The Wild Leek Place

A narrative history of Chicago, drawn only from the research store.

Every claim below rests on a source registered in the research store. Where the store's sources disagree, the disagreement is kept. Where the store holds nothing, this says so.

I. 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.

A continental glacier lay over this ground more than a mile deep, moving — as Chamberlin estimated it and J. Paul Goode reported it in 1926 — perhaps no faster than the end of the hour hand of a watch. It pushed off the tops of the hills and filled the transverse valleys, and when it drew back it left a lake standing where the Loop is now. Waves broke on the bluffs at Beverly Hills and Palos Park. The outlet river running south-west below Forest Island was, Goode reckoned, perhaps as large as the Mississippi at Keokuk.

That outlet cut a gap through the rise between two ocean drainages. When the lake fell to its present level the gap stayed, and so did an insignificant creek across the sandy shoreline that Goode calls a glacial after-thought.

His conclusion is blunt and worth keeping: there had to be a great city somewhere at the head of Lake Michigan, but the exact site was determined by the little, inconsequential Chicago River, because that creek gave a harbour and lay close enough to the Des Plaines that a slight portage reached the Mississippi. Without the Great Lakes, he wrote, there would be no Chicago.

The whole place rests on an accident of drainage a few feet deep.

II. Seven feet

The accident can be measured. La Salle measured it, and Milo Quaife reports the figure: the prairie where Mud Lake lay stood seven feet above the surface of Lake Michigan.

Seven feet was the divide between the St Lawrence and the Mississippi — between everything draining to the Atlantic and everything draining to the Gulf. And in a wet spring it was not a divide at all. Mud Lake drained both ways. In flood the Des Plaines sent part of its water through Mud Lake and down the channel into Lake Michigan.

Two ocean watersheds, joined by a puddle. Every canoe between Montreal and the Gulf came through that gap, which is why Hulbert called the Chicago Portage one of the keys of the continent — and why Quaife could note, as late as 1913, that despite its importance no careful study of it has ever been made.

The word portage on the old maps conceals what crossing it cost. Gurdon Hubbard took an American Fur Company brigade through Mud Lake and described men sunk to their waists in mud that mostly had no water in it, hauling empty boats over rollers with forked poles, their legs covered with bloodsuckers which caused intense agony for several days. Three consecutive days of that, dawn to dark, to move the boats nine miles.

III. The plant, and the name

The creek was named for what grew along it.

In the Miami-Illinois language the stem is šikaakw-, and the Myaamia Center's own dictionary glosses it as both the striped skunk and the wild leek or garlic — one word, for the animal and for the plant that smells like it. So the onion and the polecat were never rival theories, which is what a century of Chicago writers assumed. Michael McCafferty, a historical linguist of the language, states it directly: the place name means striped skunk, extended to the wild leek.

It named the river first — Šikaakwa Siipiiwi, the Wild Leek River — and that is grammar, not accident. Naming a river for a plant abundant in its watershed is ordinary Miami-Illinois practice; the Salamonie is bloodroot river, Sugar Creek is maple sugar tree river. Then the place where that river meets the lake: Šikaakonki, the Wild Leek Place.

The variant spellings that fed generations of theorising are French. In the New World French of the period c and k were interchangeable before a, o and u, and Frenchmen regularly heard their own e for a Miami-Illinois i. Checagou, Chicagou, Chicagoua, Eschikagow — one word, written by men with French habits and French ears.

The plant was not a curiosity by a creek. An Illinois State Board of Education teaching packet from 1980 — of all places — records it as a staple used every conceivable way: eaten raw or cooked with meat, used for seasoning, rubbed on the body as an insect repellent, and among the first fresh greens after a winter with none. The same packet answers the old embarrassment flatly: the smell is not a derogatory statement but a record of what mattered. That is McCafferty's argument about eurocentrism, arriving in a classroom handout twenty years before he published it.

And what the plant did is recorded too. Atkinson has Tonty's party at the portage in late November, their commander down with malarial fever, kept alive by wild onions which they grubbed from the marsh.

