated with the built environment of cities. So that's where I got started in all of this. And I started in archeology and then moved to urban history.
I share your passion and Chicago is really dear to my heart because you get so much of a concentrated history of what makes the modern American city happen. Today's conversation predates that modern version of Chicago history. One day we will tell that story, I promise you. This was called the City of the Century, meaning the 19th century by all rights.
And it shouldn't be there at all, really, when you consider what an unlikely place this really was to build a city. Why was that?
It's on a swamp along the lakeshore at the mouth of a very slow-moving small river called the Chicago River. And you're right, it takes off. And it takes off, as you note, Don, because of the railroad and industry. And it becomes the center for that growth. So when we think about Chicago, it's a city that really emerges out of the industrial age.
So in a very real sense, in contrast to cities on the East Coast that have their start, as you noted, in the colonial period, This is a city that really grows on industrialization, on railroads, on immigration. And that's, you know, that's at the heart of what Chicago is and its built environment right down to the present.
All of that, very personally interesting to me, the more modern version of that history. But today we're going to really talk about the earlier history of this, coming out of the early settlements that were going on there. So let's go way back. These are obviously native lands, like everything in the American continent.
It was the intersection of several great waterways, which allowed those native peoples to travel and trade. They were Algonquin, then Miami. What's interesting and will be a theme of this conversation is how much Confederacy there was, how many overlappings of these territories were going on at this time. It seems to inform the place, doesn't it?
Yeah. As you note, it's at the intersection of the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes. So the continental divide, it's a very swampy place. It's hard to imagine that it's a continental divide, but it is to the east from the Chicago River eastward goes into the Great Lakes, into Lake Michigan to the west goes down to the Mississippi River. So you could portage.
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Chapter 4: What role did the French play in Chicago's early history?
That's what the difference is here than the first one in 1821. So if 1821 opens the land of Chicago area for American settlement, 1833 clears it.
Yes. I think that's an important way of thinking about this. And it makes it possible then to begin buying and selling that land. And you get the first subdivision. So the first plat at Chicago actually precedes the 1832 subdivision. War and the 1833 Treaty, and because it goes back to that 1816 Treaty, so it's the Illinois-Michigan Canal Commissioners make at the mouth of the Chicago River.
And that plat is what becomes downtown Chicago. And that is, to my mind, I mean, if you're thinking about when do you want to start Chicago history, 1833 seems a reasonable moment, 1812, late 1780s when DuSable is there, 1803 with Fort Dearborn. In 1830, though, there's an argument because that's when land is now real estate, when you can start to sell it. And the U.S.
government is thinking about it in those terms. Now, it's not the U.S. government. They have given this land to the new state of Illinois to use to build the canal. But it's government land being sold in that way. So the story now becomes really different.
Yeah. 1837, Chicago is officially incorporated as a city. Surprisingly recent, but that's the story of America, as we mentioned before. You've got all those old cities on the East Coast, old for our standards, but this is why Chicago is still a very new city. It is the railroad that will establish Chicago as the modern American city, however. And that all comes later on.
1848, the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal creates a water link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. That is soon overtaken, as all canals are, by the railroads. 1850, the railroad moves out. Aurora Branch Railroad laid the first tracks into West Chicago. 1860, Chicago is established as America's leading railway center. Fascinating story. Who gets the railroad? Not St.
Louis. Chicago gets it. And The rest is history.
Right. I mean, in a big part of that, we can make a linkage here in that there's a lot of money made at Chicago in real estate speculation in the 1830s. And that real estate speculation is critical. to the money that's needed for investment in railroads in an industry.
The other thing that I think is really interesting in thinking about what you've just laid out is that the federal government agrees to improve the harbor at Chicago. So the harbor at Chicago, there is really not a harbor at Chicago. There's a sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River. And beginning in the mid 1830s, the Corps of Engineers comes in and basically
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