{"id":34060,"date":"2026-08-08T22:50:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/chicago-early-settlement-era-1813-1870\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T17:42:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T17:42:07","slug":"chicago-early-settlement-era-1813-1870","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/fr\/chicago-early-settlement-era-1813-1870\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Settlement Chicago, 1813-1870 | A Cliff Dweller&rsquo;s History"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-1 fusion-flex-container nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1372.8px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><div class=\"fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion-builder-column-0 fusion_builder_column_1_1 1_1 fusion-flex-column\" style=\"--awb-bg-size:cover;--awb-width-large:100%;--awb-margin-top-large:20px;--awb-spacing-right-large:1.92%;--awb-margin-bottom-large:20px;--awb-spacing-left-large:1.92%;--awb-width-medium:100%;--awb-order-medium:0;--awb-spacing-right-medium:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-medium:1.92%;--awb-width-small:100%;--awb-order-small:0;--awb-spacing-right-small:1.92%;--awb-spacing-left-small:1.92%;\"><div class=\"fusion-column-wrapper fusion-column-has-shadow fusion-flex-justify-content-flex-start fusion-content-layout-column\"><!-- Vintage Chicago, Chapter 2 \u2014 from manuscript v7 (2026-09-29). Paste into one Avada \"Code Block\" element (not a Text Block), replacing the page's old content. All styling is inline so it also survives a Text Block. -->\n<div class=\"vc-chap\" style=\"max-width:780px;margin:0 auto;padding:0 clamp(16px,4vw,40px);box-sizing:border-box;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;color:#222;\">\n<h1 style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:30px;line-height:1.25;margin:0 0 18px;\">Chapter 2: Early Settlement Chicago, 1813\u20131870<\/h1>\n<h3 id=\"a-fort-rebuilt-a-frontier-reclaimed\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">A Fort Rebuilt, A Frontier Reclaimed<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 16px;max-width:380px;text-align:center;clear:both;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1816-2024050719_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1816-2024050719_nc.jpg\" alt=\"The rebuilt Fort Dearborn, 1816\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">The rebuilt Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River, 1816.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">When American soldiers returned to the mouth of the Chicago River in the summer of 1816, they found little but ashes and memories of survivors. The original Fort Dearborn had been burned to the ground after the August 1812 massacre, and the handful of traders and Native families who had called the place home were mostly scattered or dead. The new Fort Dearborn, built that year under Captain Hezekiah Bradley, was a modest wooden stockade. Its purpose was to reassert American control over a crossroads the United States had no intention of abandoning.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The garrison brought with it a slow trickle of civilians, traders, interpreters, and a few enterprising families willing to gamble on a swampy outpost most of the country had never heard of. For nearly two decades afterward, Chicago remained what it had always been, a portage and trading post, its population rarely exceeding a few dozen white residents alongside the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe who still dominated the surrounding country. Nothing about its physical setting, flat, wet, mosquito-ridden, and prone to flooding, suggested it was destined to become anything more.<\/p><h3 id=\"black-hawks-war-and-the-departure-of-the-potawatomi\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Black Hawk\u2019s War and the Departure of the Potawatomi<\/h3><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The event that did more than any other to clear the way for American settlement was not a Chicago event at all. It happened in 1832 along the Rock River, when the Sauk leader Black Hawk led several hundred followers back across the Mississippi into Illinois hoping to reclaim ancestral cornfields and in defiance of an earlier land cession.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The conflict that followed, brief and one-sided, barely touched Chicago directly, but it terrified the scattered settlers of the region badly enough that many fled to the rebuilt fort for protection. The event hardened American resolve to finish removing Native nations from northern Illinois altogether. The following year, 1833, U.S. commissioners gathered in Chicago thousands of Potawatomi, along with Odawa and Ojibwe delegates. The goal was the Treaty of Chicago, in which the tribes ceded the last of their remaining land in the region in exchange for cash and reservations west of the Mississippi. The actual departures took place over several years, but by 1835 the last large Potawatomi encampments had left the Chicago area for good. They were marched west under a government escort. It was a wrenching, coerced ending to thousands of years of Native presence at the confluence of the Chicago River and lake, and it opened the ground on which the American city would be built.