Chicago

First settlers

During the mid-18th century the area was inhabited by a native American tribe known as the Potawatomis, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples. The first known nonindigenous permanent settler in Chicago, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable,a Haitian, arrived in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi woman, and founded the area’s first trading post. In 1803 the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in the 1812 Fort Dearborn massacre. The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi later ceded the land to the United States in the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were eventually forcibly removed from their land following the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of 350. Within seven years it grew to a population of over 4,000. The City of Chicago was incorporated on March 4, 1837. The name "Chicago" is the French rendering of the Miami-Illinois name shikaakwa, meaning “wild leek.”[9][10][11] The sound shikaakwa in Miami-Illinois literally means 'striped skunk', and was a reference to wild leek, or the smell of onions.[10] The name initially applied to the river, but later came to denote the site of the city.