IV. The people the ground belonged to

The state's name is a second plain word doing unglamorous work, though not the work this page first claimed. William Duncan Strong, writing for the Field Museum in 1938, glossed Iliniwek as men and read it as a slight aimed at the neighbouring nations. That is wrong, and it was repeated here until the linguistics was checked.

David Costa — the leading specialist in Miami-Illinois, and the same Costa McCafferty leans on for Moingwena — derives it from irenweewa: iren, ordinary or regular; wee, by speech; wa, he or she. He speaks in the ordinary way. Gravier's Illinois-French dictionary of about 1700 glosses it as he speaks Illinois. No claim about manhood, no insult to anybody.

And it reached French second-hand. Ojibwe habitually drops the final -wa from words borrowed out of neighbouring Algonquian languages, giving ilinwe and the plural ilinwek — which is the form Allouez wrote at Sault Ste Marie in 1666-67, and which French spelling turned into Illinois. So twelve million people live in a state whose name is a Miami-Illinois word for speaking normally, borrowed through Ojibwe, spelled by Frenchmen, and finally said in English.

They never called themselves that. The French missionary sources record the collective name they used for themselves as Inoka, whose original meaning is not known.

That is now the third name on this ground that turns out to be somebody else's word for the thing: šikaakwa, a plant carrying a skunk's name; Point de Sable, a surname the city rewrote; and the state itself.

They do not survive it, and the scale is worth stating before the collapse. Robert Warren puts the confederacy at as many as twelve affiliated tribes and more than ten thousand people, holding a territory the French called the Pays des Illinois — roughly a hundred thousand square miles of prairie, forest and wetland. By the summer of 1832, he reckons, 98 percent of that population was gone, the nation reduced to two tribes numbering fewer than two hundred. Five generations, start to finish.

The confederacy the French met in towns of thousands was at war with its neighbours by 1682 and taking heavy losses from Iroquois raids; then Pontiac was killed by a Kaskaskia, which turned the northern nations against them; then the Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo and Potawatomi took the greater part of their territory. The remnant settled near the French at Kaskaskia and kept declining until, Swanton records, about 150 were left by 1800. In 1832 the survivors sold up and settled on a joint reservation in eastern Kansas; in 1854 they merged with the Wea and Piankashaw as the Confederated Peoria; in 1867, under Chief Baptiste Peoria, they were moved again.

They are still here, and they say so themselves. The Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma governs from Miami, Oklahoma — a confederation of Kaskaskia, Peoria, Piankashaw and Wea united in 1854, describing itself as Illinois people whose homelands lay along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, removed from Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Missouri, relocated to Missouri, then Kansas, then Indian Territory under the Omnibus Treaty of 1867.

This history cited a scholar for that until it went and asked the Tribe. On the question of who the Peoria are, the Peoria are the source — the same rule that puts the Myaamia Center above any linguist on the meaning of šikaakwa. A history that describes this confederacy only as a collapse is describing half of it, and describing that half in somebody else's voice.

Note who did the displacing first, and note what this store does not do with it. The Potawatomi took Illini ground — and were themselves removed from Chicago by the treaty of 1833, going to Missouri, then Iowa, then Kansas. Two dispossessions on the same ground inside about sixty years. That Native nations displaced one another is a fact about power. It is not an excuse offered to the United States, and it is not recorded here as one.

Strong also supplies the thing the fort-and-massacre literature never does: how people actually lived on this ground. Houses covered with rush mats woven by the women, sometimes sixty feet long. Four or five fires to a house, and eight to ten families under it. Maize planted in spring by the women with a dibble stick, hoes made from the shoulder-blades of deer.

And the villages were not walled. According to De Gannes they stood in the open, sited where a good view of the surrounding country was to be had — a defensive choice, but an entirely different one from a stockade. Hold that against the two forts this story is otherwise organised around.