<\/p><h3 id=\"from-trading-post-to-town-to-city\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">From Trading Post to Town to City<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 14px;max-width:380px;text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1833-2024081553_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1833-2024081553_nc.jpg\" alt=\"John Kinzie's 1833 plat map of Chicago\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"max-width:100%;max-height:300px;width:auto;height:auto;display:block;margin:0 auto;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">John Kinzie\u2019s original 1833 plat map of Chicago \u2014 the same downtown street grid as today\u2019s Loop.<\/figcaption><\/figure><figure style=\"float:right;margin:4px 0 12px 16px;width:42%;max-width:220px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1832-2024123200_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1832-2024123200_nc.jpg\" alt=\"Wolf Point drawing, 1832\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">Wolf Point, 1832, by George Davis \u2014 Wentworth\u2019s tavern at left, the Miller House at right.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The transformation that followed was startling even to contemporaries. In 1833, the same year as the Treaty of Chicago, the tiny settlement, a few hundred residents clustered around the fort and the river mouth, organized itself as the Town of Chicago. It elected a board of trustees and adopted a charter fit for a place that could still be walked end to end in a few minutes.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Land speculation was already becoming the town\u2019s first real industry. Plots that had sold for a few dollars in the early 1830s were changing hands for hundreds within a few years. Word was spreading that this swampy junction sat on the likely route of a canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi watershed. Growth outpaced the town charter almost immediately. By 1837, with a population estimated around four thousand, Chicago incorporated as a full city, electing as its first mayor, William B. Ogden, a transplanted New Yorker and canal-land promoter. The timing was inopportune as the Panic of 1837 hit the same year. The speculative land bubble that had inflated Chicago\u2019s early growth collapsed along with banks across the country. For several ensuing years the young city\u2019s finances and its half-built canal project both nearly foundered.<\/p><div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div><h3 id=\"the-canal-that-made-the-city\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">The Canal That Made the City<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 14px;max-width:380px;text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1836-2024060980_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1836-2024060980_nc.jpg\" alt=\"1836 Illinois and Michigan Canal Commission map of Chicago\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">Chicago as recorded by the Illinois and Michigan Canal Commission, 1836.<\/figcaption><\/figure><figure style=\"float:left;margin:4px 16px 12px 0;width:42%;max-width:220px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1841-2026020359_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1841-2026020359_nc.jpg\" alt=\"1841 account of Irish canal laborers\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">The British traveler James S. Buckingham\u2019s 1841 account of the Irish laborers\u2019 camp along the canal works.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Long before the panic, Illinois legislators and Chicago boosters understood that the settlement\u2019s future depended on solving one stubborn geographic problem: the portage between the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River, though short, was not navigable. This meant goods and boats had to be hauled overland between the Great Lakes system and the Mississippi system. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, authorized by the state legislature in 1836, was meant to fix that permanently by cutting a channel roughly a hundred miles long connecting Chicago to the Illinois River at LaSalle. Construction began that same year with enormous fanfare and even more enormous debt. The debt had been financed substantially by land grants and bond sales tied to the very real estate speculation that would soon crash.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Work slowed to a crawl during the depression years of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the state came close to abandoning the project. It was finally finished in 1848, twelve years after it began, but the cost had nearly bankrupted Illinois. However, once it opened, the effect was immediate and transformative. Grain, lumber, and all manner of goods could now move by water all the way from the Mississippi basin to the Great Lakes. From there they could be moved on to the Atlantic seaboard via the Erie Canal. Chicago sat at the hinge point of this entire system. The canal did what its promoters had always promised. It turned a village on Lake Michigan into a genuine commercial gateway.<\/p><div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div><h3 id=\"locks-lumber-and-a-river-put-to-work\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Locks, Lumber, and a River Put to Work<\/h3><figure style=\"float:right;margin:4px 0 12px 16px;width:42%;max-width:220px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1858-2024061289_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1858-2024061289_nc.jpg\" alt=\"Rush Street Bridge, 1858\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">Sailing boats along the Chicago River docks at the Rush Street Bridge, 1858.