Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent

Histories of Chicago’s spatial transformation have long privileged the urban expansion of the United States from the mid to late nineteenth century and neglected the region’s Indigenous and colonial past. Yet the Chicago Portage, an ecologically diverse wetland that connects Lake Michigan to the tributaries of the Mississippi River, was both home to several Native American nations and a site of colonial settlements. John William Nelson’s Muddy Ground joins an energetic body of scholarship on human encounters and the natural environment that encourages new multicultural perspectives of interior maritime worlds like the Chicago Portage.As Nelson asserts, the transformation of the Chicago Portage was neither seamless nor guaranteed as European and later American expansionists imagined. Through a localized view of human-environment relations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nelson concludes that sequential colonial efforts to harness waterborne mobility (as opposed to military invasion) ultimately displaced Indigenous authority in the Chicago Portage. The nascent United States was especially effective in shifting the portage’s power dynamics following a strategic, well-financed effort to reengineer the natural environment. It was imposition of infrastructure, rather than adaptation to Indigenous modes of trade and travel, that emboldened US authority over this space.Nelson examines encounter and conflict in the Chicago Portage through a lens of geographic mobility. Depicted as a cosmopolitan borderland, the portage produced a complex set of human relations and protocols distinct from the conventional “middle ground” narrative of the Great Lakes. Nelson exemplifies this claim in a discussion of colonial and Indigenous upheavals during the eighteenth century. The French empire’s alliances with Native nations not only proved unstable but also fueled conflict across the region, including the Fox Wars from 1712 to 1733. In the latter half of the century, Potawatomi migration into the portage “unseated older tribal authorities, disrupted expected alliances, and yielded to new geographies of power” (119). When the region entered the US domain under the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, emerging US leaders sought to first seize “strategic sites of movement” like Chicago and then overhaul the geography to support US industrial, agricultural, and commercial interests (121).Indigenous experiences in and around the Chicago Portage are a key point of inquiry for Nelson, who includes vignettes of leaders like Sigenauk and Nakiowin (Anishinaabeg), Little Turtle (Miami), Black Hawk (Sauk), and Simon Pokagon (Pokagon Potawatomi). Nelson reconstructs many of these narratives and the region’s Native history more generally from archaeological evidence, maps, government correspondence, and reports by missionaries, traders, and explorers. It is important to note, however, that Nelson makes frequent use of colonial terminology that limits the book’s ability to capture Chicago as an inherently Indigenous space. To be sure, Nelson asserts that Chicago “was and is claimed as the homeland of many Indigenous nations” (10). However, an uncritical usage of terms like conquest, frontier, Native settlers/settlements, Native refugees, and internal improvements prevents the reader from fully engaging with the possibilities of Indigenous futures in the region. Each concept carries the historiographical weight of scholars who have debated its meaning. Native scholars in particular have long asserted that such terms can inadvertently reproduce settler colonial harm in historical narratives. Muddy Ground would have benefited from a stronger engagement with Indigenous theories, sources, and methods that illuminate the cultural nuances of Native spatiality and sovereignty.Nonetheless, Nelson provides an insightful perspective on the spatial transformation of the Chicago Portage as a gateway to the North American interior. Nelson’s clear organization and assembly of evidence reveals the complex nature of these spatial relations. Muddy Ground leads the push for future studies of Native geography, diplomacy, and intercommunal relations in the dynamic spaces that connect coastal and interior waters.