And Now For Something Completely Different
Submitted by roy on Sat, 11/08/2008 - 15:20.
A friend recently loaned me a book titled "Take The Cannoli: Stories from the New World" by Sarah Vowell. Vowell is a contributing editor for This American Life on Public Radio International. This book is a look at American history and culture, with plenty of humor thrown in.
My wife and I were recently in Chicago, and when I came to the chapter titled "Michigan and Wacker" I really got interested, as I could envision the scene that Vowell described.
Vowell then started to write about the early history of this place. The following is taken from her book:
The first person to grasp the significance of this place where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan was Louis Joliet. Joliet was a twenty-seven year old fur trader who accompanied a Jesuit missionary named Jacques Marquette ona canoe expedition from Quebec in 1673. They were to map the Mississippi in the name of France, unaware that Spain had already claimed the river some 130 years before. On the return trip, at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois River, then the Des Plaines. They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this spot where the river meets the Great Lake-just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker.
And Joliet then had a vision. His map of North America, an oddly pretty, delicate ink drawing he made in 1674, is concerned with one thing, and one thing only-water. His America is all Great Lakes and Mississippi. Look close and you can see what he was: From Lake Michigan, there is only one point-the future site of Chicago-that connects to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi. This is what Joliet knew, that this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and thus the Atlantic and the Gulf. All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between the rivers. He wrote, "We could go with facility to Florida in a bark, and by very easy navigation." Thus Joliet's map isn't so much a map as a prophecy: Stick your ear up against it and you can practically hear cash registers ring.
I like to picture Joliet sometimes, walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge, a go-cup in his hand from either the Starbucks on the south side of the bridge or the Starbucks from the north side, spitting coffee-laced saliva into the Chicago River, knowing it'll float-with facility-all the way past New Orleans and to the ocean from there.
The first person to get cracking on Joliet's dream was Chicago's permanent settler, Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, a trader who moved to the north side of the river in 1779. That was in the middle of the American Revolution, and a century after Joliet paddled by. Du Sable's mother was an African slave and his father was French. He was born in the Caribbean, on the island of Hispaniola. Which connects the land around the Michigan Avenue bridge all the way back to Columbus. Hispaniola, much to the dismay of its inhabitants, happened to be the place where Christopher Columbus dropped off forty of his Spanish raper/pillagers on Christmas Eve in 1492 as he headed back fror Spain, where he reported that the people he called Indians "had very good faces" but "could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes." Of course, certain settlers at Michigan and Wacker who met death by tomahawk in 1812 might have begged to differ with that assessment.
Du Sable built a small wood cabin on what is now the site of a thirty-five story office tower called the Equitable Building. With his Potawatomi wife, Catherine, Du Sable's marriage bed was itself a map of America-the mising of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes.
Chicago schoolteachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago's first resident, Du Sable, was a black man. And just think, it only took 204 years for the town to elect its first black mayor.
After reading this, it was easy for me to connect another Chicago resident to this story. A man born of an African father and American mother-Barack Obama. And just think, it only took 232 years for America to elect its first black President. But he's not black, he's American, born of people from different lands. Just like me.
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