What was the most significant event in the history of Chicago?
The Great Chicago Fire? Wrong. The 1893 World’s Fair? Wrong. The Cubs winning the World Series in 2016? Tempting … but no.
Those don’t count. Because Chicago was already a dynamic city when they occurred. What happened to create a major metropolis here in the first place?
Time’s up! The most important thing to ever happen in the history of Chicago — for starters, it’s the reason Chicago is not a city in Wisconsin — isn’t well known here because it didn’t happen here, but 500 miles east, exactly 200 years ago Sunday: the opening of the Erie Canal, a 363-mile waterway from Albany, at the mouth of the Hudson River, west to Buffalo on the northeast tip of Lake Erie.
The opening was announced by a cannon firing in Buffalo at 9 a.m. Oct. 26, 1825, with the news echoed across the state, by guns placed within earshot of each other.
As that cannonade reverberated, Chicago was a swampy nowhere, a log stockade fort and, maybe, 100 residents. St. Louis, “the Rome of the West,” had 100 times the population. There were more enslaved miners digging for lead in Galena than there were residents of Chicago.
So how did the Erie Canal push Chicago to the forefront?
The canal meant a ship could sail across the Atlantic Ocean, pass New York City, travel 150 miles up the Hudson and transfer cargo to flatboats at Albany. Those boats would transverse the state via canal, load goods and passengers back onto schooners at Buffalo to range across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River, across Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River, up Lake Huron following the contours of Michigan, through the Straits of Mackinac down choppy Lake Michigan, to be deposited on its southernmost point, at Chicago.
If that sounds arduous, it was easy compared to the previous system — ox cart — unchanged since ancient Greece. Considered an engineering marvel on par with the pyramids, the Erie Canal cut shipping costs by 90%.
Jefferson’s take on canal: ‘A little short of madness’
Not everyone got it. President Thomas Jefferson, in a rare moment of short-sightedness, withheld federal funds, calling the canal idea “a little short of madness.” New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton made it his personal project. Work on the canal began July 4, 1817, three days after Clinton took office.
Some called it “Clinton’s folly.” Others immediately saw the canal’s implications, including Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois territory’s delegate to the House of Representatives. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the northern border of Illinois as a continuation of Indiana’s northern border, cutting Illinois off from access to Lake Michigan. Pope pressed Congress, already rattled by storms that would lead to the Civil War, arguing that being connected to the Great Lakes and the East, via the nascent Erie Canal, would tie Illinois to the Union. Without lake access, Illinois’s proximity to the Mississippi might draw it into the camp of the restive South. Congress agreed, and pushed the state’s border 60 miles north.
That’s why Chicago is in Illinois rather than Wisconsin. What got it going as a city was the prospect of the goods of the world landing at the sand bar blocking the mouth of the Chicago River. Where would they go from there? What would be loaded for the return trip? The soldiers at Fort Dearborn got busy excavating the mouth of the river, while the federal government began developing the port of Chicago.
Meanwhile, a dream that began when Jolliet and Marquette visited Native Americans here in 1673 — a canal leading to the Mississippi — was put into motion: a canal from the Chicago River, 96 miles south to the Illinois River at LaSalle. Then boats could continue into the Mississippi and down to New Orleans. The Erie Canal dropped Europe on Chicago’s doorstep; the I & M Canal would invite South America too.
A canal cost money. There was one readily available resource here: land. Chicago was surveyed and platted up so lots could be sold to finance a canal; plus land along the canal route. If you look at the original James Thompson Chicago map of August 1830, you’ll recognize Loop streets — Wells, La Salle, Clark. And west of the river are two street names that hint why this is being done: Clinton, for the governor of New York, and Canal, which gives the game away.
Meanwhile, native American tribes were finally pushed out in 1835, after a final ghost dance through the city.
A speculative frenzy broke out in Chicago. The population shot from 200 in 1833 to almost 5,000 in 1840. The I & M Canal was completed in 1848, a year that saw, not coincidentally, the opening of the Chicago Board of Trade, trying to stabilize wildly swinging grain prices.
Canal construction begins…without a civil engineer
The Erie Canal’s technical marvel wasn’t so much its 362-mile horizontal traverse across the state, though that required 18 aqueducts to cross rivers, but going up and down 675 feet of elevation, requiring 83 locks. When construction began, there wasn’t a trained civil engineer in the nation — the work was overseen by surveyors. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was founded in Troy, New York, in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer, a canal commissioner, to develop technical expertise.
The Erie Canal was the first example of American genius stoked by trying to overcome what historian Paul Johnson called “the tyranny of distance.” It is no accident that mile-gobbling technologies including the telegraph, telephone, radio and airplane were invented here.
Not everyone marveled at the change. European visitors were practically required to admire the 10 locks that can still be seen in Lockport, New York. “Nature is fairly routed, and driven from the field,” wrote Frances Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony Trollope, “and the rattling, cracking, hissing, spitting demon has taken possession of Lockport forever. … I have never been more out of humor at what Americans call improvement.”
Another way the Erie Canal influenced Chicago is in the people who built the I & M Canal. Then, as now, America off-loaded its hardest, dirtiest jobs to immigrants, and Irish gathered at the northern terminus, Bridgeport, first to build it, then to live and work the lumberyards and tanneries sprouting there. You can also draw a straight line from Irish ditch diggers to the rise of Richard J. Daley and his loyalty-based political machine.
Yet another impact was on agriculture. Farmers who previously sold their grain to their own communities suddenly had markets hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.
The effect of this cannot be overstated. Southerners were shocked to discover they could buy Iowa wheat more cheaply than wheat grown in the next county. The Industrial Revolution of the 1850s in England could take off because British farmers could leave their fields and go to cities to work in factories. America would feed them.
Canals weren’t central for long. Five years after the celebratory cannons boomed, the Baltimore & Ohio opened its first 1.5-mile route of track. Chicago’s first train — brought here by ship, as there were no tracks to the city — puffed from Kinzie Street in 1848 (and in a miracle of history, the selfsame engine, the Pioneer, can be seen today at the Chicago History Museum). Rail travel was expensive at first, but trains were faster, and tracks had the unbeatable advantage of not freezing over in winter. The Erie Canal stopped moving freight in 1903.
I & M Canal Hwy. today? The Stevenson
Traces linger. School children still sing about it — “I have a mule, her name is Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal…”
There is also some lovely biking through I & M Canal National Heritage Area, an hour south of Chicago.
But you don’t have to go to Channahon to see the canal route. You might trace it every day and never realize it. The I & M Canal ceased being a working freight route in 1933. Immediately plans were aired to put a “southeast super-road” on its right of way. The Great Depression nixed that. But the first post-war public works progress was a highway built on the canal route, initially called “The I & M Canal Highway.” Its name was eventually changed to the Stevenson Expressway, which follows the canal route for seven miles through the city, cars and trucks flying past where mules once slowly pulled flatboats.
And Chicago is still the major Midwestern metropolis, thanks to a canal nobody here remembers while we try to surf the next technological change — AI, our future or a bubble? — into the middle of the 21st century.
