Anyone who knows Chicago knows that there is a city full of diversity, rich culture, with people who are proud to be in Chicago, and a remarkable spirit of Chicago in the veins of the earth.
Yes, veins. Chicago was built on a marshy swamp. It is not easy. The Algonquin peoples inhabited the area for centuries, with its wetlands and waterways connecting journey through the Great Lakes and East Mississippi.
Swamp of Destiny
Frenchbegan to explore the region in early 1600. In 1673, these researchers have shown the Indian tribes, the area of "Rock Portage". Quickly see the potential of the waterways of the great lake of the Chicago River and the Mississippi River, which marked the area for the future.
Connecting Lake Michigan to the Des Plaines in the spring was a strip of expansive fountain called "Mud Lake". From this Chicago region grew at the bottom. The first settler, Jean BaptistePointe du Sable, was Haitian and French origin, settled on the Chicago River in 1770, and married a native woman Potawatomi.
Until the mid-1800s, Chicago had grown into a thriving metropolis of hundreds of thousands of people. The Windy City has not looked back. America's "second city" was destined to be one of the largest cities in the world and had to be nothing to stop it.
River mud
Despite the weather, which can really bitterWinters and humid summers and mostly in the Chicago River, the decades-backed sewage and pollution of water held on to Chicago.
Residents of the Chicago River known as "the stinking river" because of the large amount of waste water and pollution flowing into the river industries booming and people. In mid-1800 began thriving and prosperous future-oriented people to work towards creating a system of channels for a more efficientAway from the fetid River Des Plaines River. As a channel was dug successfully Mud Lake that connects the Chicago River to Des Plaines, employees were infested with leeches, mosquitoes and bacteria.
Gurdon S. Hubbard, a writer for the American Fur Company and was later the leader of a successful entrepreneur and travel in the city of Chicago, describes, or rather by commercial boats through Mud Lake was first developed.
"Those who wade in the mudoften fell to the waist, and sometimes were forced to stop on the side of the boat goes over their heads hanging, after reaching the final and camping for the night came the task of getting rid of leeches.
"The sea was full of these vile black plague, and stuck to the skin so tight that it broke into pieces when force was used to remove them, experience has taught us to eliminate the use of a decoction of tobacco, and refuge was with goodSuccess.
"Once we get rid of the leech, we were by myriads of mosquitoes that sleep attacks made without hope, even though we tried the softer places on the ground for our beds. Those who wade the lake has suffered terrible pain, their legs are swollen and inflamed, and their sufferings were not over for two or three days. "
Swamp of Transformation
In 1900, the Chicago Sanitary District built the canal and, conversely, the flow of the Chicago River.Until now flows into the lake, the river now flows from the lake for easier navigation. incredible stubbornness, sheer stupidity of happiness, or the determination of naked and pushing the people to keep refining the region, build, maintain and fix everything.
René Robert Cavelier de La Salle, the famous French explorer had this to say about the opportunities in the region.
"The Lake of Illinois is always a sandbank at the entrance ofChannel leads. I very much doubt, despite what anyone says, if this be cleaned out or force the flow of the Chicago River [Des Plaines] was removed when slid there, as the much larger currents in the same lake can not.
"Furthermore, the usefulness of a channel would not be very great, because I doubt that anything would happen if a boat of the great flood, causing the currents of Chicago [Des Plaines] may exceed theSpring .... Would in turn navigation for a short period of time exceeding 15 or 20 days a year, after which there is no water. What made me even more confirmed in the thought that the Chicago River [Des Plaines] could not wipe the mouth of the channel [Chicago River] is that if the lake is blocked by ice most of the navigable mouth full. "
Chicago real estate swamp was a city built on perseverance and vision. Through all the ups and downs, from the back ofImmigrants and freed slaves, all the political mist, rose the city of Chicago for the shining example of true America. A line from the movie "Field of Dreams:" If you build it, they will come "shows the Windy City Spirit from the beginning.
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