Carroll Street east of the river’s north branch, and east of Water Street from North Water to Kinzie—to permit the canal trustees to widen and deepen the Chicago River and build a turning basin on the north branch of the river at Carroll Street. By resolving the uncertainty over property rights, then, the city destroyed an older landscape and created a new one more suitable for the demands of a growing commerce.41
Through river dredging and the offer of long-term leases, Chicago’s Common Council enticed private parties to build wharves on public lands. The Chicago River Harbor, constructed as a joint public and private enterprise, became a dynamic marketplace.
The Chicago Common Council pinned the costs of wharf construction on those who wished to use them—as opposed to all the city’s taxpayers. This was a matter of fairness, an acknowledgement by the city’s alderman that creating new infrastructure benefitted some people more than others. Even so, the construction of new infrastructure was sometimes a matter of intense dispute. If it was not a matter of cost, it was often a matter of space. Commerce followed infrastructure, as goods flowed into harbors, over roads, and across bridges. Consequently, the power to build or destroy infrastructure on public land was often tantamount to the power to establish or destroy a marketplace. Recognizing this fact, Chicagoans fought bitterly over where to locate the city’s bridges.
Breaking and Building Bridges for Commerce
Before daybreak one morning in July 1839, a “large crowd” gathered on the banks of the Chicago River to destroy the bridge at Dearborn Street. The precise identity and number of the people who came to the riverbank brandishing axes and sledge hammers that morning is unknown, but the crowd likely consisted mostly of Southsiders embroiled in in the great “Bridge War” with Northsiders.42
Ostensibly the Southsiders were acting in the interest of public safety. Built in 1834 on the order of the town trustees, the structure at Dearborn Street was the only bridge that spanned the main stem of the river. It was a rickety, three-hundred-foot-long “gallows” draw with two frames that loomed “like instruments of death” and a sixty-foot passageway for ships that could be opened by a team of six men pulling chains. For years its supports had been pummeled by the “blows of passing vessels,” and its planks worn underfoot of pedestrians and animals, causing the bridge to begin to disintegrate.43 The city had made repairs in 1835 and 1837, but structural problems persisted. In 1838, Alderman Henry Rucker reported on the city’s options: repair the bridge again for a cost of between $135 and $300, insert a float between its piers for $650, or replace it with a floating bridge at Clark Street for $1,090.44 In July of the following year, the Chicago Common Council ordered that the hazardous bridge be torn down and replaced with a ferry. The next morning an enthusiastic crowd “chopped the bridge to pieces.”45
The crowd’s eagerness to tear down the bridge owed less to concerns over safety than to its desire to control the corridors of commerce in Chicago and, with them, the city’s burgeoning grain market. Before railroads and canal boats stitched Chicago to the Midwestern interior, farmers brought their produce to the city on wagons known as “prairie schooners.” According to the Chicago Times, “Every night there came up out of the south a great fleet of prairie schooners that … often numbered five hundred, and came laden with wheat and corn.” The farmers came in from the south and, since the city’s principal grain warehouses lay north of the main stem of the river, they had to cross a bridge or sell their crops to a middleman on the Southside. Southsiders eager to insert themselves into that lucrative intermediary role were delighted when bridge defects led the Common Council to authorize the destruction of the draw at Dearborn Street. Those Southsiders, however, were not content to merely destroy one bridge. They also wanted to prevent the construction of any new bridges.46
During the late 1830s and early 1840s the Chicago Common Council debated not how to fund bridge construction but whether to even have bridges binding the sections of the city. As the Dearborn Street Bridge continually deteriorated, Northside businessmen led by Ogden spearheaded plans for an alternative bridge at Wells Street, for which they promised to pay.47 The Common Council included two aldermen from each of the city’s six wards. Its members, evenly split between Northsiders and Southsiders, rejected the proposal.
The council agreed that the Dearborn Street Bridge had to go, but it argued bitterly over whether to replace the span, and, if so, where the new bridge should be located. Southside Alderman Augustus Garrett led the charge against a new bridge; he even went so far as to claim that a span across the river would help British troops enter the city if they attacked from Canada.48 Northside real estate moguls Ogden and Walter Newberry, in turn, tried to win Southside aldermen’s support for the bridge. According to the Chicago Times, Ogden and Newberry gifted two blocks of Southside land to the Catholic Church for the purpose of building a cathedral with the understanding the aldermen would acquiesce to a bridge.49
By April of 1840, workmen were driving piles for a new span at Clark Street. Even so, the debate over the bridge continued. In 1841, the Common Council considered moving a new bridge from Clark to Dearborn, but took no such action.50 When a flood damaged the Clark Street Bridge in 1844, Garrett argued that it should be removed. Northsiders silenced him, however, by repairing it. With financing from private property owners like Newberry, the city constructed several new bridges across the river before the end of the decade, although not without the typical wrangling over location.51 With each new bridge, it became easier to shuttle people, goods, and information across the Chicago River.
The Shifting Sands of the Chicago River Harbor
As Chicago’s city leaders successfully harnessed public and private funds to build key infrastructure—bridges, wharves, and a deeper, wider river channel—in the 1830s and 1840s, and the Chicago River became a thriving harbor, one vexing barrier to commerce remained. The sandbar, described by La Salle over a century earlier, still stubbornly clogged the mouth of the Chicago River. Because it abutted the army’s Fort Dearborn and Lake Michigan, an interstate body of water, the sandbar was a federal responsibility, but the federal government failed to consistently allocate money to keep the channel open, which continually refilled with sand. Some influential political leaders from the south did not want to spend money developing a northern city, and Chicago’s leaders grew frustrated.
The river was the lifeblood of their city’s economy, and it had the potential to be a key harbor on expansive Lake Michigan, which runs 307 miles in length and up to 118 miles in width, with a maximum depth of 923 feet.52 On an 1821 visit to the Chicago River, geographer and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft observed that “after passing the Manitou Islands [off the cost of northern Michigan] there is no harbor or shelter for vessels in the southern part of Lake Michigan, and that every vessel which passes into that lake after the month of September, runs an imminent hazard of shipwreck.” But, School-craft noted, the “sand which is driven up into the mouth of the Chicago Creek” blocked deep draft vessels from entering that potential harbor.53
The mouth of the Chicago River had to be cleared of sand to permit ships to pass from the waters of Lake Michigan to the proposed canal. In 1830, surveyor William Howard told Congress that “The formation of a good harbor at this place [the mouth of the Chicago] is … indispensable to the efficiency of the proposed canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois river.”54 To establish such a harbor, however, engineers would have to contend with an incessant barrage of water and sand. The force of Lake Michigan’s current drove sand across the mouth of the Chicago River, closing off the stream from all but the smallest of vessels. When he made his survey of the Chicago River in 1830, Howard was surprised to discover that the sandbar did not owe to the sediments carried by the river into the lake. “A remarkable circumstance connected with the formation of this bar is,” Howard observed, “that these deposits of sand seem to be brought almost entirely from the North [by lake currents].”55
The Chicago River was generally