V. The French century

France reached this water road long before the United States built anything on it. Louise Phelps Kellogg frames the period plainly: France held the keys to the interior of North America at three points that became New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago.

The store's best scene from that century is not a battle. Nehemiah Matson, writing in 1874, describes Marquette returning to an Illinois village and finding a cross raised in the middle of it — hung with deer and buffalo skins, bows, arrows, war-clubs, knives, tomahawks and the scalps of enemies. The head chief said it had been erected in honour of the great French Manito, and the warriors commanded to bow to it. Marquette raised his hands and thanked God that these people had embraced the true religion.

One object. Two readings, in the same paragraph. Neither party lying, and neither understanding the other. That is the whole colonial encounter in a single sentence, and it is why this store records disagreements rather than resolving them.

There was also a man called Chicagou — a Michigamea chief from Cahokia, sent to France about 1725, whose eloquence and dignity made, in Kellogg's phrase, a deep impression. Older accounts made him the source of the city's name. Flinn disposes of that on a date: the French were writing the river's name in the 1680s, forty years before the embassy. A man and a place carried the same word. The word came from the plant.

He is usually told as a curiosity — the chief who went to Versailles. Swanton supplies what that leaves out. Michigamea means Big Water, and the division had already been pushed out of Illinois into north-eastern Arkansas and driven north again, merging with the Kaskaskia, before the end of the seventeenth century. The displacement people date to the removal era was two moves old when he sailed.

VI. Point de Sable

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

John Swenson, working from the documents, is exact about it: Point de Sable was his chosen legal name; he was never called Du Sable during his lifetime. Point is part of the surname, not an initial to drop on the way to a plaque — and du Sable without the Point was a minor Quebec noble title belonging to a family with no known connection to him.

He enters the record concretely and by accident. Pierre Durand, petitioning the governor of Canada in 1784 about cargo the British had seized, mentions leaving his packs of furs in October 1778 with Baptiste point Sable, free negro — at the Rivière du Chemin, present Michigan City, Indiana, not at Chicago, where he is usually placed. Durand's phrase is Swenson's ground for saying he was born free rather than escaped.

His farm at the mouth of the river ran from about 1784 to 1800. When he sold and moved to St Charles in Spanish Upper Louisiana, the improvements and household goods were valued at 6,000 livres — a holding comparable to the leading households of Cahokia. One of the two men who set that value was John Kinzie, who then occupied the house, and whom the next century would install as Chicago's father.

That installation can be watched happening. In 1910 Eleanor Lytle Kinzie Gordon — a Kinzie — published a sketch titled John Kinzie, the "Father of Chicago." Her quotation marks. The whole text was searched for this store: for Baptiste, for Point, for Saible and Sable, for negro, for first settler and first resident. Point de Sable is not in it. The only Sable in the document is the Au Sable river and the word disable. Kinzie's arrival is traced instead to buying out a Frenchman named Le Mai.

Three years later Milo Quaife wrote that early Chicago's truth had been obscured by a mass of tradition fostered in large part by family pride. The store now holds the diagnosis and the specimen. What it does not hold is whether Le Mai stood between the two men, and on what terms; that chain wants a source this store has not got.

Quaife rejected both origin stories then told about Point de Sable — Kinzie's San Domingo, Matson's runaway from Kentucky — as equally unworthy of credence, and he was right that both were late and sourceless. He also called the question of a first resident idle, which is a different kind of statement, and the store records both readings without collapsing them.

Swenson notes one more thing. Point de Sable means sand point, and he reckons the man named himself for a place that mattered to him — a place nobody has yet identified. The city carries a lost toponym inside its founder's name and has never gone looking for it.

VII. Taking the portage

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

At Greenville in 1795, along with a six-mile square at the mouth of the Chicago river, the nations granted free passage through their country, in Illinois from the mouth of the Chicago river and over the portage to the Illinois and down to the Mississippi. Before a fort, before a canal, before a state line — the first American acquisition on this ground was the right to cross it.

