If you happened to be paddling a canoe down Lake Michigan in 1650 or so, you could make a sharp north turn around a sandbar and enter the mouth of a slow-moving creek the natives called “Chekagou”, which supposedly means something like “stinking onions”. If you continued west, avoiding branches to the north and south, you would end up in a stagnant swamp later called “Mud Lake”. If you then got out of your canoe and dragged it westward through the mud, you’d eventually end up, covered with leeches and mosquito bites, at another little creek which flowed west out of Mud Lake. Once there was enough water to float your canoe, you could head downstream until you reached the Des Plaines River (locals pronounce this “DEZ planes”, to the consternation of Francophones). If your paddling arms held out long enough, you could descend the Des Plaines to the Illinois, the Illinois to the Mississippi, and end up in New Orleans.


French, English and Americans all found this an interesting fact of nature, but what with wars against each other and the natives, not much was done about it right away. Although Carl Sandburg later made Chicago famous as the city of railroads, it actually got its start as a lake port – a very busy port, the third largest in the young US after New York and New Orleans. Chicago is, of course, even more famous for politics and the locals quickly got busy lobbying Washington for money to dig a canal. Congress didn’t come through with cash, but it did offer a land grant (similar to the way the transcontinental railroad was funded); the Canal Commission ended up with several sections it could sell. After initial attempts to build a deep-cut canal with no locks foundered on the Silurian Niagara Dolomite, the Illinois and Michigan Canal was completed in 1848.


The canal really got Chicago going; the population skyrocketed and the tiny frontier village was soon the second largest city in the country. That brought its own problems and this is where things get interesting for me. The various branches of the Chicago River were a convenient place for industry and households to dump effluvia, and the river quickly became as notorious an open sewer as the Fleet in London. One branch became known as “Bubbly Creek”, not because it cheerfully bubbled over rocks but because large bubbles of methane kept rising from the bottom. After a couple of cholera epidemics something needed to be done (the germ theory of disease wasn’t established yet, but people thought cholera was spread by bad smells, which was probably just as good for the public sanitation industry) . Thus, in an effort that was later hailed as “one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world”, the canal was deepened so that the water would flow west instead of east, and the entire city was raised 2 to 9 feet so gravity sewer drainage would work. St. Louis sought a court injunction, but in a effort typical of Chicago the canal commissioners showed up in the wee hours of the morning on the day the injunction was supposed to be issued and more-or-less personally opened the canal ahead of schedule. There’s a wonderful illustration of the city-raising work underway; a corps of brawny men, all dressed in identical striped shirts and all splendidly handlebar-mustached, rhythmically tug at the handles of screw jacks, lifting a building off its foundations. Crinolined ladies look on, doubtless nearly swooning at the sight of all those bare arms (Chicagoans had the right to bare arms back then). Not all the city was raised; you can still find old buildings in Bridgeport and on the near North Side where the original first floor (that’s ground floor for the UK) is now the second.


The last part of the book chronicles the now typical reversal of fortune for the river. Industries moved away from the banks and were replaced by high rises; antipollution laws finally got enforced, and the water cleaned up to the point that there are now fish in the river again, something probably not seen for 150 years. Chicago is still a major port, but the ships now come into Calumet Harbor, near the Indiana border.


Not a bad read, although somewhat specialized. It’s listed as a “natural history” work in the publisher’s catalog, but although there is some natural history, the industrial history was more interesting to me. Very well illustrated, especially with historic maps; these are quite necessary because a lot of the complicated river channels are now nonexistent, having been culverted or filled in. ( )

http://benfulton.net/blog/2004/08/book-review-chicago-river-libby-hill.html ( )