The Evolution of the Chicago Portage

Situated between the Chicago and DesPlaines Rivers, Eschikagou was known to the Native Americans as a “portage,” a transportation shortcut revealed to the French explorer Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette in 1673. In the days before planes, trains and automobiles -- or even good roads for wagons -- most travel was by water. Jolliet quickly realized that goods shipped across the Atlantic could travel down the Great Lakes and connect successively with the DesPlaines, Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.

All that stood in the way was a few miles of land, the portage. In wet weather, traders could float their canoes from the south branch of the Chicago River across Mud Lake, a swampy area, to the Des Plaines. In dry weather, it was an arduous process over several days to push canoes from what is now 27th and Leavitt Streets in Chicago to 47th Street and Harlem Avenue in Lyons: the Chicago Portage National Historic Site. Maintained by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, “it is the only place where you can stand on the same ground walked by all the explorers, early settlers and creators of Chicago. It is certainly Chicago’s ‘Plymouth Rock,’” according to the Chicago Portage Tours website.

Over 160 years later, the Illinois & Michigan Canal, built by the state of Illinois and the U.S. government, replaced the portage. Today, the Stevenson Expressway parallels its route.

Fur is what motivated the French traders, specifically warm and waterproof beaver abundant in the Great Lakes area. Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable and Antoine Ouilmette, who had a trading post at Grosse Pointe (Wilmette), were just two of many French traders who married Native American women, whether for romance or better economic alliances with their kin.

The women contributed to their husbands’ success, often running the post while they were away on trading expeditions. Their mixed blood children, or “Métis,” further bridged the two cultures, European and Native American, for nearly the first two decades of Chicago history, in what was called the “middle ground,” according to the online Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Wolf Point, where the north and south branches of the Chicago River meet to form a Y before flowing into the main channel to Lake Michigan, was the scene of Middle Ground entertainment, like drinking French brandy, American bourbon and British rum and betting on card games, shooting matches and horse races. Méti women danced with their husbands to Creole music played on fiddles and mouth organs while single women eyed bachelor traders.

“The War of 1812 marked the death knell for the middle ground at Chicago.” Native Americans had ceded land in the Treaty of Greenville that enabled construction of Fort Dearborn in 1803. In August 1812, however, troops were unable to hold the fort and evacuated, along with civilians. Enroute to Fort Wayne, they were killed by pro-British Potawatomi.

John Kinzie had been the third owner of DuSable’s property, but he and his associates lost their holdings and did not fully recover when the fort was rebuilt in 1816; “the pace of change overwhelmed them.” The next year, Congress passed a law that excluded foreign traders from U.S. territory.

The Great Lakes fur trade was taken over by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Kinzie and Méti traders were given secondary roles but found themselves alienated from the “more aggressive, highly organized and systematic Yankees” --New Englanders arriving in Chicago.

“…the old way of life disintegrated….Within two decades both the Native Americans and the Métis found that they no longer had a place at the Chicago portage.”

Portage site in August when it is swampy.

Alan Scott Walker