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The canal\u2019s success remade the river itself long before any dramatic economic reversal made headlines. At Bridgeport, where the canal met the South Branch of the Chicago River, engineers built a lock and a steam-driven pumping works to draw water from the river into the canal\u2019s channel whenever the season\u2019s natural flow ran too shallow for loaded barges. This meant that any day the pumps ran hard enough, they could pull the river\u2019s current toward the Des Plaines River instead of Lake Michigan. This was a precursor of the far larger reversal the city would undertake decades later. The South Branch became Chicago\u2019s working waterfront: lumber schooners from the pine forests of eastern Wisconsin and western Michigan tied up along its banks to unload at a sprawling lumber district. By the 1850s, young Chicago ranked among the largest lumber markets in the world. As a corollary, tanneries, distilleries, and slaughterhouses upstream had begun treating the same river as a convenient drain for their waste. This practice would turn into a full-blown public-health crisis within a generation.<\/p><div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div><h3 id=\"rails-arrive-and-everything-accelerates\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Rails Arrive, and Everything Accelerates<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 14px;max-width:360px;text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1850-2025101797_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1850-2025101797_nc.jpg\" alt=\"Map of the Aurora Branch Railroad\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">Map of the Aurora Branch Railroad, an early Chicago rail line later absorbed into the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">In addition to the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848, that year also brought Chicago\u2019s first railroad. The Galena and Chicago Union, chartered years earlier but stalled for want of capital, finally laid track running west out of the city. In later years it reached the lead mines in Galena, Illinois. However, the railroad\u2019s first small locomotive, the Pioneer, first began hauling wheat in from farms that had previously had only seasonal markets depending as they did on wagon roads running through snow or mud much of the year.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The railroad turned a profit almost immediately, because the farmers were desperate for a faster route to market than canal barges or overland wagons could offer. This set off a scramble to build additional rail lines. Within a decade, a dozen rail lines radiated outward from Chicago into Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the hinterland beyond. The city was positioned as the funnel through which much of the produce of the entire Midwest passed on its way east and later west. With the canal and railroad together, arriving within the same year, Chicago\u2019s destiny was supercharged. More than any other single development of the period the canal proved the concept of Chicago as a transportation hub. The railroads that followed scaled it up far beyond what water transport alone could ever have managed. Unlike canals, rail lines could be built almost anywhere, in any season, regardless of drought or freeze.<\/p><h3 id=\"grain-steam-and-the-birth-of-the-futures-market\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Grain, Steam, and the Birth of the Futures Market<\/h3><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">That same pivotal year of 1848 also gave Chicago the institution that would turn its farmers\u2019 crops into a national commodity. The Chicago Board of Trade was founded that year as a general chamber of commerce for the growing city\u2019s merchants. For its first several years, the Board did little more than set weights and settle petty trade disputes. However, the flood of wheat arriving by canal and rail soon forced a more fundamental innovation. Grain had traditionally been hauled to Chicago in sacks and sold as each farmer\u2019s own particular crop. This meant weighing, inspecting, and negotiating over every individual load, a hopeless bottleneck as volumes climbed into the millions of bushels.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">In 1856, the Board of Trade solved the problem by introducing a formal grading system. It involved sorting incoming wheat into a handful of quality classes so that grain of the same grade, regardless of whose farm it came from. This permitted the wheat to be dumped together into a single elevator bin and treated as one uniform commodity. A charter granted by the Illinois legislature in 1859 gave the Board\u2019s own inspectors binding authority to assign those grades. This effectively made Chicago\u2019s grain standard the law of the wheat market.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The change severed, for the first time, a farmer\u2019s ownership claim from any particular physical wheat. What a farmer now held was a claim on so many bushels of a given grade, a claim that could be bought, sold, and speculated on independent of any actual grain at all. That severance is precisely what made a true futures market possible. The Board of Trade obliged in 1865, by adopting standardized futures contracts and formal trading rules for margin and delivery. This was a model that commodity exchanges from cotton to soybeans to, eventually, financial futures would copy for the next century and beyond.