American Indians and Chicago in the Nineteenth Century

More than any event in Chicago history, save the fire of 1871, the Fort Dearborn "Massacre" defines Chicago identity. Although this event occurred on the American frontier—during the War of 1812, which was fought between the United States and Britain on Potawatomi territory—the city of Chicago took the story as its own. It helped support both the rugged individualism of the American character and the belief that Americans inexorably wrested this area away from the British and the Indians. With this narrative of conquest, Chicagoans could legitimately claim this area as their own. Or so they thought.

The story of the "massacre" became one of legend and lore for the emerging metropolis of Chicago. By the end of the nineteenth century it grew to mythic proportions, retold for the masses in numerous dime-store novels. The myth grew to the extent that the industrialist George Pullman commissioned a massive public sculpture by the famed artist Carl Rohl-Smith to be placed next to the Pullman mansion in the South Loop. The completed monument features two American Indians: one trying to kill a white woman and the other trying to save her. Rohl-Smith, in designing the sculpture, wanted "real" Indians to model for his work. He was in luck—he found them at Fort Sheridan, north of the city.

In February 1891 a Sioux delegation of more than forty prisoners of war came to Illinois from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They were brought in the wake of the U.S. Army's attack on Lakota civilians and religious celebrants at Wounded Knee the previous December. The delegation was divided into two parts. One group stayed in Chicago for several days and then traveled on to Washington DC, while the other group was held as "guests of the government"—a euphemism for prisoners of war—at Fort Sheridan. There the corrupt South Dakota politician M. H. Day referred to them as "murderers."

The group that was held at Fort Sheridan included Short Bull, whom the sculptor Carl Rohl-Smith purportedly believed looked like a "typical Indian." The local Potawatomi Indians did not look Indian enough for Rohl-Smith to depict in a seminal event in Chicago history. Instead, Rohl-Smith selected the Lakota man to model the Potawatomi Black Partridge saving Mrs. Linai Helm at Fort Dearborn, in what would become the iconic Chicago monument. Already, Plains Indians represented the archetypical Indian image for white America. The Rohl-Smith sculpture was emblematic of the portrayal of Chicago's Native history that would dominate the consciousness of Chicagoans at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a foreshadowing of future conditions, Indians were placed in a dichotomous situation of being both allies and untrustworthy "others" in relation to non-Native Chicagoans.

Growth of a City on Indian Resources

D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark reminds us that "in order to be truthful, any telling of how Illinois was made—in narrative or in embodied form—certainly must include candor about how the state was cleansed of its unwanted Indians." Chicago grew as a city on American Indian lands and with resources acquired from American Indian tribes both from around Lake Michigan and from the prairies. American Indians had lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a presence throughout. As a result of the treaties that ceded what became Illinois to the United States, several Indian families retained pieces of land in and surrounding Chicago, although no reservation was established within the state's borders. In addition, Indian people passed through or came to the city throughout the nineteenth century. In various ways Chicago remained Indian Country to the Indian people who stayed there, visited, or moved to the city.

Chicago is located where the Chicago River had emptied into Lake Michigan until the city's engineers reversed its flow, sending its effluence to the interior river system and eventually to the Mississippi River in 1900. The area was swampy, and the name for Chicago in the Miami language translates to "wild onions" or "wild garlic," also known as skunk weed. Historically, the region served as a trading center and provided village sites for various tribes, including the Miamis and the Winnebagoes. The Menominee have ancient stories connecting them to the place that is now Chicago—it served, for example, as the southern goal in a lacrosse game played by their supernatural heroes. The tribal group most associated with the area in the years immediately preceding American arrival was the Potawatomi.

Over a period of four decades, the encroaching American settler population, using warfare and the U.S. legal system, eradicated American Indian title to all of the lands in the Chicago area and removed nearly all of the Indian people living there from their homelands. Between 1795 and 1833 five treaties dealt with land cessions in Chicago. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville signed in the wake of General "Mad Anthony" Wayne's 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers included cession of an area that is now downtown Chicago, where Fort Dearborn would be built in 1803.

In 1812, after war broke out between the Americans and the British, some five hundred tribal members, primarily Potawatomis and a smaller number of Ottawas, attacked the American stronghold, killing fifty-one and causing the rest of the military to surrender.

Potawatomi bands and leaders were autonomous, however, and Black Partridge sided with the Americans, honoring an agreement that he had made many years before to keep peace. He warned the U.S. command of the attack, returned a peace medal he had previously been given (because of his failure to keep the peace), and, in an event dramatically captured in Rohl-Smith's sculpture some eighty years later, saved Margaret Helm, whose husband, Linai, was an officer at the fort, "by warding off an Indian seeking to tomahawk her," according to historian Virgil J. Vogel.