Everything after is a way of holding that route more securely. In 1803 the government built Fort Dearborn on the south side of the river: two blockhouses, a parade ground, a stockade, and a sally-port — a subterranean passage down to the water. Fifty men and three guns. (Davidson and Stuvé date the fort to 1804; the conventional date is 1803, and this store cannot settle it, so the disagreement is filed rather than smoothed.)

VIII. The fort

In August 1812 Fort Dearborn was ordered evacuated.

Captain Nathan Heald promised the assembled Potawatomi the government stores in exchange for safe escort out. On 13 August the cloth and calicoes were distributed. That night, on his order, the ammunition and whisky were destroyed — poured into the sally-port well, the barrel-heads knocked in, the rest emptied into the river — while, the record says, the Indians crept as near the scene as they could to watch it happen. The promised price of the garrison's passage, poured away in the dark.

The evening before the march, the chief Black Partridge came to the commander and gave back his American medal: he could not restrain his young men, and would not wear a token of peace while compelled to act as an enemy.

The column marched out on 15 August to the sand hills. William Wells — taken by the Miami as a boy, made Miami, married to Little Turtle's daughter, and uncle to the commandant's wife — had ridden down from Fort Wayne to bring the garrison off, his face blackened before he left the garrison in token of what he expected. He died there. So did twelve children killed at the baggage wagons, and so did Cicely, Mrs Heald's serving-woman, and her infant son — named by Quaife as among the few documented instances of people held in slavery at Chicago, twenty-five years after the Northwest Ordinance prohibited it in the territory. Her son's name is not in the record and this store cannot supply it.

Two days after handing back his medal, Black Partridge pulled the wounded Margaret Helm into the lake and held her head above the water. She recognised him, she wrote, in spite of the paint with which he was disguised — so he was painted for war while he did it. The store keeps both acts in one entry, because they are one man being consistent.

The fort had one more use worth recording. In 1832, during the Black Hawk War, troops sent west brought cholera with them. Thirty died on the way and were, in Davidson and Stuvé's phrase, heaved into the waters of the lake for want of burial. Fort Dearborn became a hospital and the families sheltering in it were turned out onto the prairie to make room; ninety more died there in thirty days and went into pits. Remember which lake that is. The city would drink from it for the rest of the century, and the typhoid in that water is the stated reason the river was turned around in 1900.

IX. The line on the map

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

Under the Northwest Ordinance the new state's northern edge would have fallen south of here, leaving the portage and the lake shore to what became Wisconsin. At statehood in 1818 the territorial delegate Nathaniel Pope amended the enabling bill to push the boundary up to 42 degrees 30 minutes north — and carried it through both houses, in Thomas Ford's phrase, upon his own responsibility.

The motive was not Chicago. Ford, who was governor of Illinois and writing about his own state, gives it plainly: it was necessary to give Illinois not only the port and a canal route but a considerable coast on Lake Michigan, with a country back of it sufficiently extensive to contain a population capable of exercising a decided influence upon the councils of the State — a lake-facing north that would hold the state to the Union by commerce.

So the portage was still doing what it had always done. From seven feet of wet prairie it decided where the lines on the map would fall. A generation later Ohio and Michigan came close to war over the mouth of the Maumee for the same class of reason, which is the sister project's whole subject: two boundary fights, two portages, one water road.

X. Removal, and what stayed

The nations did not vanish; they were moved, in stages, and the record of it is dry. Edwin Gale, writing in 1902, notes a party removed by Major Sibley and the remainder transferred the following year under Colonel Russell to Clay County, Missouri — then to Iowa near Council Bluffs, then to Shawnee County, Kansas.

Before that, and during it, Potawatomi leaders lived in the town. Juliette Kinzie's Wau-Bun places Robinson — Che-che-pin-qua — with his wife's connexions in two or three log cabins near Wolf Point, and Billy Caldwell, the Sauganash, residing there occasionally with his wife, a daughter of Nee-scot-nee-meg. Chicago's first hotel took Caldwell's name. Most people who have said it since did not know it was a man's.

