The French in the Heart of America

This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River–Riviere de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept–the Des Plaines. This path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed beyond all others of these trails, for it was beside this portage that Marquette suffered through a winter, detained there by a serious sickness when on his way to minister to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below. His hut was the first European habitation upon its site–the site of the future city of Chicago.