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Handling that torrent of graded grain required machinery to match. Steam power, first harnessed for a grain elevator in Buffalo in 1842, had reached Chicago by 1848. This was when the city\u2019s first steam-driven elevator began lifting grain on a belt of buckets, called \u201clegs\u201d in the trade\u2019s language. The elevator was capable of moving thousands of bushels an hour, drawing wheat directly out of canal boats and rail cars and pouring it into storage bins several stories tall along the Chicago River. A Chicago Tribune reporter touring the riverfront elevators in 1861 marveled at the scale involved. He wrote that the roughly 28 million bushels the city\u2019s elevators had handled the previous year, if hauled the old-fashioned way in two-bushel sacks, would form \u201ca wall sixteen feet high and seven hundred miles long.\u201d<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The thousands of houses built in this period were constructed with stacked spruce planking, and framing structures containing millions of board feet originating in the vast pine woods of Wisconsin and Michigan. The South Branch\u2019s lumber mills and storage yards district was only a few blocks away from the grain elevators. So, grain, lumber, rails, and the Board of Trade\u2019s new futures contracts all together turned Chicago in little more than a decade from a muddy trading post into the commodity clearinghouse for the entire agricultural interior of North America.<\/p><h3 id=\"an-astonishing-rate-of-growth\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">An Astonishing Rate of Growth<\/h3><figure style=\"float:right;margin:4px 0 12px 16px;width:42%;max-width:220px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1855-2024081551_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1855-2024081551_nc.jpg\" alt=\"1855 map of Chicago\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">An 1855 lithograph map of Chicago, based on residents\u2019 recollections of the city\u2019s 1833 population of 350.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The population figures from these decades are almost hard to believe. Chicago counted perhaps 350 residents when it incorporated as a town in 1833. By the time of city incorporation in 1837 that figure had grown roughly tenfold. By 1850, with the canal newly open and the railroad boom underway, the city\u2019s population had reached about 30,000. Twenty years later, in 1870, it stood at nearly 300,000, a hundredfold increase in less than four decades from its town-charter days, and among the fastest sustained urban growth rates the country had ever seen.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Immigration drove much of this surge: Irish laborers who had come to dig the canal stayed on afterward, German immigrants arrived in large numbers throughout the 1840s and 1850s fleeing political upheaval and economic hardship in Europe, and a steady stream of native-born New Englanders and New Yorkers came west chasing opportunity in real estate, grain trading, and lumber. The city that had been a muddy fort a generation earlier was rapidly becoming one of the significant urban centers of the entire country, its downtown filling with brick storefronts, hotels, and the beginnings of a distinct commercial district along the river.<\/p><div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div><h3 id=\"raising-the-city-out-of-the-mud\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Raising the City Out of the Mud<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 14px;max-width:380px;text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1858-2025101590_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1858-2025101590_nc.jpg\" alt=\"Court House after the city raised its street grade, 1858\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">The Court House and City Hall after the city raised its street grade \u2014 a fourth floor was added in 1858 to match the new elevation.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Rapid growth brought a problem that could not be solved by ambition alone: Chicago sat on flat, poorly drained, often swampy ground barely above lake level, and its early wooden buildings and dirt streets turned into seas of mud with every rain. By the 1850s the situation had become a public health crisis as much as an engineering embarrassment, since standing water and inadequate drainage were blamed, correctly, for outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The solution the city settled on was a bold one. Rather than dig sewers underground, which the wet soil made nearly impossible, engineers led by men such as Ellis Chesbrough decided to raise the entire grade of the city several feet. New sewers would be laid on top of the old ground level and then streets, sidewalks, and eventually whole buildings would be brought up to match. Through the late 1850s and into the 1860s, Chicago underwent a period in which entire brick buildings, some of them massive hotels, were jacked up on hundreds of screw jacks and raised several feet into the air. Meanwhile, their business inside continued uninterrupted. This went on block by block, until the city\u2019s grade had been lifted well above its original swampy footing. It remains one of the more remarkable feats of urban engineering of the era. The process gave Chicago a workable sewer system and a way to guard against the diseases that plagued it.