I guess I’ll just have to own the fact that I’m the biggest documentary dork known to man. Maybe also the biggest history dork, if there is a separate tier of history dorks who don’t seem to know a lot about history, but like to try and soak in as much as possible.
Strange work patterns completely threw off my sleep schedule this past week, and I often found myself awake at odd times: too early to call anyone, too late to go anywhere, nothing but infomercials on TV. I counted myself lucky that my very conscientious librarian mother very recently sent me a set of PBS dvd’s, which her library system had received for free from the good folks at PBS, but were just going to throw away. That’s how I ended up watching all four discs of “Chicago: Mudhole to Metropolis” at 3 a.m. every morning this week.
I had read the diaries of Father Marquette, the French missionary who spent a grueling winter along the banks of Lake Michigan in 1674, and found them very interesting. I loved reading passages and then thinking that beneath the very sidewalk I stood on, people were building the future on this land hundreds of years ago. The documentary begins with Father Marquette’s experiences, since they were so meticulously and beautifully documented, but spends ample time discussing the many Native American tribes that populated the area in the late 1600s. It is in this segment of the documentary that the origin of Chicago’s name is revealed: it is the French rendering of the Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa, meaning “stinking onion weed.”
Apparently, some smelly types of river reeds grew in large amounts near the banks of Lake Michigan, and the Native Americans stayed away, lest they smell like onions for days.
The story of Chicago’s growth takes off from there, and slowly but surely weaves its way through the Civil War, the Great Chicago Fire, the Columbian Exposition, and tiresome labor struggles, never leaving out period architecture, the building of railroads, the famous Chicago stockyards, and the first elevated train line. The series also spends a lot of time revealing the extraordinary lives of famous Chicagoans, such as Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, Marshall Field (who, you will find, was actually kind of a jerk), and Albert and Lucy Parsons, a free interracial couple who worked as labor activists against the city’s biggest, richest politicians and businessmen. Of course, then there’s just the amazing and little-known facts about early Chicago. Did you know that in the mid-1800’s, when the water level rose due to pollution and man-made structures, the city hired a man to design a crank system that could raise an entire city block, one building at a time, so that a higher foundation could be raised higher beneath it? That’s right: it took them a while, but they lifted all of young State Street’s buildings until they were, eventually, five feet higher than their original foundations.
It’s amazing to see the slow growth of this beautiful and sometimes troubled city, and to learn all about the people who helped build and shape it, directly from the mouths of their living ancestors. Now that I’ve spent the dark hours before dawn watching our wonderful city come together, I must say, I feel happy to be a part of such a young place with such deep, rich history.