Much later (near the time of the creation of the sculpture), Simon Pokagon would describe this event from a Potawatomi perspective: "In their loyal zeal they could not comprehend their own weakness and the strength of the dominant race, but, being pressed onward by as noble motives as ever glowed in the breast of mortals, they fought most desperately for home and native land. When white men pillaged and burned our villages and slaughtered our families, they called it honorable warfare, but when we retaliated, they called it butchery and murder."

In 1816, in one of a series of treaties that the United States signed with Indian tribes in order to make peace in the wake of the War of 1812, the federal government purchased a twenty-mile strip of land whose northern border was located at what is now Rogers Avenue on the far north side of Chicago. After this, an increasingly contentious relationship developed between the growing white population and Chicago's original inhabitants.

In 1829, when tribal leaders sold what are now the North Shore suburbs of Evanston, Wilmette, and Kenilworth to the United States, a number of individual Indians were granted their own plots of land in what is now Chicago and its suburbs. These individuals included Sauganash (Billy Caldwell), Archange Oiulmette (the wife of a French trader), Chechepinqua or Alexander Robinson, and several others. Nearly all of their fellow tribesmen and women, however, would be forced to leave Illinois.

In 1832 and 1833 a series of treaties ceded all of the remaining tribal lands in Illinois to the United States, including those in and around Chicago. The United States was able to impose these treaties after it had "established military supremacy in the western Great Lakes Region during the Black Hawk War."

The treaty negotiations of September 1833, held in Chicago, included Potawatomi tribal members from northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. One of the Potawatomi leaders, who would refuse to leave Michigan despite all efforts of the United States to force him to, was known as Pokagon or Leopold Pokagon. His son Simon was just a young boy when the tribe gathered in its old hunting and fishing grounds in what is now the South Side of Chicago for this treaty signing. At the signing, "It is told that [Leopold] Pokagon wept, and said he had rather die than sign away the land." Both Sauganash and Chechepinqua received five thousand dollar payouts from the 1833 treaty, and each also received an annuity for themselves and their children.

In the autumn of 1835 some five thousand Indians came to Chicago to receive annuities. According to one report, "Eight hundred of them took part in a last war dance. One of the spectators wrote, 'Their weapons were brandished as if they would slay a thousand enemies at every blow, while the yells and screams they uttered were broken up and multiplied and rendered all the more hideous by a rapid clapping of the mouth with the palm of the hand. It seemed as if we had a picture of hell itself and a carnival of the damned spirits were there confined.'" Shortly thereafter, most Potawatomi people in the region removed to west of the Mississippi, some by heavy-hearted choice, and others deceived through blatant trickery.

Another description was penned by Milo Milton Quaife, the early twentieth-century historian who considered the conquest and development of this region to be a glorious advancement of civilization. He portrayed the tribal members as "leaping, gesticulating, screaming, while they looked up with hell itself depicted on their faces, at the Chemokoman squaws [white women] in the windows, and brandished their weapons as if they were about to make a real attack in deadly earnest.... [A]ll the ... space ... was covered with this raging savagery." Quaife finished his book on the history of Chicago with a bittersweet, romanticized, and misleading conclusion: "With beautiful appropriateness the red man thus celebrated the end of his era. Defeated but defiant, he took up his journey toward the sunset. Over Chicago-land the day of the white man had dawned."

A popular writer in the 1970s, Finis Farr, recreated the scene even less charitably, writing: "And on that day in August 1835 ... the last detachment of Indians emptied hundreds of whiskey jugs and danced howling through the streets, pausing here and there to look in at windows or to execute a knife dance at a cabin door. Twenty-three years before, the members of this same Potawatomi clan had killed and tortured white men on the ground where they now capered and tumbled, or lay in muddy gutters sick from their last debauch of Chicago booze. Then they were gone."

For decades these descriptions defined the way Chicagoans learned about the dispossession of the Potawatomi homelands that formed the foundation of their city. In addition, although Indians did not disappear from Chicago at this time, Chicago's historians have for the most part treated them as if they did. An exhaustive 2009 city history by Dominic Pacyga, arguably Chicago's leading ethnic community historian, completes its discussion of American Indians in Chicago with this statement: "The years 1835 and 1836 marked the last gathering of the Indians at Chicago." After that Indians disappear from Chicago in his narrative. Penelope Edmonds has identified this widespread "historiographic problem" as "the representation of Indigenous peoples as being either absent or anomalous to urbanizing ... environments."

For almost the next century, various Potawatomi people attempted to regain title to the land in Chicago, or compensation for the loss of it. In fact, the lost lands became the subject of several Potawatomi lawsuits. On January 14, 1876, a Potawatomi woman named To-gah Bertrand filed suit "to assert her title to 126 acres of valuable land in South Chicago, near the mouth of the Calumet River," according to a local Chicago newspaper. That case or another was dismissed in 1877 after some non-Indians had bought the title for $10,000 and pursued the land claim—which then amounted to some 476 acres—in court. The judge ruled that the claim dated to 1835 and therefore should have been pursued some four decades previously.