<\/p><h3 id=\"mayors-machines-in-miniature-and-the-lager-beer-riot\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Mayors, Machines in Miniature, and the Lager Beer Riot<\/h3><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Chicago\u2019s earliest municipal politics were small-scale and evolved quickly. The town incorporated in 1833, the city charter followed in 1837, and William B. Ogden, a Democrat, canal, and railroad promoter, won election as Chicago\u2019s first mayor, defeating the Whig incumbent town president John H. Kinzie.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">Under the weak-mayor charter of these decades, the real power sat with a City Council of ward aldermen. The mayors served single-year terms in a rapid, boosterish churn that mirrored the town\u2019s own restless growth rather than any settled system of governance. That churn turned genuinely violent in 1855, when Levi Boone was elected mayor on the nativist, anti-immigrant \u201cKnow-Nothing\u201d American Party ticket. He moved to enforce a long-dormant Sunday closing law and raised liquor license fees sixfold. These were measures aimed squarely at the taverns and beer gardens of the city\u2019s fast-growing German and Irish population. When police began arresting tavern keepers that April, several hundred angry Germans marched on the courthouse in what became known as the Lager Beer Riot. The ensuing clash left one rioter dead and dozens arrested before order was restored. Boone\u2019s ordinance was repealed within the year, and the episode discredited nativist politics in Chicago for a generation. This helped cement a durable alliance between the city\u2019s Democratic Party and its immigrant voters that would shape Chicago politics for the rest of the century.<\/p><h3 id=\"chicago-and-the-civil-war\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">Chicago and the Civil War<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 14px;max-width:360px;text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1860-2024061330_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1860-2024061330_nc.jpg\" alt=\"The Wigwam, site of the 1860 Republican convention\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">The Wigwam, at Lake and Market Streets \u2014 site of the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln.<\/figcaption><\/figure><figure style=\"float:left;margin:4px 16px 12px 0;width:42%;max-width:210px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1862-2026020477_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1862-2026020477_nc.jpg\" alt=\"Camp Douglas, 1862\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">Camp Douglas, on the South Side, which held up to 30,000 Confederate prisoners of war at its peak.<\/figcaption><\/figure><figure style=\"float:right;margin:4px 0 12px 16px;width:42%;max-width:210px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1865-2025101591_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1865-2025101591_nc.jpg\" alt=\"Lincoln lying in state, 1865\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">Chicagoans filing past Abraham Lincoln\u2019s body lying in state at the Court House, 1865.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, Chicago\u2019s transportation network made it a natural hub for the Union war effort. Camp Douglas, established on the city\u2019s South Side on land associated with the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas, began as a training and mustering camp for Illinois volunteers. Later, it became one of the largest Union prison camps for captured Confederate soldiers. It ended up housing thousands of prisoners under conditions that grew notoriously harsh as the war dragged on. Beyond the camp itself, the war accelerated Chicago\u2019s emergence as a meatpacking and grain-shipping powerhouse. The Union Army\u2019s need to feed and supply its armies funneled enormous contracts through the city\u2019s stockyards, lumber mills, and rail lines. The war years, far from slowing Chicago\u2019s growth, poured fuel on it. The war cemented the city\u2019s role as the logistical engine feeding the western armies and put the postwar decades in a position for Chicago\u2019s meatpacking and grain-trading industries to become globally dominant.<\/p><div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div><h3 id=\"from-frontier-post-to-metropolis\" style=\"color:#1a3a6e;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:22px;line-height:1.3;margin:34px 0 12px;scroll-margin-top:120px;\">From Frontier Post to Metropolis<\/h3><figure style=\"margin:6px auto 14px;max-width:380px;text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1870-2023082192_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1870-2023082192_nc.jpg\" alt=\"View from the Water Tower before the Great Fire\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 8px rgba(0,0,0,0.28);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:11px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:6px;line-height:1.4;\">View from the Water Tower, north on Michigan Avenue toward Oak Street Beach, shortly before the Great Fire.<\/figcaption><\/figure><figure style=\"float:right;margin:4px 0 12px 16px;width:42%;max-width:220px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1870-2026030669_dl.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"Click to view full size with caption\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/vintage-chicago\/1870-2026030669_nc.jpg\" alt=\"The first Palmer House, opened 1870\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width:100%;border-radius:6px;box-shadow:0 2px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.24);display:block;\"><\/a><figcaption style=\"font-size:10px;color:#2a1f14;font-weight:600;font-style:italic;margin-top:4px;line-height:1.3;\">The first Palmer House, opened September 26, 1870 \u2014 and destroyed, like so much else, thirteen months later.