Increased Settlement and the Transformation of the Great Lakes
The first of these cessions to impact Chicago was the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which ended a conflict known as the Northwest Indian War. While most of the land ceded in the treaty is in what is now known as Ohio, the agreement also included cessions of a number of small land tracts at strategic locations throughout the Great Lakes, such as the mouth of the Chicago River.
This cession enabled the construction of Fort Dearborn in 1803, and as a result, an increasing number of white settlers and their families began moving into the Chicago area. Some of these settlers lived in accordance with Native protocols and limited their settlements to the land ceded in the Treaty of Greenville, while others illegally settled on unceded land and were disrespectful of Native lifeways and protocols.
Illegal settlements in Chicago and across the Great Lakes, as well as attacks on Native villages, led Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa to organize an intertribal resistance movement that appealed to several Neshnabé (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) leaders in Chicago. In the summer of 1812, Tecumseh and his allies coordinated a series of attacks on American forts, including Fort Dearborn. The Battle of Fort Dearborn ended in the deaths of many American settlers and Native fighters. Over time, it has been cast as one of Chicago’s founding stories and used to paint Native people as violent savages, but the reality of the event is much more complicated.
