The Illinois and Michigan Canal, Water, Commerce, and Chicago's Rise

Stand at the Chicago River and look south, and you are looking at one of the most consequential engineering problems in American history. Between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi system, lay ninety-six miles of low prairie and shallow river. A canal there would link the Atlantic seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico by water. The dream was as old as Jolliet's map of sixteen seventy-three. It took until eighteen thirty-six to break ground.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal was dug almost entirely by Irish immigrant laborers, many of them freshly arrived from famine Ireland, paid a dollar a day when they were paid at all. The work was brutal, the marshland malarial, and hundreds died in cholera epidemics during construction. The canal opened in April of eighteen forty-eight, ninety-six miles of water running from Bridgeport on the Chicago River south and west to LaSalle on the Illinois River.

The effect was immediate and enormous. Chicago, which had fewer than five thousand residents in eighteen forty, grew to over one hundred thousand by eighteen sixty, fueled in part by the canal's trade. Wheat and corn from the Illinois prairie could now reach New York and the world markets by water. Chicago became the grain and meat packing center of a continent.

The canal was made obsolete by the railroads almost as soon as it opened. The first locomotive arrived in Chicago in eighteen forty-eight, the same year the canal launched. Within a decade, rail was faster, cheaper, and year-round where the canal froze. The old towpath is now a recreational trail, the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor, running through a string of small towns whose rise and decline trace the full arc of American industrial ambition.