Book review: “Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent” by John William Nelson

The key moment in John William Nelson’s important, original and eye-opening history of the place that became the city of Chicago — Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent — features a retired American soldier named James Leigh.

In the spring of 1811, Leigh asked permission to “make a small improvement” on U.S. government land along the Chicago River about three miles southwest of Fort Dearborn. Based on a promise from an earlier commander, Leigh, his wife and her father, also a retired soldier, had already built a small house on the land at the eastern end of the Chicago portage and cleared about ten acres for his large stock of cattle.

Those now in charge of the fort grudgingly gave him the approval he sought but they were worried. And they were right to be because, in clearing and farming those acres, Leigh was radically changing the patterns of land use that had been in place for hundreds of years in the area.  So radical was Leigh’s move that it led directly to the Battle of Fort Dearborn a year later in which more than 50 Americans died.

As Nelson, a history professor at Texas Tech University, relates, Leigh wasn’t the first outsider to settle in the portage area to make a profit, but he was the first to claim ownership of the land through the changes he was making to it.

The first non-Native American settlers in Chicago were traders, men and women who were taking advantage of the frequent traffic through the Chicago portage and fitting themselves into the economic and environmental life of Native Americans. They included Jean Baptiste and Catherine Point de Sable (also spelled Point du Sable), Antoine and Archange Ouillemette (whose name was later given to the northern suburb Wilmette), John and Eleanor Kinzie, and Jean LaLime.

 

“An ancient gateway”

This portage — honored today with the Chicago Portage National Historic Site at the Portage Woods Forest Preserve at 4800 S. Harlem Ave. in southwest suburban Lyons — was “an ancient gateway” between the Chicago River and DesPlaines River along the continental divide.  It linked the Great Lakes waterway system to the Mississippi system and, by extension, the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.  Nelson writes:

“Chicago stood as a portal between the…forest-lined Great Lakes watershed and the tallgrass prairies of the Illinois Country and Mississippi drainage.

“For centuries, Indigenous travelers had used the overland ‘carrying place’ through Chicago to pass their boats from one watershed to the other, and [since the 1600s] Europeans had been learning to do the same from Native guides, allies, and kin.”

The portage could be traveled by canoe in times of high water.  Usually, though, it was muddy ground, requiring travelers to carry their canoes and goods — to portage them — along side paths to open water. Europeans and Americans called the area Mud Lake.

 

Redefining the land

For hundreds of years, the portage had been “a transitional environment” through which many Native American tribes migrated, a relatively easy way to get from one place to another and also a rich place for hunting, fishing and food-gathering. For much of the time, no Indigenous group held control.

Then, during the latter half of the 18th century, a group of the Anishinaabe peoples (Anishinaabeg), including the Potawatomis, moved into the region and found ways to dominate it. To protect the land and their way of life, they kept non-Indigenous visitors, particularly the British and Americans, at arm’s length.

Now, however, at the beginning of the 19th century, James Leigh was redefining the land and its meaning, as Nelson explains:

Whereas Point de Sable, Ouillemette, LaLime, and John Kinzie had established themselves at Chicago through kinship and commercial ties among the Anishinaabeg, Leigh brokered no relations with the area Potawatomis….

Leigh’s occupation of the land adjacent to the portage signaled a departure from the initial intentions of the American garrison at Chicago and marked a radical break from earlier patterns of settlement and livelihood along the portage.

 

A trailblazing Chicago history

Muddy Ground is a trailblazing Chicago history in which Nelson writes with an emphasis on the experience of Native Americans and gives high priority to the environment in which they lived.

All earlier narratives have centered on the acts and ideas of the Europeans and Americans who came to the Chicago area to make money as traders and eventually to take possession of the place as settlers, and have treated the Indigenous peoples as secondary characters.

Muddy Ground is a tour de force of synthesis in which Nelson has gathered the histories and traditions of the many tribes who lived around and near the Chicago portage and tells his story from their perspective.

And his striking account shows that, for two centuries, Native Americans were able to retain control in the region in the face of European and American intrusions because their way of life fit the muddy ground environment of the portage.  French, British and American officials were frustrated at every turn by a landscape that wasn’t what they wanted it to be.

 

A reshaping of the land

Indeed, what led to the American triumph over the Indigenous peoples of the area wasn’t military in nature.  And it wasn’t the wave upon wave of settlers who eventually arrived.

It was, instead, a reshaping of the land itself, a redefining of the land from muddy ground to property that could be bought and sold.

What won the place that became Chicago was infrastructure — bridges and a canal, street grids and harbor improvements, roads and highways, ditches and dikes and levees and lighthouses. Nelson writes:

“The American state sought to overhaul the geography and environments of places like Chicago that for centuries had operated as sites of Indigenous power and colonial consternation.  When U.S. officials and incoming settlers finally did bring about a conquest of Chicago in the 1830s, they did so only by transforming the geography and ecology of the local area through a series of infrastructure improvements that undercut the geographically based power of Chicago’s Anishinaabeg….

“Only after extensive state investment and intensive alterations to the landscape did Americans succeed in creating a usable site of empire at Chicago.”

Nelson notes that, over a period of decades, 367,485 acres of wetlands in the portage area were drained.  That’s twice the number of acres in the present-day city of Chicago.

 

“Changing the board on which the game was played”

Such drainage work and other infrastructure efforts not only made the land more usable for the Americans but made the land less usable for Native Americans, writes Nelson.

“Reductions in aquatic vegetation, most notably wild rice, removed an important food source for Chicago’s Anishinaabeg, who harvested the abundant grain every autumn from the meandering river channels of the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers.  The loss of wild rice, and wetlands in general, also diverted waterfowl migrations away from Chicago’s local vicinity, reducing hunting quarry as well.”

These are strikingly significant insights into the story of Chicago and of the people who lived in this area for centuries and the people who replaced them.  Muddy Ground is a book that any professional and amateur Chicago historian needs to read.  Nelson’s new understanding of how Chicago came to be needs to be woven into all future histories of the city.

The city of Chicago didn’t come to be because geography made it inevitable.  And it didn’t come to be because of some extraordinary innovative spirit of the first settlers.  It came to be because of infrastructure.  As Nelson writes: “By undermining the local environments of Indigenous power, the United States changed not simply the rules of the game but the board on which the game was played.”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.22.24

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 10.10.24.