page_title: Chicago River
section_title: Exploration and settlement
hierarchical_section_title: Chicago River / History / Exploration and settlement
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving showing Fort Dearborn, Chicago, Illinois, as it appeared in 1831
context_page_description: The Chicago River is a system of rivers and canals with a combined length of 156 miles that runs through the city of Chicago, including its center. Though not especially long, the river is notable because it is one of the reasons for Chicago's geographic importance: the related Chicago Portage is a link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.
  The River is also noteworthy for its natural and human-engineered history. In 1887, the Illinois General Assembly decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River through civil engineering by taking water from Lake Michigan and discharging it into the Mississippi River watershed, partly in response to concerns created by an extreme weather event in 1885 that threatened the city's water supply. In 1889, the Illinois General Assembly created the Chicago Sanitary District to replace the Illinois and Michigan Canal with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a much larger waterway, because the former had become inadequate to serve the city's increasing sewage and commercial navigation needs.
context_section_description: Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, though probably not the first Europeans to visit the area, are the first recorded to have visited the Chicago River in 1673, when they wrote of their discovery of the geographically vital Chicago Portage. Marquette returned in 1674, camped a few days near the mouth of the river, then moved on to the Chicago River–Des Plaines River portage, where he stayed through the winter of 1674–75. The Fox Wars effectively closed the Chicago area to Europeans in the first part of the 18th century. The first non-native to re-settle in the area may have been a trader named Guillory, who might have had a trading post near Wolf Point on the Chicago River in around 1778. In 1823 a government expedition used the name Gary River (phonetic spelling of Guillory) to refer to the north branch of the Chicago River.
  Jean Baptiste Point du Sable is widely regarded as the first permanent resident of Chicago; he built a farm on the northern bank at the mouth of the river in the 1780s. The earliest known record of Pointe du Sable living in Chicago is the diary of Hugh Heward, who made a journey through Illinois in the spring of 1790. Antoine Ouilmette claimed to have arrived in Chicago shortly after this in July 1790.
  In 1795, in a then minor part of the Treaty of Greenville, an Indian confederation granted treaty rights to the United States, to a parcel of land at the mouth of the "Chicago River". This was followed by the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis and Treaty of Chicago, which ceded additional land in the Chicago area. In 1803, Fort Dearborn was constructed on the bank opposite what had been Point du Sable's settlement, on the site of the present-day Michigan Avenue Bridge. Lieutenant James Strode Swearingen, who led the troops from Detroit to Chicago to establish the fort, described the river as being about 30 yards (27 m) wide and upwards of 18 feet (5.5 m) deep at the place where the fort was intended to be built; the riverbanks were 8 feet (2.4 m) high on the south side and 6 feet (1.8 m) on the north.
caption: Near the mouth of the Chicago River 1831
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