Chicago [antikvár]

Preface 'Behold! She stands beside her inland sea.' That's the beginning of the song that we learned in elementary school. And an inland sea it is. Lake Michigan is five times larger than the entire state of Connecticut; Switzerland and Luxembourg would disappear in it without a trace and still leave room to sink Rhode Island, Delaware and four cities the size of Los Angeles. Chicago is the jewel on Lake Michigan, facing the lake from the west and stretching more than 20 miles along its shore. And the lake, in turn, is the city's showcase, with a superb chain of parks and parkways flanking the shore and the city's tallest and finest buildings rising behind them. Chicago, the metropolis of the Midwest, is not an old city like Boston, New York or St Augustine. But long before the first white settlers arrived, the Chicago area was important to transportation. The Indians used it as a portage, carrying their canoes from the Des Plaines River to the Chicago River, then paddling them to Lake Michigan. Possibly the first white men to use the Chicago portage were Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette, two French explorers. This was in 1673, on their way to what is now Green Bay, Wisconsin. Marquette and two companions camped near the Chicago River in the winter of 1674-75.