Mainstream narratives of Chicago’s founding have primarily featured European and American settlers. But stories of René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Jolliet as visionary adventurers and John Kinzie and Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable as founding settlers have concealed a much more complicated reality.

In fact, Indigenous people lived on the land now called Chicago a long time before Europeans set foot here, and many remain here today. Indigenous people used this area for seasonal and more permanent village sites, to gather food sources like wild rice and wild onions (or ramps), and to travel to other parts of the larger Great Lakes and Mississippi River networks. The first European settlers entered into an already existing network of trade and familial relationships created before their arrival.

How does this change the way we understand the founding of Chicago as a city? This City Story re-centers Indigenous people to encourage a re-thinking of the familiar “founding” myths. It casts aside unnecessary superlatives like “first” settlers and “last” Native peoples in order to understand the more complicated origins of Chicago.

Sources
Alfred Theodore Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884)
Ann Durkin Keating, Rising up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2012)
Juliette Kinzie, Wau-Bun, the “Early Day” in the North-West (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856)
Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
Terry Straus, ed., Indians of the Chicago Area (Chicago, Ill: NAES College, 1990).