Throughout the nineteenth century other Potawatomi families remained in Chicago, establishing small homesteads and tiny pockets of an Indian presence. Sauganash removed to Kansas with his Potawatomi bands, but descendants of Alexander Robinson retained forest preserve property ceded to him by President Tyler in 1843. A map created by Virgil J. Vogel, "Former Indian Reservations in Cook County Forest Preserves," includes land ceded to Robinson, Billy Caldwell (Sauganash), and Claude LaFromboise in 1829. Sauganash sold his land in 1833.

If "the exchange of land is at the very essence of local politics," as urban geographers have posited, these treaties marked the launching point for both the economic and political growth that would propel Chicago to the forefront of America's urban development by the end of the century. Because of the acquisition of this land base in this geographical setting, Chicago grew from a fur trade outpost to a bustling metropolis of more than a million people in the nineteenth century, first as a lake and river port city, and then as a railroad center. "For most of the nineteenth century," historian Perry Duis has observed, "Chicago attracted each week as many as two thousand people more than left it." By the end of the nineteenth century the United States was well embarked on its massive shift from a rural to an urban nation. Though Americans would continue to think of themselves as a nation with rural roots, they would actually be one to a rapidly diminishing degree. By 1930 half of the U.S. population would be considered urban dwellers, and only one-fifth would be classified as agriculturalists.

The United States was relatively unique in that numerous cities popped up across a vast landscape. Urban growth was often fueled by proximity to water—rivers, lakes, or man-made canals—and by the mid- to late nineteenth century, railroads. Chicago, boasting all of these opportunities for transportation, grew to a predominant position.

One of the primary resources that fueled Chicago's growth was timber. The Chicago River, by the 1860s, became "the largest center for lumber distribution in the world." Chicago's ports were kept busy hauling Wisconsin and Michigan lumber to build the city that would burn so famously in October 1871. This lumber was used not only to build the city but also to build farms, fences, and towns on the prairie, and to build the railroads. All of this lumber came from lands dispossessed, primarily in treaties in the 1820s and 1830s, from the tribes that lived along Lake Michigan. After the great fire, Alexander Robinson, or Chechepinqua, who still lived in his old homeland and was by then more than eighty years old, reportedly "looked at the ruins from the Lake street bridge, [and] he gave a lusty whoop and exclaimed that once more he saw the prairie there as in the days of his prime." Chicagoans of course saw something else: after their initial shock at the conflagration, they saw an opportunity to bring about a rebirth and to build one of the most modern cities in the country, or even the world.

The lumber and waterways were just the first of the resources exploited by Chicagoans as their city grew. As quickly as loggers detimbered the ceded land, farmers planted the rich topsoil and stocked it with dairy cattle. And as the railroad pushed its way west, the prairies as well as the denuded woodlands became the breadbasket of America. Here, ranchers grew cattle that were destined for American dinner tables. Chicago as a railroad center became a key destination for the cattle, which were slaughtered in its famous stockyards on the South Side. By the 1890s some twenty percent of Chicago's population made a living in some way related to the business of the stockyards and slaughterhouses.

The other industry that fed Chicago's development in the nineteenth century, based on the grain grown on the prairies, also owed its existence to lands ceded by the tribal groups living there. The Chicago Board of Trade developed because of the city's preeminence in the grain handling and distribution business. Chicago grew not only on Indian lands, but on the resources of the lands emanating out from the city that Americans had only recently wrested away from Indians who had held both the lands and their resources for thousands of years—all of which was exemplified in the mythological remembrance of the Fort Dearborn "Massacre."

American Indian Visitors in Early Chicago

The Indian people who moved to Chicago thus came to a city that established not only its physical existence, but also its phenomenal and exhilarating economic growth and development on the tragic losses of their ancestors. By the end of the century, Indians were beginning to remake Chicago as their home. The most well-known of the Potawatomi individuals who remained in Chicago, Alexander Robinson, lived on his own reserve until his death in 1872. His granddaughter inherited the home from him, and she lived there with her son well into the twentieth century. Other Potawatomis remained in Chicago, but by the end of the nineteenth century Indian people from various tribal backgrounds also began moving to the city.

As the city grew, other Indians traveled to Chicago from neighboring states. Some came as ship hands, others to sell goods such as berries and fish. Indian delegations also continued to pass through the city, both official delegations on their way to Washington DC, and commercial delegations providing marketing opportunities for large businesses such as railroad companies and department stores. The press occasionally noticed these American Indian people passing through Chicago. They often spent a night or several nights in Chicago as they made their way from one train station to another to catch their rail connections. Chicago would eventually become home to twenty-six railroad lines and six major stations. In many cases the travelers met both Indian and non-Indian Chicagoans, leaving lasting impressions on all parties involved. A small number of these people either stayed in Chicago or returned later.