Nature Bulletin No. 168-A  November 7, 1964
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Seymour Simon, President
Roberts Mann, Conservation Editor

****:THE ILLINOIS AND MICHIGAN CANAL

Chicago is and always has been the key to the Middle West. The 
Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa Indians were but the last of a long 
succession of Indian tribes to hold this region because of its strategic 
importance. Louis Joliet, returning with Father Marquette from a 
voyage of discovery in 1673-74, reported to the governor in Montreal 
that, in order to travel by boat from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of 
Mexico, it would be necessary to make but ". . . one canal intersecting 
only half a league of prairie in order to enter from the foot of the lake 
of the Illinois (Lake Michigan) into the river of St Louis (Illinois 
River). "

By 1803, the fur trade in the Northwest Territory had become so 
important that Fort Dearborn was established The war of 1812 
emphasized the necessity of a route over which military and naval 
forces and supplies could be readily transported to the northern 
frontier. In 1816, an Indian treaty granted to the United States a strip 
of land 20 miles wide along the route of a proposed waterway from the 
mouth of the Chicago River down the DesPlaines and Illinois river 
valleys. The bill for the admission of Illinois as a state was amended to 
shove its boundary, from an east and west line drawn thru the 
southerly bend of Lake Michigan, north to its present location -- solely 
because, then, the proposed canal might be entirely within and 
constructed by the new state -- thus serving, with the Erie Canal then 
building, to link the Atlantic Ocean with the Mississippi valley.

In 1822, Daniel P. Cook and Jesse B. Thomas, respectively 
congressman and senator from Illinois, obtained from the federal 
government a grant of the public domain consisting of a strip of land 
for the proposed canal and 90 feet on each side of it. In 1829, Cook 
(for whom the County of Cook was named) was also instrumental in 
obtaining passage of an act by which the federal government donated 
to Illinois, for the purpose of financing the construction of the canal, 
alternate sections of land for a distance of five miles on each side of it.

A canal commission was appointed, consisting of Gen. William F. 
Thornton, Col. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard and Col. William B. 
Archer, and in 1829 the towns of Ottawa and Chicago were laid out. 
On July 4, 1836, with a great celebration at Canal Port, the first 
spadeful of dirt was dug and the job begun. Due to floods, labor 
scarcity and the panic of 1837, little progress was made before work 
was abandoned in 1842. Resumed in 1845, the canal, 96 miles long 
from Bridgeport (just east of Ashland Ave. at about 28th St.) to 
Peru-LaSalle, was completed and opened for traffic in 1848. The first 
boat to pass thru the entire length of the canal was the "General 
Thornton" of LaSalle, with a cargo of sugar.

Immediately the canal became a tremendous factor in the development 
of Chicago and northern Illinois. The produce of the Illinois valley, 
formerly shipped to St. Louis, began to pour into Chicago. 
Merchandise from the east, via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, 
poured down the canal to the river towns and from them to the 
settlements rapidly being extended northward and westward. In 1830 
there were only 1310 people in that part of Illinois north of Peoria. By 
1850 there were 125,708, largely concentrated in Chicago and along 
the waterway.

Now, in 1964, the bed and the right-of-way of that canal have been 
occupied by the Southwest Expressway (US 66 and Interstate 55) from 
Chicago as far as Summit. From there to Lemont, in Cook County, it 
may become a forest preserve. From Lemont to LaSalle, parts of it 
have been and all of it should be developed as a state park.

That little old canal has made mighty contributions to the growth of 
Chicago.