Checagou

Checagou lies beside a portage between Lake Michigan and the rivers of the Mississippi basin. The low, marshy divide allowed travelers to carry canoes between two vast water systems. Its Miami–Illinois name referred to wild onions or garlic that grew in the area, and was recorded by French visitors in the seventeenth century.

In 1673 Indigenous guides showed the crossing to Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette as they returned from the Mississippi. A century later the trader Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable established a home and trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River. The United States built Fort Dearborn there in 1803 to guard the route. The settlement grew into Chicago, incorporated as a city in 1837, as Indigenous peoples faced mounting pressure to leave their lands.