Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

The distinction between rural and urban has little relevance on the early-mid 19th-century Chicago landscape. Natural, rather than human-imposed, borders determined the landscape. These borders included the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan—which provided sailors refuge from violent storms and passageways to the interior of the country—the St. Lawrence River to the east, the Mississippi River to the south, and the south branch of the Chicago River. Chicago became a central location because of its access to the rich soil, prairies, and lakes created by glaciers 13,000 years earlier. As the climate warmed, Chicago became the dividing line between the prairie grasses of the Midwest and the coniferous trees of the Northeast.

Commerce between the Potawatomi people and non-Indigenous groups who set up fur-trading posts along the Chicago River date back to the 1770s. The Potawatomi, who controlled much of the land and economy in the Chicago area by the 1830s, and the French, British, and Americans who lived in the area, practiced a mix of Indigenous and Euro-American traditions such as hunting, gathering, farming, fishing, and trading (55). However, American villages to the south and west quickly developed as lead mining centers which compromised the Indigenous and non-Indigenous traders’ economic well-being.