Native American routes: the ancient trails hidden in Chicago's grid system
Many of the city’s roads began as indigenous pathways – just one example of Native American infrastructure that helped make Chicago a successful city
At 65, Chicago’s American Indian Center is the oldest urban indigenous center in the US. Its current retrospective highlights its importance to the city and is intended to serve as “evidence of the Native experience, existence, and survival.” But there is an easier way to see the enduring indigenous influence on Chicago – simply walk a few blocks east to Clark Street.
Named for George Rogers Clark, whose brother William was one half of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Clark Street was formed during the tail end of the ice age and has been a key trail for thousands of years. Its irregularity is an unnoticed but integral reminder of the many tribes that once called the area home, and a fitting example of the erasure of the Native influence on the city’s development.
Natural roots, indigenous routes
Over the course of four distinct periods of glacial melting, stretching as far back as 14,500 years ago, Chicago’s terrain was shaped by the ebbs and flows of melting ice. Through the process of littoral drift, where small bits of sand and organic matter drifted from place to place on the tide, small but distinct ridges were etched into the land. Those natural high grounds, rising no more than 10 or 15 feet above the rest of the terrain, became some of the pathways used by Native peoples as they began to inhabit the area about 11,000 years ago.
These high points held obvious value: most of the land was swampy, and very little stayed dry year-round. Indigenous tribes passed down their understanding of the land’s natural features through oral traditions. Incoming European settlers, including French trappers traveling to the area during the 17th and 18th centuries, depended on this knowledge for survival. They also quickly came to understand the significance of the trails, adapting them for commercial and military purposes.
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Continued erasure
Just as Clark Street betrays Chicago’s Native American roots by honoring those who saw to their removal, Rogers Avenue erases one of the few obvious markers of how Native removal was essential to the creation of Chicago. For years it was known as Indian Boundary Line Road, referencing the 1816 Treaty of St Louis that pushed indigenous people further out of Chicago. Only 17 years later, just a month after Chicago was formally incorporated as a town, the 1833 Treaty of Chicago revoked all indigenous claims to the area, allowing for the genocide of Native Americans to continue pushing westward.
In 1909 Indian Boundary Line Road was renamed after Phillip Rogers, an early white settler who had already given his name to the surrounding neighborhood of Rogers Park. The decision to hide the street’s importance contributes to the ongoing erasure of Native influence on modern Chicago.
The erasure of Indian Boundary Line Road, mitigated somewhat by a remaining nearby park with a similar name, as well as Pottawatomie Park, has historical implications for how Chicagoans today understand the legacy of Native removal. Other local street names such as Wabansia and Menomonee make direct reference to Native Americans who lived in the area centuries ago, but Low believes they don’t help people recognize the eradication of Native life that made Chicago possible.
“We have to remember that the urban landscape often almost completely overwrote indigenous territories in places like Seattle and Chicago,” agrees Coll Thrush, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
“Even when the urban geography has some of its roots in indigenous realities, we have to do the difficult work of reimagining those spaces as indigenous, by paying attention to the historical archive and by listening to descendant indigenous communities.”
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jan/17/native-american-routes-the-ancient-trails-hidden-in-chicagos-grid-system
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I think they were on Golf Road.
