the history · the research store · the cast · the streets · the ground · contact

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.

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 — banished as an insult in 1902, printed as “bad smell” by 1912, reopened as 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 narrative

The Wild Leek Place

Twenty-three chapters, drawn only from the research store, with every disagreement kept: the seven feet of wet prairie that decided a state line; the fort whose whole story descends from one family; the fire read as a system, not a cow; the river turned backwards in 1900 and leaking back by 1976; the 844 dead at a wharf of a safety law; the eight-hour demand; the police list with no exit — and the word, still spoken correctly by the people it belongs to.

  1. The ice
  2. Seven feet
  3. The plant, and the name
  4. The people the ground belonged to
  5. The French century
  6. Point de Sable
  7. The fort
  8. The line on the map
  9. Removal, and what stayed
  10. The hinterland
  11. The paper town
  12. Raising the city
  13. Who was free in it
  14. The fire
  15. Eight hours
  16. The White City and the ditch
  17. The trade the city licensed
  18. The reversal
  19. What the city says about itself
  20. Who counted whom
  21. What the record does not carry
  22. Who the book was for
  23. The name, still spoken

Start at the ice →

Or take it with you: EPUB · PDF. Free, no sign-up, same text as the web edition.

The store behind it

313 sources, 109 of them with their full text searchable, 824 facts, thirty-six of the cast and nineteen pieces of ground. 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.