XI. The hinterland

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

By 1862, with the war on, a commercial history of Chicago was already fighting about it. The city had claimed to be the greatest primary grain mart in the world; rivals called the claim braggadocio; and the answer was a table setting Chicago's exports against Odessa and the other great grain ports of the earth. In the same pages: elevator capacity around two million bushels a day, and railroad mileage in Illinois rising from 105 in 1850 to 2,870.

William Bross, Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, read a paper to the Chicago Historical Society in 1880 on the sources of Chicago's growth — and most of it is about Dakota, the Red River, the wheat belt filling with an industrious people. Goode makes the same argument in 1926 with a glacier underneath it: the city as the natural focus of the richest soil area on the continent. Neither mentions who was removed from that soil.

Between the field and the market stood the grain elevators, which were the tallest structures here for most of a century — the machine that made a crop into a number. Frank Norris put a reader inside the room where that arithmetic was done. The Pit (1903) is a novel and the store files it as such, but its image of the Board of Trade as a whirlpool spinning a Niagara of wheat is what the trade felt like to someone standing in it.

And south-west of downtown the animals arrived. The Union Stock Yard's own history describes the trade before refrigeration: cattle grazed to the edge of the city and held on the prairie until their turn, hogs driven in by drovers, pork packed in late winter and moved out when lake navigation reopened. Ice machines dissolved that constraint — and the same waterway that carried the packed pork out was the one the yards emptied into.

In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. In 1907 Rand McNally published John O'Brien's Through the Chicago Stock Yards, which concedes that cattle felling and pig sticking are sanguinary scenes that have little attraction for the fastidious and directs the visitor toward the refrigeration machinery instead. It is a small masterpiece of misdirection, and the store files it as evidence of the packers' self-portrait rather than of the yards.

The city the wheat and the hogs paid for is in the store too, in pieces. Chicago Union Station, planned in the 1909 Plan of Chicago and opened in 1925, is the last of the great railroad stations here — and it opened by demolishing the Union Depot of 1882, then lost its own train sheds in 1968 and its street-level concourse in 1991. The habit of replacing the monument on the same ground is very old.

XII. Raising the city

Between the removal and the fire the town became a city, and the decisive work of those years was done downward.

Chicago stood on a lake bed that would not drain. It had crossed the divide, inherited the harbour and won the boundary, and none of that fixed the fact that water sat where the streets were. From the 1850s the city's answer was to lift its own street grade — and its buildings with it — on jackscrews, so that sewers could be run underneath. Lloyd Lewis tells the set piece as an anecdote about a young contractor named George Pullman, twelve hundred men turning five thousand jackscrews a half-turn at a signal, and a hotel rising inch by inch with its guests still asleep inside. Read the numbers as a journalist's rounding sixty years after the fact; the problem they describe was real.

The engineer behind it was Ellis Chesbrough, city engineer in the 1850s, who designed the sewerage that required the raising and then drove tunnels out under the lake to draw drinking water from beyond the shore filth. Both were attempts to solve by engineering what the ice had left: a city on ground that drains the wrong way. In 1900 the same instinct would turn the river around, and in the 1970s dig tunnels to hold what the river could not carry.

The other decisive year is 1848. Before it, most of Illinois traded downriver toward St Louis and the Gulf — the old French direction, along the water road this history has followed from the portage. The Illinois and Michigan Canal opened that year and turned the pull toward the lake and the east; the first railroad tracks were laid in the same twelve months. Chicago knew the contest was not won and was, in Atkinson's phrase, thinking hard about how to take the trade of central Illinois. The answer would be the Illinois Central.

And underneath the decade sits the Treaty of Chicago of 1833, which removed the Potawatomi from this ground. Quaife shows one of its mechanisms at work: written into the settlement alongside the land cession were cash grants to named individuals, and at least one was routed straight through to a fur company agent in payment of an old debt. The nation went to Missouri, then Iowa, then Kansas. The city that grew on the ground they left raised itself out of the mud within twenty years of their going.

