A fresh look at the place name Chicago

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by McCafferty, Michael

"Chicago" has long been recognized as an original American Indian designation applied within an area rich in a kind of garlic or onion. Chicago's own late Virgil J. Vogel, a historian and educator, and Chicago's own John F. Swenson, an attorney and onion specialist, did important work in the late twentieth century in narrowing down the meaning and referent of this place name and dismissing earlier incorrect etymologies and referents for it.1 Although Swenson himself made some incorrect linguistic pronouncements and mismanaged the primary Illinois language sources, he did succeed in presenting a convincing case that "Chicago" refers to Allium tricoccum, a plant known to the historical French as "ail sauvage" (literally "wild garlic") and to speakers of modern American English as the wild leek. This article has a dual intent-to round out the study of "Chicago" by providing new, important historical linguistic information about this place name and to clean up some problems in the literature previously published on it.2

Place names created by Native Americans in the land now known as the American Midwest generally fall into three categories. A name can be a descriptive term for a river, lake, site, and so on. The name of a stream or a lake can refer to a prominent aquatic animal, spirit, or plant living in or near its waters. Or the name of a place, river, or lake can embody a tribe name or, in late historical times on rare occasions, a personal name of some well known individual, usually a native leader, who lived there. In other words, most genuine historical American Indian place-names in the mid-continent tend to be descriptive expressions, labels applied by prehistoric and early historic hunting-gathering-farming peoples specifically for practical geolocational purposes within a complex natural world. In this way their function is, for the most, part quite different from European language place names later established in the same area. The latter tend to serve other kinds of cultural needs. However, the penchant that the former have for communicating direct, meaningful, and typically very useful information, most often geophysical, spiritual, biological, or ethnonymic in nature, is their most salient characteristic. In this light, one should never underestimate their significance in indigenous societies. For instance, ammooni,3 the Miami-Illinois word for red ocher or hematite (Fe^sub 2^O^sub 3^), was the name of a very historically important Illinois River tributary known today as the Vermilion, from "vermillion," the French translation of aramooni. The native name indicated that there was an abundance of this mineral compound along this stream. This substance was ground into powder, rendered to paste, and then used, for example, as body paint. Therefore, this river's name served the function of defining it as a source of a very important cultural item. In Indian America examples of such vital, information-rich place names are legion.

The term that we today write "Chicago" is a French spelling that represents "sikaakwa, the word for the striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis) in Miami-Illinois, an Eastern Great Lakes Algonquian language.4 (The s represents the sound written sh in English, as in "she;" the i is the sound written -ee- in English "feet" but does not have a dipthong.5) The term "sikaakwa also connoted a plant and, as Swenson has determined, it referred in this tongue to Allium tricoccum. Local proto-historic Native Americans did not create place names for the deer or the raccoon, let alone the striped skunk, since these animals inhabited nearly all the local natural resource zones. However, when it came to their fashioning place names, they considered plants to be a different matter, owing to the great natural variation in their distribution. As noted above, early American Indians commonly named bodies of water after plants that were especially prolific in their watersheds. This practice never implied that a particular eponymous plant grew everywhere along a river or a lake, but that it grew in eye-catching abundance at some point(s). Examples of this practice in the Miami-Illinois language include oonsaalamooni siipiiwi 'bloodroot river' (Indiana's Salamonie River) and ahsenaamisi siipiiwi 'maple sugar tree river' (west-central Indiana's Sugar Creek). This botany-based place naming practice also exists in other Algonquian languages and in other American Indian language families. Such place names were very useful in times past since they, of course, indicated where various plant resources were located. "Chicago" is a perfect example of this very practical, fundamental kind of botanically oriented name, in this case for a stream. It was a sign indicating that somewhere nearby one could find a significant patch of wild leeks. As Swenson noted, these plants could be beneficial to humans, especially as survival food.6

In the field of American Indian onomastics it is important to be able to date the creation or the earliest occurrence of a place name. Since there is no evidence either in terms of archaeology or oral history for the presence of a Miami-Illinois-speaking population in the Chicago area prior to ca. 1630, the place name "Chicago" can be positively dated only to that time. Miami-Illinois bands probably knew about the land at the southwest end of Lake Michigan and could have had this name in their place name repertoire before then, but there is no way for us to know that.