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Shikaakwa

shi·KAA·kwa

A narrative history of Chicago — from the ice that made the portage to the name still spoken. Every claim carries its source, and how far that source can be trusted.

Read The Wild Leek Place

Read the book

The Wild Leek Place

Seven feet of wet prairie decided a state line. A river was turned backwards. Eight hours became a demand. 844 died at a wharf in the name of a safety law.

Twenty-three chapters, every disagreement kept. Free, no sign-up.

Start at the ice →

Or take it with you: EPUB · PDF. Same text as the web edition.

The book, chapter by chapter

From a million years ago to the name still spoken. Choose a chapter to start there.

  1. The ice

    Begin about a million years ago, because the town could not have stood anywhere else and the reason is geological rather than commercial.

    Map of the glacial lakes, with Lake Chicago at the south end of Lake Michigan draining down the Illinois valley
    Glacial Lake Chicago and its outletUSGS, 1915
  2. Seven feet

    The accident can be measured.

    Engraved map of the Marquette and Jolliet route, with the portage between the lake and the Illinois
    The 1673 voyage, with the portage markedThévenot, c. 1681
  3. The plant, and the name

    The creek was named for what grew along it.

    Botanical drawing of the wild leek: broad leaves, flower head and bulb
    Wild leek, Allium tricoccumBritton & Brown, 1913
  4. The people the ground belonged to

    The state's name is a second plain word doing unglamorous work, and the obvious reading of it is wrong.

    Lithograph portrait of Wa-Baun-See in a feathered headdress and coat with a medal
    Wa-Baun-See, a Potawatomi chiefMcKenney & Hall, 1842
  5. The French century

    France reached this water road long before the United States built anything on it.

    Engraved map of the Great Lakes and the Illinois country
    New France and the Illinois countryCoronelli, 1688
  6. Point de Sable

    The first documented resident of the place was a Black man, and the city has his name wrong.

    Engraving of a low house behind a fence on the river bank, with poplars
    The Kinzie house, once Point de Sable's, in 1832Andreas, 1884
  7. The fort

    The United States took the water road before it took anything else here, and it took it by treaty.

    Engraving of the stockade fort at the river mouth
    Old Fort Dearborn, built 1803Andreas, 1884
  8. The line on the map

    Chicago is in Illinois because a man in Washington moved a line.

    Map of Illinois as a territory in 1818
    Illinois before the line moved northMelish, 1818
  9. Removal, and what stayed

    The nations did not vanish; they were moved, in stages, and the record of it is dry.

    Engraving of log buildings beside the river in 1833
    Chicago in 1833Colbert, 1871
  10. The hinterland

    The city's own boosters always located its cause somewhere else.

    Engraving of traders crowding the floor of the Board of Trade under a high arched hall
    The Board of Trade floorHarper's, 1886
  11. The paper town

    The town was a piece of paper before it was a town, and the paper is older than the removal this book has just described.

    Hand-drawn plat of the first Chicago town lots on both sides of the river
    Thompson's plat of the townJames Thompson, 1830
  12. Raising the city

    The decisive work of the next fifteen years was done downward, and the baseline it started from was mud.

    Engraving of men working jackscrews under a large brick hotel to raise it
    Raising the Briggs Houseengraving, c. 1857–66
  13. Who was free in it

    While the city was raising its streets it was also arguing about who was free standing on them, and that argument ran in both directions at once.

    Oil portrait of John Jones seated, in a dark suit
    John JonesAaron E. Darling, c. 1865
  14. The fire

    On the night of 8 October 1871 the city burned, and it burned as a system, not as an accident.

    Lithograph of crowds fleeing across a bridge with the city burning behind them
    Chicago in FlamesCurrier & Ives, 1871
  15. Eight hours

    Organised labour enters most histories of this city twice, as a bomb and as a boycott, and leaves as a footnote to both.

    Engraving of the bomb exploding among police at the Haymarket meeting
    The bomb at HaymarketHarper's Weekly, 1886
  16. The White City and the ditch

    In 1893 Chicago showed the world a white classical city built on made ground at Jackson Park.

    Photograph of the Court of Honor basin and white buildings at the 1893 Exposition
    The Court of HonorOfficial Views, 1893
  17. The trade the city licensed

    Chicago was selling something else the whole time, and the record of it is unusually good, because the city kept trying to decide whether the trade…

    Title page of The Social Evil in Chicago, the 1911 report of the Vice Commission
    The Vice Commission's report1911
  18. The reversal

    Chicago's water problem was inherited, not made.

    Photograph of the straight new canal running to the horizon at Willow Springs
    The Sanitary and Ship CanalSanitary District, 1904
  19. What the city says about itself

    Official self-description is a genre of evidence in its own right, because the gap between what a city says of itself and what its record shows is…

    Painted bird's-eye view of a domed civic center with radiating avenues
    The civic center the Plan proposedJules Guérin, 1909
  20. Who counted whom

    Chicago's first population figures were not counted at all.

    Photograph of men running down a street of frame houses during the 1919 riot
    The riot of July 1919press photograph, 1919
  21. What the record does not carry

    A store like this one keeps discovering things about itself, and they add up to an argument the rest of this history only implies.

    Photograph of the gutted Cook County Court House after the 1871 fire
    The burned Court HouseC. R. Clark, 1871
  22. Who the book was for

    The record does not only fail.

    Title page of A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago, volume one
    Andreas's History of Chicago1884
  23. The name, still spoken

    The usual ending for this story is that an Indigenous name was worn smooth into something meaningless, carried now by people with no idea it was ever…

    Photograph of the river with a grain elevator, a steamer and a schooner
    The Chicago RiverDetroit Publishing Co., c. 1900

The name

Chicago is not an English word, and it does not mean anything in English. It is a plant.

The Miami-Illinois word šikaakwa is the word for the striped skunk, extended to the wild leek that grew thick in the wet ground along the river. It named the river first — Šikaakwa Siipiiwi — then the place where that river meets the lake: Šikaakonki, the Wild Leek Place. The French wrote down what they thought they heard, in French.

Myaamia people call the city Šikaakonki today. The word was never lost. What was lost was the knowing, and only on one side.

Chicago spent a century arguing onion against polecat — declared banished in 1902, printed as “bad smell” in a 1912 history, left unsettled in 1929. They were arguing over nothing: it is one word. Every step of the quarrel is in the store, with its quotes, filed as a “conflict” rather than tidied away.

The store behind it

Every row is checkable, carries its source, and carries how far that source can be trusted. Nothing is smoothed — where the record disagrees with itself, the disagreement is what gets recorded.

It runs from a glacier to a Supreme Court case to a 2024 return of land into trust. Searchable by keyword and, because nobody in 1812 wrote “ethnic cleansing” or “supply chain”, by meaning as well.

Same rules as the sister work on the Maumee: sources named, disagreements recorded rather than resolved, legend labelled as legend, burial grounds never sharpened, and no claim made on behalf of the dead that the record will not carry. Kekionga and Shikaakwa sat at opposite ends of the same water road.