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

John Nelson's debut monograph is a carefully argued and elegantly organized contribution to multiple literatures that significantly reorients popular and scholarly understandings of Chicago and the western Great Lakes. Focusing on “a particularly small patch of earth” (p. 6)—the watery landscape directly southeast of Lake Michigan surrounding what became the city of Chicago—for over a century and a half, Nelson clearly and precisely renders the character of Indigenous power in these borderlands, the inability of French and British colonial powers to control them, and the unprecedented nineteenth-century landscape transformations that followed Native dispossession and the construction of canals, drainages, and other infrastructure. Nelson highlights the Chicago region's signal importance as a continental crossroads while modeling an approach that can simultaneously track historical contingencies and structural similarities across many sites in colonial, imperial, and settler colonial histories.Nelson owes clear debts to William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis while also demonstrating how much was lost in Cronon's preoccupation with Chicago's hinterland at the expense of its local geography. Cronon's (always cautious) employment of the terms “first nature” and “second nature” is revealed to obscure too much of the deep Indigenous history and ecological dynamism of the Chicago region. Nelson joins historians like Robert Morrissey, M. J. Morgan, and Susan Sleeper-Smith who have blended environmental and Indigenous history to characterize Indigenous knowledge and land use more accurately in the seasonal economies of the Great Lakes. His chapter titles—“Openings,” “Barriers,” “Crossroads,” “Thoroughfare,” “Floodgates,” “Closings”—reflect attention to how bodies, trade goods, and cultural customs moved through and manipulated space in this porous world. Nelson especially picks up Morrissey's concern with the tallgrass prairies of Illinois as an ecotone, or transition area, between the eastern woodlands of the Great Lakes and the drier, less forested grasslands of the Plains. The diversity of habitats and broader range of ecological niches in ecotones increase species richness. The Chicago portage region also constitutes another transition as the lowest, shortest continental divide between the watersheds of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. For centuries, Nelson shows, Indigenous communities from across the continent's interior were attracted to these opportunities at Chicago's portages, which served as arteries for extensive Indigenous movement and periodically as sites of more lasting settlement. Native communities along the coast of Lake Michigan and river valleys surrounding Chicago took advantage of rich game, fish, and waterfowl; regulated movement through waterways; and hosted gatherings of wide-ranging cultural, diplomatic, and economic purposes.Nelson's opening chapters offer a tour through key moments in Great Lakes Indian history that continue the assessment of the middle ground concept in an autonomous Indigenous region. Once shown Chicago's portages by Indigenous guides, seventeenth-century French explorers quickly sought to integrate the portages into imperial designs. But French efforts to project an Atlantic maritime vision onto waterways around Chicago faced dramatic fluctuations in water levels and a pesky sand bar at the mouth of the Chicago River. French traders, officials, and missionaries depended on Indigenous canoes and techniques for portaging and relationships with Native families that controlled access to furs and political power. Nelson brings together analysis from Indigenous languages, archaeology, wetlands ecology, and well-known archives to demonstrate how several Native groups strategically shifted between trade, diplomacy, flight, bribes, and military aggression in a familiar landscape. The result is a reinterpretation of the Mourning Wars that sees Miami, Meskwaki, Kickapoo, and Mascouten playing Haudenosaunee and Illinois confederacies off each other rather than being dominated by them and of the Fox Wars that sees French administrative blunders and internal rivalries exacerbating the conflict rather than encouraging peace in the face of allegedly intransigent Meskwakis.By the mid-eighteenth century, the Chicago region was a refuge for Natives and Europeans seeking life beyond the reach of French authority. Nelson shows how Anishinaabe peoples in this period employed a seasonal economy fine-tuned over centuries in the Great Lakes that varied settlement size and balanced agriculture, foraging, fishing, and hunting to integrate Chicago's portages as a southwestern node of Anishinaabe power. By explaining how Anishinaabe migrations to Chicago eased population pressures and internal tensions in communities further east and north, Nelson emphasizes that Native decisions must be understood as part of trajectories in Great Lakes Indigenous and environmental history that long predated European presence. By the late eighteenth century, those trajectories produced a dynamic multiracial fur trading community at Chicago whose safety and prosperity depended on good relations with southwestern Anishinaabe. Over the first several decades of the nineteenth century, incoming Americans fitfully but ultimately successfully replaced the protocols of commercial and diplomatic kin obligations with state administration of Chicago's portages. Beginning in 1816, the drainage of hundreds of thousands of acres of wetland and the construction of bridges, harbors, roads, and canals began to render the Chicago region unrecognizable from the abundant wetlands it had been for centuries. Nelson keenly describes internal improvements as “switching out the board on which the game was played” to create a “more legible, winnable topography” (p. 155). American officials understood that infrastructure at Chicago would both integrate the Great Lakes into an expanding national commercial network and eliminate the ability of the region's Anishinaabe to survive as independent peoples. As did Natives in the area: Nelson details how Native resistance from the 1810s to the 1830s rarely targeted white settlers themselves but rather land surveys, crops, bridges, horses, and livestock—mechanisms of the shifting land-use regime choking the plants, animals, and streams on which they depended. That resistance could not match the growing tide of farmers, land speculators, and entrepreneurs and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago extinguished all remaining Native land titles in Illinois and catalyzed removal. Nelson's sharp analysis of the connection between internal improvements and northern Indian removal is a tremendous offering to scholars of American Indian history, the early republic, environmental history, and beyond.Most limitations are finer points of historiography. For example, Nelson might have drawn more on Jacqueline Peterson and the larger Great Lakes creole literature to paint a more vivid portrait of the multiracial Chicago of the 1810s–1830s and explore how American conquest remade social categories and circumscribed Native and mixed-ancestry women's economic power. Some will object to details of portage locations and the narration of events like the Battle of Fort Dearborn. Others may have preferred more engagement with territorial, state, and pioneer historiographies. Such questions are appropriately left to area specialists and the Native communities who have maintained relationships with the place now called Chicago. Readers can explore references to tribal websites and scholarship related to those Native communities in Nelson's “Guide to the Peoples’ of Chicago's Portages.”