the lake on a low prairie bog and the north branch ran south along a low muddy plain parallel to Lake Michigan for about thirty miles. The two branches met a mile or so from Lake Michigan and flowed east past a settlement of about a dozen houses and Fort Dearborn. After Fort Dearborn, the river then turned south and dribbled over the sandbar and into Lake Michigan.56
As Howard had noted, Lake Michigan’s currents had created the sandbar through a process of littoral drift. According to the historical geographer Libby Hill, Lake Michigan’s current often flowed for two hundred nautical miles from Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula before it pummeled the Chicago lake shore from the northeast. As the lake waters flowed toward Chicago’s shoreline, sometimes aided by storms or great winds, they gained momentum and swept sand and other debris along with them. As a wave washed ashore, however, it lost its energy, dropping much of the debris. Some debris collected on the shoreline and some rolled back into the lake with the receding waves. As the receding waves bounced off the shoreline, they rolled back into the lake, not toward their origin in the northeast, but easterly and slightly to the south, continually moving the sands southeast along the shoreline. That littoral drift clogged the Chicago River’s mouth with sand and bent the channel southward.57
In the 1830s, the Army Corps of Engineers cut a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River, forever altering the shoreline in unforeseen ways. To open the harbor, Howard suggested to Congress that the Army Corps of Engineers cut a channel across the sandbar, so that the Chicago River flowed due east into the lake. Howard proposed building two long piers on either side of the river mouth that extended out into Lake Michigan, thereby, Howard hoped, protecting the river’s opening from sand.58 In 1833, Congress appropriated money. Army engineers, first commanded by Major George Bender and after 1834 by Lieutenant James Allen, cut a two-hundred-foot-wide channel through the sandbar so that the river flowed almost due east into Lake Michigan about one thousand feet north of its former outlet. By 1835, the south pier ran 700 feet into the lake and the north, or weather, pier extended 1,260 feet. Lieutenant Allen could already see that just north of the weather pier, a new sand bar was forming that threatened to encroach on the river channel as it grew. As the lake currents rolled in from the northeast, the north pier trapped sand, growing the north shoreline of the city by 320 feet between 1833 to 1837 and another 400 feet between 1837 and 1839, creating an area known as the “sands” and later Streeterville. South of the piers, however, the effect was just the opposite. The piers prevented the currents from depositing new sands and created an eddy that eroded the existing southern lakeshore, an area occupied by the U.S. Army Fort Dearborn and the city’s only public parks.59
The city of Chicago acquired the valuable but eroding Fort Dearborn lands from the federal government in 1839. By 1833, American forces had crushed the band of Sauk and Fox Indians led by Chief Black Hawk and forced Native Americans to relinquish their lands east of the Mississippi River.60 Fort Dearborn, therefore, became largely obsolete except that it housed the army engineers who worked to clear the mouth of the Chicago River. In 1838, Chicagoans petitioned the federal government to relinquish the fort because it was “useless for a military post.”61 In 1839, the Secretary of War granted 90 percent of the Fort Dearborn land to the city, reserving only a small parcel south of the mouth of the Chicago River for military buildings. The Fort Dearborn Addition to Chicago consisted of valuable waterfront lots and public lands. The addition consisted of seventy-six acres extending northeast from the intersection of State and Madison Streets to Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, most of which the city subdivided into lots and sold to private parties.62
President Martin Van Buren, however, ensured that some of the Fort Dearborn Addition lands were reserved for the public. Campaigning for reelection, the New York Democrat worried that he would lose western votes if eastern speculators bought up too much choice waterfront land in Chicago. Van Buren therefore ordered the General Land Office to designate the block west of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Madison Streets a “public square,” which became known as Dearborn Park. The land office marked the parcel east of Michigan Avenue “public ground.” This ground became known as North Lake Park since it adjoined a strip of lakeshore land to the south, between Madison and Twelfth Streets. The land had been set aside just three years earlier when the state’s canal commissioners elected not to sell it, instead deeming the space “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings or other Obstruction Whatever.” In 1844, the canal commissioners transferred control of that public space to the city of Chicago. By 1847, the land had become known as Lake Park, a popular promenading ground.63 The Fort Dearborn Addition therefore extended the city’s park space and endowed it with additional lakeshore and riverfront lots. But these assets were imperiled because the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to open the Chicago River Harbor had precipitated the erosion of the shoreline.
The city of Chicago had contradictory political and environmental imperatives. The city required a harbor. Yet, the acts of dredging the river and extending piers into Lake Michigan caused the erosion of valuable lake shore lands south of the mouth of the river. The city’s position highlights a common environmental and economic tension: the transformation of a landscape often simultaneously increases its value and sows the seeds of its destruction. Even if those goals were contradictory, though, the city had little choice. It had to simultaneously maintain the harbor and protect valuable private and public lands on the lakeshore, and it attempted to achieve these goals—without imposing heavy taxes on its population—by appealing to the federal government for lakeshore protection.
Within months of acquiring the Fort Dearborn Addition, the city of Chicago asked the federal government for the remaining federal lands as compensation for damage done to the shoreline. The mayor and Common Council complained to Congress that the “extension of piers forming the harbor … have caused such a change in the action and effect of the water on this shore of Lake Michigan that … land … on the south side [of the piers] … is rapidly disappearing.” To save “a large portion of the best part of our city” from the lake waters, the petition requested that Congress grant the city additional federal lands to compensate the city for the cost of “erecting a permanent barrier against this invasion.” The petition fell on deaf ears.64
If Lake Michigan’s currents posed a threat to the Chicago River Harbor, so too did the shifting sands of congressional politics. From 1839 to 1841, Congress, mired in sectional conflict over the distribution of internal improvement funds, allocated not a cent for harbor improvement. Meanwhile, in Chicago, sand crept around the north pier into the river’s mouth, clogging the channel and putting commerce in peril. In 1842, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Francis Sherman, and the Common Council petitioned Congress for harbor improvement money. Anticipating a debate over the national significance of the harbor, the mayor and aldermen highlighted Chicago’s emerging position as a gateway between east and west. “The agricultural prospects of all of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri,” noted the petition, “are … greatly dependent upon facilities for business … on the southwest part of Lake Michigan: which lake is part of the great channel by which the staples of these States will best reach the eastern market.”65
Indeed, the city of only about six thousand residents already boasted annual imports in excess of $1.5 million and exports of $348,362. The petition warned, however, that “serious and immediate evils threaten the … harbor for the purposes of commerce.” Critically, “the action of the wind … has formed a sand-bar across the pier.”66 Congress granted a modest ten thousand dollars in 1843 for Chicago harbor repairs.67 Even so, it mattered little in the grand scheme of things. For the harbor to remain open Congress would have to continually pour money into dredging and pier renovations designed to preserve the harbor from an incessant barrage of wind, water, and sand (Table 1).
Growing increasingly frustrated with Congress’s lack of sustained funding for harbor improvements, the Chicago Common Council challenged the federal government’s control of what remained of Fort Dearborn. In April of 1845, on motion of the lawyer
