This is Throwback Thursday #121. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc ...), please sent them to [email protected] Thanks!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ever wonder why Chicago is Chicago? It's all about a small piece of land now called the "Chicago Portage". There's even a historic site - The Chicago Portage National Historic Site. which is located in Lyons, IL in Portage Woods Forest Preserve at 47th Street near where the Old Route 66 crosses the Desplaines River.
Welcome to the Chicago Portage, the birthplace of Chicago. This National Historic Site commemorates the place where 17th century French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette were shown an ancient portage connecting the Great Lakes Basin and the Mississippi Valley watersheds. Connecting these two great water trails of the past meant easy access across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. This strategic location soon became the hub of economic activity in the Midwest and to this day Chicago is a major center of the global economy.
The site is easy to visit... it's even on Google Maps!
The National Park Service also has a website for the historic site. It became a National Historic Site in 1952.
The Chicago Portage, a low and short divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems, has been described as one of the “keys to the continent.” Following the lead of generations of Native Americans, explorers Marquette and Joliet first crossed the Chicago Portage in 1673. One of the most important travel routes of the mid-continent, the portage was a significant factor in the development of the United States interior. During early European exploration, natural waterways were often the easiest route across the North American landscape and places where canoes and trade goods could easily be carried around barriers or across multiple rivers were critically important. Along with the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848, the portage became the transportation link that spurred the growth of the City of Chicago.
A book by Benjamin Sells tells the fascinating story of how Chicago came to be. "A History of the Chicago Portage - The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America" was published by Northwestern University Press in August 2021.
This fascinating account explores the significance of the Chicago Portage, one of the most important—and neglected—sites in early US history. A seven-mile-long strip of marsh connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the portage was inhabited by the earliest indigenous people in the Midwest and served as a major trade route for Native American tribes. A link between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, the Chicago Portage was a geopolitically significant resource that the French, British, and US governments jockeyed to control. Later, it became a template for some of the most significant waterways created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The portage gave Chicago its name and spurred the city's success—and is the reason why the metropolis is located in Illinois, not Wisconsin.
A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America is the definitive story of a national landmark.
The Chicago Reader has a nice interview with the Author.
Conceptually, the words “Chicago, Wisconsin” are sure to baffle almost anyone reading them today. The idea that Illinois’s metropolis (and the nation’s third-largest city) could somehow be a part of the Dairy State seems laughable. Too bound to the long and sordid annals of Illinois politics, despite at times feeling a million miles away from anything happening “downstate,” Chicago is clearly wrapped up in Illinois history, and vice versa.
When examining the longer history of the colonization of the North American continent by white settlers, one can see that Chicago was originally intended to have been included in the Wisconsin Territory, per the rules laid down by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That fate was averted due in large part to the Chicago Portage, a marshy, unpredictable site of passage that linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and became the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848. When white settlers first came to the region and saw the portage’s potential to connect the continent, it spurred the actions of those like Daniel Pope Cook, namesake of Cook County, to both incorporate Illinois as a state and push the boundary line north to include the portage site for such commercial purposes.
That story, and plenty of other fascinating examples of the portage’s long significance in the history of the continent, are documented in Benjamin Sells’s new book A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads that Made Chicago and Helped Make America. Sells, who served as a two-term village president of suburban Riverside until earlier this year, documents the longer geological becoming of the portage site, the region’s significance for generations of Potawatomi, Chippewa, Ojibwe, and other tribal groups, and the ways in which images of the portage’s ability to connect the continent spurred the development that made Chicago a major city. While the physical history of the portage has mostly been erased by land development and the creation of the canals, tracing the story back reestablishes its significance in the history of the region. The Reader caught up with Sells over the phone in early September.
For a good book review, have a look at this article by 3CR, the 3rd Coast Review.
Let me tell you: I’m a huge Chicago history nerd, and I just gobbled up Benjamin Sells’s new book A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America, newly published by Northwestern University Press.
You’re probably not as nerdy as I am, so you may not realize that Chicago is here because, back around 500 BC, a tiny piece of land was created.
Chicago is Chicago because of that tiny piece of land, known to history as the Chicago Portage.
It was the result of something like 70 millenniums of movement by ice and water and debris across the surface of the earth, and, when all the movement was finished, the portage was left behind on the St. Lawrence Continental Divide, which separates the Mississippi watershed basin from the Great Lakes watershed basin.
It was called a portage because it was the land between the DesPlaines River and the South Branch of the Chicago River, and, during the frequent times when water levels were low, Native American traders and then European and American traders would have to carry their canoes and trade goods on their shoulders—to “portage” them—to get from one water highway to the other.
