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The History of Bolingbrook
Indian Boundary
In the early 1800s, the need for improved land and water transportation prompted the Congress to consider internal improvements. Traders wanted to be able to travel unmolested between Chicago and the navigation headwaters of the Illinois River at Ottawa. In 1807, the Senate instructed Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin to report on the subject of roads and canals. The Gallatin Report mentioned the Chicago Portage, a low divide between the waters of Lake Michigan and the Des Plaines River that the Indians used as a carrying passage. The marshy nature of this passage had been recorded by the French explorers Joliet and Marquette in 1673. A canal to connect Lake Michigan to the Illinois River via this passage was urged for the consideration of Congress. But the War of 1812 postponed questions of internal improvements until some years later.
As of 1816, the United States had acquired from the Indians the greater part of what is now Illinois but not the lands adjacent to Lake Michigan including the Chicago Portage. The Indian Commissioners were instructed to negotiate for a tract of land which would connect the shores of Lake Michigan with the Illinois Purchase. On August 24, 1816, the United States concluded a treaty with the United Tribes of the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi. The tribes ceded to the United States a twenty mile wide tract of land through which white men were supposed to be able to travel safely. The "safe passage" runs diagonally from the southern extremity of Lake Michigan westward to the Mississippi. The southern of the two boundary lines begins at the mouth of the Calumet River and goes straight southwest to the Kankakee River. The northern boundary line begins in the center of Rogers Avenue in Chicago at Lake Michigan and angles southwest. This northern Indian Boundary Line runs through Bolingbrook.
In 1819, an inspection of the proposed canal route was made by Richard Graham and Joseph Philips, who had been Judge and Secretary, respectively, of the Illinois Territory. Their report pointed out the supposed case and relative inexpense of a canal connection between the Illinois and Chicago Rivers. The land between the two parallel Indian boundary lines was surveyed from 1821 - 1822 for canal purposes. At the time of the first survey, the parties who did the work had to go all the way to Peoria (then Fort Clark) to get supplies. The Illinois and Michigan Canal was built by the State of Illinois from 1836 to 1848.
Sources: History of Will County, 1858, Documentary History of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, 1956 Smith, Bruce. "When History Marched Westward thru DuPage, the Trib, Wednesday, October 21, 1970
.....Article taken in its entirety from the Met, 1995
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