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Shikaakwa

A narrative history of the Chicago portage — the country before the fort, the fort itself, and everything the fort set running.

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

Because the meaning was disputed from the start, and the argument is on the record. Lloyd Lewis, writing in 1929, refused to settle it and simply laid the candidates out: a wild onion or garlic on the creek bank; a word for playful waters; a word meaning destitute; a word meaning skunk; a word used for thunder, or for the voice of the Great Manitou, or for the Mississippi itself. “Just why they called it ‘Chicago’ is disputed.”

And there was a man called Chicagou — a Michigamea chief from Cahokia, sent to France about 1725 to plead the Illinois cause at court, where his eloquence and dignity made, in Kellogg’s phrase, a deep impression. Every popular telling of the name leaves him out.

Then the part that gives the whole thing away. In 1902 Edwin Gale declared the wild-onion and polecat theories “forever banished,” preferring to derive Chicago from La Salle’s Latin, and wrote that the men who proposed the onion had “sought to blast us” with it. A great city could not be named for an onion or a skunk, so a nobler ancestor was found. By 1921 the onion had quietly won anyway, and Harper states it in passing as ordinary fact.

Contested and resented in 1902. Ordinary by 1921. Reopened as genuinely unsettled in 1929. Several million people say the word daily and are told none of this — and almost none of them are told whose onion it was.

That sequence is the whole reason this site has the name it has. All of it is in the store, with its quotes, filed as a conflict rather than tidied away.

And then a linguist read the dictionaries

Michael McCafferty, a historical linguist of Miami-Illinois at Indiana University, answered it — and the answer dissolves the quarrel rather than picking a side. The onion and the polecat were never rival theories. It is one word. Šikaakwa is the striped-skunk word, extended to the wild leek, and Old Illinois happens to be the most extensively recorded Algonquian language in history — three large bilingual dictionaries — so this is not a guess reconstructed from scraps.

The variant spellings that fuelled a century of theorising turn out to be French. c and k were interchangeable before a, o and u in the New World French of the period, and Frenchmen regularly heard their own e for a Miami-Illinois i. Checagou, Chicagou, Chicagoua, Eschikagow: one word, written by Frenchmen with French habits. Gale’s Latin, Lewis’s six candidates and the whole polite-versus-rude argument all assumed the variation carried meaning. It carried orthography.

And naming a river for an abundant plant is not a curiosity, it is ordinary Miami-Illinois grammar — the Salamonie is bloodroot river, Sugar Creek is maple sugar tree river. So the leek named the water, the water named the place, and every person who says Chicago is finishing a sentence about a plant.

As for the objection that a great city could not be named for a smell — the one Gale spent his paragraph on — McCafferty has a one-word answer: eurocentric. Peoples name things bluntly. The Illinois band recorded as Moingwena, from which Des Moines descends, were called a name that reads as shit face, and were called it throughout their history. The embarrassment was always Chicago’s, never theirs.

What is already here

The research store is open. 35 sources, sixteen of them with their full text searchable, 48 facts, two of the cast and one piece of ground — every row in it 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 opens on Fort Dearborn, because that is where the sister project’s research had already arrived. Juliette Kinzie’s Wau-Bun, Quaife’s Chicago and the Old Northwest, Gale’s Reminiscences, Parkman on La Salle. The fort is mapped to the yard; William Wells and Sweet Breeze are in the cast.

Seven feet

The reason there is a city here at all is a low place in the prairie. The divide between the Atlantic and the Gulf — between everything that drains to the St Lawrence and everything that drains to the Mississippi — came to seven feet of wet ground west of the lake. In a hard spring it came to nothing at all: Mud Lake drained both ways, and water ran out of the Des Plaines into Lake Michigan. Two oceans, joined by a puddle.

Every canoe between Montreal and the Gulf came through that gap, which is why Hulbert called it one of the keys of the continent and why the French were writing the name down within a decade of seeing it. The word portage on the old maps is doing a lot of quiet work. Gurdon Hubbard, who crossed it with a fur brigade, described men sunk to the waist in mud that mostly had no water in it, hauling empty boats over rollers, their legs “covered with bloodsuckers which caused intense agony for several days” — three days of that, dawn to dark, to move the boats nine miles.

And the gap itself was cut by ice. J. Paul Goode, writing in 1926, put a glacier more than a mile deep over the site of Chicago, moving “perhaps not faster than the end of the hour hand of your watch”; the meltwater lake that followed stood where the Loop is now, with surf breaking on the ridge at Beverly Hills, and drained south-west through the channel the portage, the canal and the barge route all still use. Goode — a booster in most of that book — calls the Chicago River “a glacial after-thought” and says plainly that the head of the lake guaranteed a city somewhere, while this insignificant creek decided which spot. The whole place rests on an accident of drainage a few feet deep.

All of that is in the store with its sources attached, and it is the kind of thing this work exists to set down: not a verdict on anybody, but the record kept whole enough that a reader can see a man hand back a medal and then save a life two days later, and make of it what they will.

The same argument, in Chicago

The city named a street for William Wells — the captain who rode down from Fort Wayne to bring his niece out and died at the sand hills for it, his face blackened before he left the garrison in token of what he expected. In the autumn of 1870 the aldermen renamed the south-of-the-river stretch of it Fifth Avenue.

Not removed. Replaced by a number. Edwin Gale was still asking for it back thirty-two years later, and called the thing that displaced it “the meaningless name of Fifth avenue, which possesses no significance.” The name did come back, eventually.

A name that meant something, replaced by a number, on the same ground and by the same habit of mind. It is filed in the store as tradition rather than fact — Gale was writing in 1902 about a council he did not sit in, and the 1870 minutes would settle it.

But set it beside šikaakwa and the two come apart, which is the more useful lesson. Wells Street was genuinely taken: the aldermen voted, the name went, a number stood where it had been. Šikaakwa was not taken. It is still spoken, correctly, by the people whose word it is — Šikaakonki — and it is still spoken, unknowingly, by everyone else. What was lost was not the name. It was the knowing.

And then a third time, on a man. The city has put DuSable on a bridge, a museum, a high school and a lake-front drive. John Swenson, who went to the documents, is blunt about it: “Point de Sable was his chosen legal name; he was never called Du Sable during his lifetime.” In every record he signed or appeared in, the surname reads Point de Sable — Point being part of the name, not a middle initial to be dropped on the way to a plaque.

He is in the record early and concretely. A 1784 petition to the governor of Canada, written about seized cargo and not about him at all, leaves packs of furs with “Baptiste point Sable, free negro” in October 1778 — at Trail Creek in present Indiana, not at Chicago, where he is usually placed. His farm at the river mouth ran from about 1784 to 1800 and was appraised, when he left it, at a value fit to stand beside the leading households of Cahokia. One of the two men who set that value was John Kinzie, whom the next century would install as Chicago’s father.

A name worn into a shape its owner never used, and then carved into public stone in that shape. It is the same sentence the river has been saying for three hundred years, spoken about a man — and the store now files it with the documents attached rather than the sentiment.

This runs forwards and backwards from Fort Dearborn, by the 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.