Before the Grid: Indigenous Mapping of the Chicago Portage
The conventional history of Chicago cartography begins with Louis Jolliet's 1673 map, the first European depiction of the Chicago portage. But centuries before Jolliet dipped his pen in ink, the peoples who lived in and around the Chicago region possessed a geographic knowledge so detailed and so functionally sophisticated that it guided every major European exploration of the interior of the continent. The Potawatomi, Miami, Illinois, Ojibwe, Odawa, and other nations of the Great Lakes region did not produce maps in the European sense, printed documents with grid lines and compass roses, but they maintained systems of geographic knowledge that were in many ways more nuanced, more dynamic, and more deeply rooted in the lived experience of the landscape than anything a European cartographer could produce from a single expedition.
The Chicago Portage: A Geographic Crossroads
To understand why the Chicago portage was so significant to indigenous peoples, you must understand the hydrology of the region. The portage was a low, marshy stretch of land, roughly six miles long, that connected the south branch of the Chicago River, which flowed into Lake Michigan, to the Des Plaines River, which flowed into the Illinois River and ultimately into the Mississippi. During periods of heavy rain or snowmelt, the portage was partially or entirely flooded, and canoes could pass between the two watersheds with minimal effort. During dry periods, travelers had to carry their canoes and goods overland across mud flats and wet prairie.
This portage was not merely a geographic feature; it was a continental junction. Anyone who knew the portage route could travel by water from the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean, through the Great Lakes, across the portage, down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The peoples who controlled the portage controlled one of the most important transportation corridors in North America, and their geographic knowledge of the route, its seasonal variations, its hazards, and its resources was the product of centuries of accumulated experience.
Indigenous Geographic Knowledge: Beyond Paper Maps
European cartography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a technology of abstraction. A map reduced the three-dimensional, seasonally changing, culturally layered landscape to a flat, static, geometrically ordered image on paper. Indigenous geographic knowledge operated differently. It was embedded in oral traditions, ceremonial practices, place names, and the lived experience of traveling through the landscape season after season, generation after generation.
This does not mean that indigenous peoples did not create physical representations of geographic information. The historical record contains numerous examples of maps drawn by indigenous informants on birch bark, animal skins, sand, or paper provided by European visitors. These maps often showed waterways, portage routes, the locations of villages and resources, and travel distances measured in days of paddling or walking. But these physical artifacts were only the surface of a much deeper system of knowledge that included:
- Seasonal route knowledge: Understanding of how waterways, trails, and portages changed with the seasons, including flood patterns, ice conditions, and the availability of food and shelter along the route
- Place-name systems: Extensive vocabularies of place names that encoded geographic information such as terrain type, water conditions, resources, and historical events associated with specific locations
- Oral navigation traditions: Detailed verbal instructions for traveling between locations, passed down through generations and refined through continuous use
- Ceremonial and spiritual geography: A sacred landscape of significant sites, burial grounds, vision quest locations, and places associated with creation stories and cultural narratives
- Ecological mapping: Knowledge of plant and animal distributions, seasonal migration patterns, and the locations of medicinal plants, all of which constituted a form of environmental cartography
The Potawatomi and the Chicago Landscape
By the late seventeenth century, when the first French explorers arrived, the Potawatomi were the dominant nation in the immediate Chicago area. The Potawatomi, whose name means "People of the Place of the Fire" or "Keepers of the Fire," were part of the Council of Three Fires alliance with the Ojibwe and Odawa. They had migrated to the Chicago region from the northern Great Lakes area, and their knowledge of the local landscape was both practical and profound.
Potawatomi place names in the Chicago area reveal the depth of this knowledge. The name "Checagou" itself, as noted in our article on the earliest known map of Chicago, most likely referred to the wild garlic or wild leek that grew abundantly in the marshy areas along the river. Other Potawatomi and Algonquian place names in the region described specific landscape features: the quality of water in particular streams, the character of the soil, the types of vegetation, and the presence of animals. These names constituted a form of geographic database that encoded centuries of environmental observation.
The Potawatomi also maintained detailed knowledge of the trail network radiating outward from the Chicago portage. Trails ran northward along the lake shore to the Ojibwe and Odawa territories around Green Bay and Mackinac, westward across the prairie to the Rock River and the Mississippi, southward along the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers to the heart of the Illinois Confederacy's territory, and eastward along the southern shore of Lake Michigan to the St. Joseph River and the Potawatomi communities in present-day Michigan. Each of these trails was known not just as a line on the landscape but as a complex, seasonally variable route with known camping sites, water sources, food resources, and potential hazards.
