Boom, Bust, and Recovery in Early Chicago, 1835–1850

This chapter looks at the start of construction on the long-anticipated portage canal that would link Chicago with the westward-flowing Des Plaines River in 1836. It mentions Judge Theophilus Smith of the Illinois Supreme Court who predicted that Chicago would boast 20,000 inhabitants in twenty years and 50,000 in fifty years. The chapter describes the enthusiasm of the local residents of Chicago that were wildly optimistic about the town's prospects and their expectation of Chicago to grow quickly into a frontier metropolis. It also talks about the level-headed observers that had every reason to reject the prospects of Chicago dominating the Old Northwest since it was considered small, dirty, and unattractive in 1836. It describes Chicago's winters that were bitter and long, in which the ice closed Lake Michigan to shipping for at least one-third of every year.

The Illinois

Patrick Henry ordered Col. George Rogers Clark to take the Illinois country for Virginia in January 1778. Using Fort Pitt information and Spanish support secured by Henry, his Illinois Regiment surprised the largely French population at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes in July. After British governor, Henry Hamilton, brought a Detroit force to recapture Vincennes, Clark led his 170-man army through “a drowned country” in February 1779 to retake Vincennes and capture its commander. The British surrender of Vincennes survives among the most important events of the American Revolution, as it nullified the Crown’s plan to capture the American West before trapping Washington on the east coast. The new country’s ability to hold the territory through the Treaty of Paris negotiations also secured the Old Northwest territory for the United States.

George Rogers Clark and William Croghan

This is a story of greed, adventure and settlement; of causes won and lost. The book’s theme is eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflict and settlement in the Ohio River valley, told within the context of the national and international events that led to the American Revolution and guided Kentucky’s postwar future.“Colonel” George Croghan serves as the exemplar of Britain’s trans-Appalachian experience. The Revolution was fought in three theaters; the northern belonged to George Washington, and among his officers was Croghan’s nephew, Major William Croghan. The major joined the southern theater at the moment the Continental Army surrendered to Britain in Charleston. The third theater was the Revolution in the West, and its leader was Virginia colonel, later general, George Rogers Clark, whose vision secured the old Northwest Territory for the new nation. Taken together, the war adventures of Clark and Croghan epitomize the American course of the Revolution. Croghan and Clark arrived at the Falls of the Ohio River after the Revolutionto survey the land that served as payment for Virginia’s soldiers. Clark, however, regularly was called by Virginia and the federal government to secure peace in the Ohio River valley, leading to his financial ruin and emotional decline. Croghan, his partner and brother-in-law, remained at Clark’s side throughout it all, even as he prospered in the new world they had fought to create, while Clark languished.

Fighting Hunger, Fearing Violence after the Revolutionary War

This chapter assesses how, after the Revolutionary War, Native Americans increased their authority by working with the U.S. government to circumvent hunger. The federal government failed to win power because it cost so much to distribute food aid, and the government was not yet powerful enough to refuse to do so. Postwar Indian country was a place of simultaneous resilience and desolation; although burned villages and scattered tribes provide plentiful evidence of disruption, there were numerous sites where Indian power waxed, at least until the mid-1790s. Approaches to Indian affairs, which included food policy, varied from state to state and evolved in three separate regions in the 1780s and 1790s: the southern states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia; the mid-Atlantic states of New York and Pennsylvania; and the old northwest region of the Ohio Valley. Food negotiations reveal similarities between federal and state approaches, but also demonstrate that it was the competition between the states and the federal government that by 1795 left Native Americans more willing to accommodate U.S. officials in a joint cooperative fight against hunger.