XIII. The fire

On the night of 8 October 1871 the city burned, and the thing worth knowing about it is not in Chicago.

Sheahan and Upton — two Chicago newspapermen, one of them of the Tribune — published a full account within the year. Their method for counting the ruined is worth watching: they do not count people, they count wards burnt and read the population off a census taken earlier the same year. Every house in the First, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth wards, four-fifths of the Sixteenth. A reasonable estimate, and not a measurement.

Bound into the same volume is an appeal headed To the People of Wisconsin. Through the northern part of that state, it says, fires had been raging in the woods for many days; hundreds of families were homeless, their crops consumed, their farms a blackened desert.

Those fires were burning the same week. The worst of them took Peshtigo, and it killed far more people than Chicago's did — the deadliest fire in American history, and almost nobody can name it. A city disaster with newspapermen living inside it became the national story. A rural one with more dead became a fundraising notice in somebody else's book.

Chicago put its fire on the flag. The second star is the 1871 fire, and the Chicago History Museum's lesson plan asks schoolchildren to find it there before telling them what happened. The disaster became a civic emblem — proof of the city's capacity to rebuild — which is a use for a catastrophe that Peshtigo, having no second act, was never able to make of its own.

XIV. The White City and the ditch

In 1893 Chicago showed the world a white classical city built on made ground at Jackson Park. The Official Guide was written by John J. Flinn — the same Flinn who, two years earlier, had set the onion and the polecat side by side and picked the polite one. The man who tidied the city's name for its readers was hired to present the city to the world.

Across the same decade, a few miles west, the Sanitary District was cutting a channel to reverse the river.

XV. The reversal

In 1900 the flow was turned. Water that had gone to the St Lawrence now went to the Gulf.

The seven-foot rise that made this place worth having — the divide men had hauled boats over, the height of land the whole continent's traffic bent around — was engineered out of existence by the city it created.

Missouri sued within weeks. In January 1900 the state filed in the Supreme Court against Illinois and the Sanitary District; the case was argued that November. The bill describes the same channel from the other end: a drain built under Illinois authority to carry off and eventually discharge into the Mississippi the sewage of Chicago, by way of the Des Plaines and the Illinois. That is the portage route exactly. The water road the French used to reach the Gulf was rebuilt to send sewage down it.

The symmetry should not be softened. Chicago reversed the river because sewage in Lake Michigan was killing Chicagoans with typhoid. Missouri went to the Supreme Court because the same sewage, sent the other way, would carry typhoid to Missourians. One city's public health measure is the next state's public health emergency, and both are arguing about the same water.

(The store holds only the 1901 demurrer ruling — the Court held it had jurisdiction and made Illinois answer. The merits came in 1906 and are not here.)

How much did it buy? The civic answer is that it ended the typhoid crisis, and the agency that maintains the works still calls it an engineering triumph. A 2025 analysis using ward-level mortality records puts the immediate effect at about 4 percent — roughly 985 lives in 1900 — and argues the large declines needed chlorination, filtration and broader sanitary reform as well. That study is a preprint and not peer reviewed, and the store says so wherever it is cited. It files the disagreement as a conflict and resolves nothing.

Then the federal government answered it by accident. In 1976, justifying the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan — the Deep Tunnel — the Environmental Protection Agency listed among its purposes: prevent further pollution of Lake Michigan due to backflow.

Read that twice. The river was reversed in 1900 precisely so that sewage would stop reaching the lake. Seventy-six years later the United States is spending half a billion dollars partly to stop sewage flowing back into the lake. The same document sets the baseline: before the tunnels, storm overflows discharged straight into the area's streams and rivers roughly a hundred times a year, with pollutant concentrations already past the state's own water quality standards.

XVI. What the city says about itself

This store collects official self-description as its own genre of evidence, because the gap between it and the record is frequently the story.

