In preparation · the research store is open →
Shikaakwa
shi·KAA·kwaA narrative history of the Chicago portage — the country before the fort, the fort itself, and everything the fort set running.
Chicago is not an English word, and it does not mean anything in English. It is a plant.
The Miami-Illinois word is šikaakwa. It names the wild leek that grew thick in the wet ground along the river — the ramp, Allium tricoccum — and it is built on the word for the striped skunk, because that is what the ground smelled like when the leeks were up. The French wrote down what they thought they heard, and the spelling is on every map and every airport board in the world.
Several million people say it daily. Almost none of them are told they are naming an onion, and none of them are told whose onion it was.
That is the whole reason this site has the name it has. A word outlives the people who spoke it, goes on being used by everyone who took their country, and quietly stops meaning anything at all.
And that paragraph is not yet sourced. It is the standard reading and the store does not hold a citation for it — which by this project's own rules makes it a claim, not a fact, however confidently a landing page states it. It will carry a source or it will carry a hedge. Until then it is listed as a debt, and you are entitled to know that before you believe anything else here.
What is already here
The research store is open. It is small on purpose — six sources, eleven facts, two of the cast, and one piece of ground — and every row in it is checkable, carries its source, and carries how far that source can be trusted. Nothing is smoothed. Where the record disagrees with itself, the disagreement is what gets recorded.
It opens on Fort Dearborn, because that is where the sister project’s research had already arrived. Juliette Kinzie’s Wau-Bun, Quaife’s Chicago and the Old Northwest, Gale’s Reminiscences, Parkman on La Salle. The fort is mapped to the yard; William Wells and Sweet Breeze are in the cast.
An example of what the store is for. On 13 August 1812, having promised the assembled Potawatomi the government stores in exchange for safe escort out, Captain Heald distributed the cloth and calicoes — and that night, on his order, had the ammunition and whisky secretly destroyed: poured into the well, the barrel-heads knocked in, the rest emptied into the river. The promised price of the garrison’s passage, poured away in the dark while, as the record has it, the Indians “crept, serpent-like, as near the scene of action as possible.”
The evening before the march, the chief Black Partridge came to the commander and gave back his American medal. “I cannot restrain them, and I will not wear a token of peace while I am compelled to act as an enemy.”
Two days later, in the killing at the sand hills, the same Black Partridge pulled the wounded Margaret Helm into the lake and held her out of it.
All of that is in the store with its sources attached, and it is the kind of thing this work exists to set down: not a verdict on anybody, but the record kept whole enough that a reader can see a man hand back a medal and then save a life two days later, and make of it what they will.
The same argument, in Chicago
The city named a street for William Wells — the captain who rode down from Fort Wayne to bring his niece out and died at the sand hills for it, his face blackened before he left the garrison in token of what he expected. In the autumn of 1870 the aldermen renamed the south-of-the-river stretch of it Fifth Avenue.
Not removed. Replaced by a number. Edwin Gale was still asking for it back thirty-two years later, and called the thing that displaced it “the meaningless name of Fifth avenue, which possesses no significance.” The name did come back, eventually.
Which is the same story šikaakwa tells about itself, told again three centuries later on the same ground: a name that meant something, worn down to something that means nothing, and carried now by people who have no idea it was ever anybody’s. It is filed in the store as tradition rather than fact — Gale was writing in 1902 about a council he did not sit in, and the 1870 minutes would settle it.
This runs forwards and backwards from Fort Dearborn, by the same rules as the sister work on the Maumee: sources named, disagreements recorded rather than resolved, legend labelled as legend, burial grounds never sharpened, and no claim made on behalf of the dead that the record will not carry. Kekionga and Shikaakwa sat at opposite ends of the same water road.