Oak Park Continental Divide Page 5

The colonies in the east were coalescing into a union. The French were withdrawing, but their influence would remain. A major contribution of the French was to give the names to the main features of the portage. Illinois, the State and the river, was ininiok and then illiniwek, Indian names for the confederacy of six tribes which occupied the area.¹⁴ This was changed by the French to Illinois. The name of the Des Plaines River is a corruption of eau plein, "full of water"¹⁵, referring not to the river, but to the sap-flowing maple trees along its banks. The portage was occasionally referred to as Portage des chênes, after the many oak trees near Mud Lake. Later it came to be called le portage de Checagou¹⁶ after the wild onions that grew in the area. Chicago was named after the portage, not the other way around.¹⁷

The Indians had occupied the area for five hundred generations¹⁸ -- over ten thousand years. There were sophisticated trade routes, stretching all the way to Florida.¹⁹ They had, of course, been using the portage for a long time. Trails from the portage led east and west and also north, along the old beach ridge, to and through Oak Park.

The Indians had reestablished control of the area of Illinois in about 1700.²⁰ and for the next hundred years there was very little traffic on the trade route.²¹ During this time, the portage would be under three flags of three countries; France, England and the United States. The British took control from the French in 1763.²² The newly formed United States gained the land by the Treaty of Paris in 1783,²³ which ended the Revolutionary War. Soon thereafter, the first, and for awhile, the only permanent local settler was Jean Baptist Point du Sable, who built a cabin on the Chicago River, near Lake Michigan in 1779.

The spirit of manifest destiny and the official U.S. policy of "Indian Removal" continued. In 1795²⁴, the Treaty of Greenville, between the U.S. and Indian tribes, created peace in the area, and the U.S. took a parcel of Land, six miles square, at the mouth of the Chicago River.²⁵ Fort Dearborn was built in 1804,²⁶ and generally secured the area except for a massacre and destruction of the fort in 1812. In 1816 Territorial Governor, Ninian Edwards, negotiated a treaty with the Indians, taking control of a strip of land twenty miles wide from the mouth of the Chicago River to the Illinois River, and then ten miles wide to the Fox.²⁷ The northern border of this strip still shows as Forest Preserve Drive adjacent to Indian Boundary Golf Club in Norridge.²⁸ Finally, in 1832, with the Treaty of Chicago ending the Black Hawk War, the Indians left all of Illinois.

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