In 1947 Chicago published a report to its people saying that Chicagoans of all faiths, national origins and racial strains had worked together. In those same years its Commission on Human Relations was recording the violence at the Airport Homes veterans' project, two Black veterans' families who needed help to get milk and ice delivered, and shots fired through a window in February 1947. The commission named the mechanism too: years of agitation to maintain segregation had magnified the fears of white property owners, so that every small incident carried the seeds of explosion. Some Chicagoans, it records, opposed the veterans' housing programme precisely because it treated white and Black veterans alike.

Neither document is lying about the facts it reports. One is a city describing itself to its citizens; the other is a city investigating itself. The same government published both, five years apart.

There is a schoolroom version of this thread as well. H. V. Church's 1931 textbook taught Illinois children about their state; the Illinois State Board of Education's 2025 resource guide tells Illinois schools about Native and Indigenous peoples. Both are in the store, ninety-four years apart, and the comparison is available to anyone who wants it.

And the sequence the city is still inside. Having reversed the river and dug the Deep Tunnel, Chicago published a stormwater strategy admitting that when the treatment plants and the tunnels are both full, the mixture of sewage and stormwater still overflows — through roughly two hundred outfalls, into the river, the canal, Lake Calumet, and Bubbly Creek, which is the stockyards' old open sewer. The same document notes that close to 60 percent of the city's land is now paved or built on, surfaces designed to shed water as fast as possible. The current municipal answer is to slow the water down and let the ground take it again, after a century and a half of the opposite.

Each solution is the next problem's cause. That is not a flourish; it is the shape of every chapter above.

XVII. 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 anybody's.

Half of that is false, and the correction matters more than the story.

In the Miami-Illinois language the wild leek is šikaakwa. The river is Šikaakwa Siipiiwi. The place where it meets the lake is Šikaakonki — and the Myaamia Center states plainly that Myaamia people call the city Šikaakonki today.

The word was never lost. It is a living word in a living language, spoken correctly by the people it belongs to. What was lost was the knowing, and only on one side.

Compare Wells Street, which the aldermen renamed Fifth Avenue in the autumn of 1870, replacing a man's name with a number; Gale was still asking for it back thirty-two years later. That name really was taken, by a vote. Šikaakwa was not.

And a fourth time, by people it had been done to. A mile and a half south-west of the Loop is a neighbourhood called Pilsen — named by Bohemian immigrants for Plzeň, a city in a country most of them would not see again, laid over ground that had been Potawatomi within living memory of their arrival. The sokol they built in 1892 kept the Czech spelling when the neighbourhood's name did not. The district is now largely Mexican. So a Bohemian name for a Czech city sits on Potawatomi ground and is spoken mostly in Spanish, and each layer was applied by people who had themselves been moved.

That is the difference between this and a grievance. Naming over is not something Chicago did once to one people. It is how the ground has always been used, by nearly everyone who arrived on it — which is exactly why the first name deserves to be said correctly rather than avenged.

Nor is the removal the end of it. In 2024 the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation had portions of their reservation in DeKalb County returned into trust — land that had been, in the Illinois State Board of Education's own word, illegally sold off by the government — making them the first federally recognised tribe with land in trust in Illinois in over 175 years. The same nation Gale watched being moved to Missouri, then Iowa, then Kansas.

Around a hundred thousand Native people from more than a hundred tribes live in Illinois now. The state's own personnel department counted 192 Native American employees in Illinois government in FY2020 — 0.41 percent, ten more than the year before — and published the number in a report filed on schedule. It is the least romantic sentence in this entire history and one of the most necessary, because the commonest lie told about Indigenous people is the past tense.

Several million people say Chicago daily. Almost none of them are told whose word it is, or that it names a plant, or that the plant kept a starving French party alive at the portage in November, or that the ground it grew in stood seven feet above the lake and was the reason for all of it.

XIX. Who counted whom

Twice the city was surveyed by people who lived in what they were surveying, and both times the counting was the argument.

