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Former Site of Fort Dearborn
Source

An 1830 map showing the mouth Chicago River and planned changes to the harbor

When Fort Dearborn was built in 1803, it was a military outpost in a landscape still occupied and controlled by Native people. The fort sat across the Chicago River from the fur trading post and was built within only six square miles of land that had been ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. All other land surrounding those six miles was still owned by Native people until future treaty cessions in 1816.

In the decade after the fort was built, Neshnabé people living in the area began to increasingly see it as a threat to their land and lifeways. These groups contested the Treaty of Greenville and argued that no representatives from Chicago were present at the treaty signing, and they grew increasingly frustrated with white settlers who had begun to farm the land and disrupt the environment that Native people had long maintained. These tensions erupted in the Battle of Fort Dearborn.

After the battle, Fort Dearborn was raided for what supplies had not been destroyed and the building was burned to the ground. The Neshnabé people who lived and traded in the area continued to do so with some non-Native relatives. Beyond the mouth of the river, the labor of the Potawatomi, Odawa Sauk, Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, and Kickapoo people made the fur industry in the city immensely profitable. When the Americans returned to Chicago in 1816 and rebuilt Fort Dearborn, they once again entered an already thriving market.

Sources:

Kathleen A. Brosnan and Ann Durkin Keating, “Cholera and the Evolution of Early Chicago,” in City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, History of the Urban Environment (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
“Chicago Facts,” Chicago Public Library, accessed July 13, 2023, https://www.chipublib.org/chicago-facts.
“Fort Dearborn Massacre,” Chicago Monuments Project, accessed July 13, 2023, https://chicagomonuments.org/monuments/fort-dearborn-massacre.
“Fort Dearborn Sets a Star On Chicago’s Flag,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 22, 1939.
Ann Durkin Keating, Rising up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2012).
Nehemiah Matson, “Sketch of Shau-Be-Na, a Potawatomi Chief,” in Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol. Volume VII (Wisconsin Historical Society, 1876), https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/whc/id/7778.
John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
Simon Pokagon, “The Massacre of Fort Dearborn at Chicago. Gathered from the Traditions of the Indian Tribes Engaged in the Massacre, and from the Published Accounts,” Harper’s Magazine, 1899.

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Re-Thinking Chicago's Founding icon Re-Thinking Chicago's Founding

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