The Potawatomi and the Treaty of Chicago

Before Fort Dearborn, before DuSable, before Marquette and Jolliet paddled through the Chicago portage, the Potawatomi had been living at the junction of the river and the lake for generations. They were the primary Indigenous nation at the site when the United States established Fort Dearborn in eighteen oh three, and they negotiated, traded, and fought with the Americans for the next thirty years. In eighteen thirty-three, the year Chicago was incorporated as a town, the Potawatomi signed the Treaty of Chicago at a gathering on the riverbank. They ceded their remaining Great Lakes lands in exchange for territory west of the Mississippi and a promise of annuity payments. Historians describe the treaty process as conducted under significant coercion: the United States government had made clear that removal was coming whether the Potawatomi signed or not.

The annuity payments were inconsistently delivered. The territory they were promised was not always what they received. Five years after the treaty, in the fall of eighteen thirty-eight, approximately eight hundred fifty Potawatomi were forcibly marched from northern Indiana, where many had remained, to Kansas. The journey covered more than six hundred miles in autumn conditions. Approximately forty people died on the march, most of them children and elderly. The Potawatomi called it the Trail of Death. The name was precise.

Three federally recognized nations trace their descent from those forced west and from those who managed to remain: the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi in Michigan and Indiana, the Forest County Potawatomi in Wisconsin, and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma, which is the largest.

The Treaty of Chicago is the founding legal document of Chicago's land tenure. It is the instrument by which the United States acquired ownership of the ground the city is built on. It is almost never mentioned in the city's tourism narratives, and its two-hundredth anniversary will arrive in twenty thirty-three.