<\/figcaption><\/figure><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">By 1870, the frontier trading post of 1813 was gone entirely. In its place stood a booming rail and grain metropolis of nearly 300,000 people, built in less than two generations. Fort Dearborn had been rebuilt to reassert an American claim on the site, the Black Hawk War and the Treaty of Chicago cleared away the last organized Native presence that might have contested it. Incorporation as a town and then a city supplying the legal scaffolding to grow, and the twin arrival of the canal and the railroad in 1848 handed the young city control over much of the flow of goods between the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes. No rival Great Lakes or river city could match it.<\/p><p style=\"margin:0 0 16px;font-family:Georgia,'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:17px;line-height:1.65;\">The population boom of the 1840s and 1850s, and the sheer civic will required to physically raise the city out of its own mud, were both extraordinary events. With this momentum, the catastrophe waiting just one year ahead, the Great Chicago Fire, would prove only a pause rather than an ending.<\/p><div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div><p style=\"font-size:12px;color:#000;font-weight:700;margin-top:14px;\"><u>Sources<\/u>: A.T. Andreas, <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/historyofchicago01andr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time<\/a>, Vol. 1 (1884); Henry H. Hurlbut, <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/chicagoantiquiti00hurl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">Chicago Antiquities: Comprising Original Items and Relations, Letters, Extracts, and Notes, Pertaining to Early Chicago<\/a> (1881); Joseph Kirkland, <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/storyofchicago00kirk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">The Story of Chicago<\/a> (1892); William Cronon, <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/naturesmetropoli0000cron\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">Nature\u2019s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West<\/a> (1991); Francesca Gamber et al., <a href=\"https:\/\/commonplace.online\/article\/natures-metropolis-at-30\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">Nature\u2019s Metropolis at 30<\/a>, Commonplace (2021); Chicago Tribune, \u201cOur Grain Elevators\u201d (1861), reproduced with additional history at <a href=\"https:\/\/chicagology.com\/harbor\/grainelevators\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">Chicagology.com<\/a>; general reference sources on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and Camp Douglas; Libby Hill, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Chicago-River-Natural-Unnatural-History\/dp\/0809335301\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History<\/a> (2000); Emmett Dedmon, <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/fabulouschicago0000dedm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" style=\"color:#0645AD;text-decoration:underline;\">Fabulous Chicago<\/a> (1953); general reference sources on Mayor Levi Boone and the 1855 Lager Beer Riot.<\/p><p style=\"font-size:12px;color:#000;font-weight:700;margin-top:14px;\"><u>Photo Sources<\/u>: The rebuilt Fort Dearborn, 1816 \u2014 Wisconsin Historical Society; Kinzie\u2019s 1833 plat map of Chicago \u2014 Illinois State Archives, Illinois and Michigan Canal Commission records; Wolf Point, 1832 (George Davis) \u2014 Chicago History Museum; Illinois and Michigan Canal Commission map, 1836 \u2014 Newberry Library, Chicago; The Court House and City Hall after the 1858 grade raise \u2014 Chicago History Museum (Alexander Hesler); The Wigwam, 1860 \u2014 Chicago History Museum (Alexander Hesler); Camp Douglas \u2014 Library of Congress, Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs; Lincoln lying in state, 1865 \u2014 Library of Congress (photograph by S. M. Fassett); The first Palmer House, 1870 \u2014 Chicago History Museum. Internet sources of other photos are not identified.<\/p>\n<div class=\"vc-chap-nav\" style=\"display:flex;justify-content:space-between;gap:16px;flex-wrap:wrap;border-top:1px solid #ccc;margin-top:36px;padding-top:14px;font-size:15px;\"><span><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/chicago-colonial-era-1688-1812\/\">\u2190 Chapter 1: Colonial Chicago, 1688\u20131812<\/a><\/span><span><a href=\"https:\/\/wbowe.com\/chicago-post-fire-era-1871-1900\/\">Chapter 3: Post-Fire Chicago, 1871\u20131900 \u2192<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><div class=\"fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box fusion-builder-row-2 fusion-flex-container has-pattern-background has-mask-background nonhundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling\" style=\"--awb-border-radius-top-left:0px;--awb-border-radius-top-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-right:0px;--awb-border-radius-bottom-left:0px;--awb-flex-wrap:wrap;\" ><div class=\"fusion-builder-row fusion-row fusion-flex-align-items-flex-start fusion-flex-content-wrap\" style=\"max-width:1372.8px;margin-left: calc(-4% \/ 2 );margin-right: calc(-4% \/ 2 );\"><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-34060","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Early Settlement Chicago, 1813-1870 | A Cliff Dweller&#039;s History - William J. 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