Liquid Capital. Joshua A. T. Salzmann
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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 too sluggish to carry much sand to its mouth. The south branch originated five or six miles southwest of 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