
The French Origins of Chicago
Published on January 23, 2025
The first wave of Europeans to colonize North America focused on the Eastern seaboard due to its precious metals and fertile land. France was later to the game than Britain, Spain and the Netherlands, and could only claim the northernmost lands. But the establishment of New France (now Canada) in 1534 enabled France to eventually go further inland via the Great Lakes.
By Dave Lifton (@daveeatschicago)
The Marquette Building is included on two of our adventures dedicated to Chicago’s downtown architecture: Mimi Fron’s Art, Architecture & History, oh my! and Cathy Holleb’s Chicago, the Center of American Architecture.
In 1673, France sent a fur trader named Louis Joliet and Pere Jacques Marquette to lead an expedition of unsettled territory down the Mississippi River to claim the land for France, establish trade with the natives, and introduce them to Catholicism. As they returned north, the Indians who’d befriended them told them of a shortcut to the lake. If they took the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, they could go through a muddy portage that would take them to another river that fed into Lake Michigan.
Joliet wrote that replacing that portage with a canal would create an easy passageway between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. The natives called the area “shikaakwa,” after the pungent aroma given off by the fields of wild onions.

Nine years later, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle explored the same region at the start of his journey to the Gulf of Mexico. In his writings about his journey, La Salle changed shikaakwa to the more French-sounding “Checagou.”
By the start of the 18th century, Chicagou, as it was now known, had become key to France’s interests in North America (there may have even been a fort). It was a vital economic hub, as evidenced by a 1692 contract between a businessman in Ville-Marie (now Montreal) and four men to transfer goods to Chicago and return with beaver pelts.
Chicagou was also a missionary post. In 1696, Father Pierre François Pinet, a Jesuit priest, established the Mission of the Guardian Angel amid two villages populated by the Miami tribe. The precise location in modern Chicago of the mission is unknown, but it was described as being “built on the bank of a small river, with the lake on one side and a fine and vast prairie on the other.” That evokes the mouth of the Chicago River, although historians have speculated that it could have been anywhere from Lake Calumet to Highland Park, Ill.
The Mission of the Guardian Angel only lasted a few years. The arrival of Jean François Buisson de St. Cosme from the Seminary of Foreign Missions led to conflicts, and the agreement mediated by Count Frontenac, the Governor General of New France, resulted in the Jesuits’ departure.
Around the time that the mission was abandoned, the Meskwaki (Fox) nation was growing increasingly upset with France’s involvement on their land. In addition to charging high prices for goods, the French were supplying the Meskwaki’s main rivals, the Sioux, with arms. They blocked the river and the portage, damaging France’s economic interests in the area. As such, there’s no existing record of what the French—who were engaged in two wars with the Fox in Michigan and Wisconsin between 1712 and 1733—were doing in Chicago after about 1700.
But it is known that, in 1717, King Louis XV transferred control of Illinois Country—which consisted of Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, plus part of Iowa and Ohio—from New France to Louisiana. France lost all its North American territories in 1763 after defeat in the Seven Years’ War, with Illinois Country going to the British.

Still, Frenchmen continued to do business in the territory. One of them, a trader named Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, became the first permanent, non-indigenous resident of Chicago when he built a homestead at the river’s mouth at some point between 1778 and 1783. Born in present-day Haiti to a Frenchmen and an enslaved African, DuSable and his family stayed in Chicago until 1800, when he sold his compound and moved to St. Charles, Mo. A bust of DuSable was installed on Michigan Ave. in 2009, with the bridge named in his honor a year later.
Two other men of French-Canadian ancestry, Jean-Baptiste Beaubien and Antoine Ouilmette, were among the influential early settlers in the 40 years prior to Chicago’s 1837 incorporation. The suburb of Wilmette is named for Ouilmette, and Beaubien has a street named after him near Millennium Park.
Marquette and Joliet’s voyage to Chicago is recognized by a statue at the Chicago Portage National Historic Site in Lyons (the western end of the portage) and a monument to Marquette at 2631 S. Damen Ave. (the eastern end of the portage). In the Loop, the Marquette Building (140 S. Dearborn St.) has four bronze panels of Marquette’s life, with words from his journals, and the lobby is adorned with a Tiffany mosaic about Marquette and busts of Native Americans.

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