In 1895 the residents of Hull-House published maps of wages and nationality for the congested district around Halsted Street — street by street, household by household. They were women, they lived there, and they were explicit about method: they kept the colours of Charles Booth's London wage maps, importing an English poverty-survey technique wholesale, and each writer signed her own chapter. Their prefatory note is disarming about what they were: residents whose energies had gone mainly to constructive work rather than to investigation, who had done the survey anyway.

Twenty-four years later the state did the same thing under worse circumstances. On 27 July 1919 Eugene Williams, seventeen, drowned while swimming off Twenty-ninth Street. The beach was not a supervised public one; it was reached across the railway tracks along the lake shore, and — the Commission is careful about this — it was used by both races. What followed killed thirty-eight people, twenty-three Black and fifteen white, injured 537, required the state militia, and was not reckoned over until 6 August.

Governor Lowden appointed a commission with Black and white members to find out why. It reported in 1922, at about 350,000 words.

Hold that against the two documents this history already contains from the same government. In 1947 the city told its people that Chicagoans of all faiths, national origins and racial strains had worked together. In those same years its Human Relations Commission was recording shots through a Black veteran's window. Illinois has investigated itself thoroughly and more than once. What it has not done is carry the findings forward.

And note where the 1919 riot started. That lake is the water the city drank; the water the cholera dead of 1832 were put into for want of burial; the water the river was turned around in 1900 to protect. It is also the edge along which the city's segregation was enforced without anyone having to write it down.

XVIII. 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.

Two of the documents behind these pages are public records that were published as unreadable page images: the Chicago Commission on Human Relations' report of 1952 and the Deep Tunnel's 1976 Environmental Impact Statement, 587 pages between them. Nobody restricted either. They simply could not be searched, quoted or indexed by anyone who had not rendered and machine-read the whole of both. An Environmental Impact Statement exists to be argued with — it is what a public gets to read before a thing is built. Being public and being readable are different things, and the gap between them is where arguments go to die.

Then the asymmetry of who gets written about carefully. The Association of American Railroads needed 88,000 words in 1951 merely to list what had been published about one Illinois railroad in a century. Nine years later, the local history of the Potawatomi of Kankakee County was written by two fourth-grade classes and a sixth, printed, and shelved in a university library. One subject got a reference librarian and a federal trade association. The other got nine-year-olds.

And the scholarship that settles the questions in this history is mostly behind paywalls. McCafferty on the name, Swenson on Point de Sable, Halpern on race in the packinghouses — this store holds citations to all three and the text of none, because that is what the licences allow. What can be read freely here is overwhelmingly what was written before 1929, which quietly shapes what any project like this one can say.

The silences

Naming them is the same discipline that files a row as conflict rather than resolving it — and every one this history first listed has since been closed, which is recorded here rather than quietly tidied away. The Great Fire, the riot of 1919, Hull-House, the decades between 1833 and 1871, and the ending of the Illinois were all absent when this was first written. They are above now.

What is still missing:

The labour history has two ends and no middle. Haymarket is here twice now: an officer's account of the bomb, from a book whose own title page calls it the Horror — and Governor Altgeld's 1893 pardon message, which reviewed the trial and found a packed jury, jurors incompetent by the Supreme Court's own standard, a judge incapable of granting a fair trial, and a defendant kept in prison after the state's own attorney said there was no case against him. What is still absent is everything between: the strike that occasioned the meeting, the trial itself, the executions. Who threw the bomb was never established and this store does not pretend otherwise.

None of these is an oversight to be quietly corrected later. They are the shape of what has been collected so far, and a history that will not say where it goes quiet is making the same move as a city that renames a street and hopes nobody checks.

Sources for every claim above are at /sources, with each one's status attached: verified, tradition, conflict, or corrected. Nothing here is smoothed.

Two of the documents behind this narrative — the Chicago Commission on Human Relations' report of 1952 and the Deep Tunnel's 1976 Environmental Impact Statement — are public records that were published as unsearchable page images. They could only be read here because they were machine-read first, 587 pages of them. Being public and being readable are different things.