How Indigenous Knowledge Informed European Maps
When European explorers arrived in the Chicago region, they were not mapping an unknown landscape from scratch. They were traveling through a thoroughly known and carefully managed environment, and they were guided by indigenous informants whose geographic knowledge was indispensable. The historical record makes this dependence clear, even when the European cartographers and their patrons preferred to present their maps as products of independent discovery.
Jolliet and Marquette's 1673 expedition relied heavily on indigenous guides and informants. The route they followed from Green Bay through the Fox River to the Wisconsin River and down to the Mississippi was not a path they discovered; it was a well-established indigenous trade and travel route that their guides knew intimately. The return route through the Illinois River, the Des Plaines River, and the Chicago portage was likewise pointed out by indigenous informants who had been traveling it for generations.
Specific Examples of Indigenous Cartographic Contributions
- Route planning: Indigenous guides provided Jolliet and Marquette with detailed route information, including the location of the Chicago portage, the navigability of rivers at different seasons, and the distances between key waypoints
- Place names: The indigenous names that appear on French maps of the region, including "Checagou," were provided by indigenous informants and constitute a direct transfer of geographic knowledge from oral to written form
- Hydrological knowledge: Indigenous understanding of seasonal water levels, particularly the variable flooding of the Chicago portage, informed European descriptions of the route's navigability
- Political geography: Indigenous informants provided European mapmakers with information about the territories of different nations, the locations of villages, and the political relationships between groups, all of which appear on colonial-era maps
- Resource mapping: Information about the locations of fur-bearing animals, agricultural areas, and trade goods, provided by indigenous informants, shaped the economic geography depicted on French maps
The Treaties That Changed Boundaries
The geographic knowledge that indigenous peoples maintained of the Chicago region was ultimately used against them as the United States expanded westward. A series of treaties between 1795 and 1833 systematically transferred indigenous lands in the Chicago area to the federal government, redrawing the map of the region with each new agreement.
The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 ceded a six-mile-square tract at the mouth of the Chicago River to the United States, providing the site for Fort Dearborn, which was built in 1803. The Treaty of St. Louis in 1816, negotiated in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the Fort Dearborn Massacre of 1812, ceded a much larger area, a twenty-mile-wide strip running from Lake Michigan to the confluence of the Fox and Illinois rivers, encompassing the entire Chicago portage. The Treaty of Chicago in 1821 ceded additional lands to the south and west. And the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, the final and most consequential, ceded the remaining Potawatomi lands in Illinois and Wisconsin, approximately five million acres, in exchange for land west of the Mississippi and cash annuities.
Each of these treaties produced maps that documented the boundaries of the ceded territories. These treaty maps are among the most historically significant documents in the cartographic record of the Chicago region, because they record the precise moment at which indigenous geographic sovereignty was transferred, willingly or under duress, to the United States. The treaty maps also show the geographic knowledge of the indigenous signatories, because the boundaries they describe follow natural features, rivers, ridges, portage routes, that were defined by centuries of indigenous use and naming.
Recovering Indigenous Geographic Knowledge Today
In recent decades, scholars and indigenous communities have worked together to recover and document the indigenous geographic knowledge that underlies the European cartographic record of the Chicago region. Projects at institutions including the Newberry Library, the Field Museum, and the University of Chicago have mapped indigenous place names, trail networks, and seasonal land-use patterns using a combination of archival research, oral history, and archaeological evidence.
These projects reveal a Chicago landscape that was far more complex and culturally rich than the blank space that appears on most pre-settlement European maps. The "empty" prairie that European surveyors saw when they arrived was in fact a carefully managed environment, shaped by centuries of indigenous burning, planting, and resource management. The trails that became Chicago's diagonal streets, including Milwaukee Avenue, Archer Avenue, and Clark Street, were indigenous routes that followed the logic of the pre-European landscape.
At Earliest Chicago Maps, we believe that understanding the indigenous cartographic heritage of the Chicago region is essential to understanding the city's full history. Our research services team can assist scholars, educators, and community organizations working on projects related to indigenous mapping and land use. We also offer reproduction prints of colonial-era maps that show indigenous place names and territorial boundaries, suitable for educational display and scholarly reference. Explore the pre-colonial cartographic record of Chicago using our Chicago Timeline Explorer.
