A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America

Seven muddy miles transformed a region and a nation

This fascinating account explores the significance of the Chicago Portage, one of the most important--and neglected--sites in early US history. A seven-mile-long strip of marsh connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the portage was inhabited by the earliest indigenous people in the Midwest and served as a major trade route for Native American tribes. A link between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, the Chicago Portage was a geopolitically significant resource that the French, British, and US governments jockeyed to control. Later, it became a template for some of the most significant waterways created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The portage gave Chicago its name and spurred the city's success--and is the reason why the metropolis is located in Illinois, not Wisconsin.

A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America is the definitive story of a national landmark.

Author: Benjamin Sells
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 08/15/2021
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.91w x 0.71d
ISBN13: 9780810143906
ISBN10: 0810143909
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | State & Local | Midwest(IA,IL,IN,KS,MI,MN,MO
- History | Maritime History & Piracy
- History | North American

About the Author
BENJAMIN SELLS is the author of the The Tunnel under the Lake: The Engineering Marvel That Saved Chicago, also published by Northwestern University Press. His other books include The Soul of the Law, which was recently reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition; The Essentials of Style: A Handbook for Seeing and Being Seen; Order in the Court: Crafting a More Just World in Lawless Times; and The Soul of Sailing.