Chicago in 1820; Antique Historic Illustration; Custom Printed

A fine archival reproduction of an antique illustration of the city of Chicago in 1820. Chicago was considered as a young city. When you stand today at the corner of Wacker Drive and State Street and look westward down the river, with the gleaming Wrigley Building, the twin towers of Marina City, and the wide facade of the Merchandise Mart to your right, and to your left the lofty forest of skyscrapers, it is hard to believe that only two centuries ago, all this was a lonely marshland of trees and tall grass, a place with an abundance of wild onions, from which the Iroquois gave it its name, Chicagou.It has always been a crossroads. Long before the white man came, the Indians knew this place as the portage between two great water routes - eastward through the Great Lakes, then down the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic; and southward down the Des Plaines River, into the Illinois, and then down the Father of Waters to the Gulf of Mexico.It was uninhabited then, a dreary no-man's land disputed by the Indians, the Iroquois who lived to the east, the Foxes who lived to the north, and the Illinois to the south.