History
The name "Chicago" is the French rendering of the Miami-Illinois name shikaakwa, meaning “wild leek”.345 Etymologically, the sound /shikaakwa/ in Miami-Illinois literally means 'striped skunk', and was a reference to wild leek, or the smell of onions.4 The name was initially applied to the river, but later came to denote what is presently the site of city. The sound Chicago is saidattribution needed to be the result of a French mis-transcription of the original sound by Louis Hennepin, a Catholic priest, missionary and explorer, who in 1683 first placed the place name 'Chicago' on a map.citation needed
 During the mid-18th century the area was inhabited primarily by Potawatomis, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples. The first settler in Chicago, Haitian Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, arrived in the 1770s, married a Potawatomi woman, and founded the area’s first trading post. In 1803 the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in the 1812 Fort Dearborn massacre. The Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi later ceded the land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of 350. Within seven years it grew to a population of over 4,000. The City of Chicago was incorporated on March 4, 1837.
 The city began its step toward regional primacy as an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Begun in 1836, Chicago’s first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, opened in 1848, a year which also marked the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought many new residents from rural communities as well as immigrants from abroad. The city’s manufacturing and retail sectors became dominant among Midwestern cities and subsequently influenced the American economy, particularly in meatpacking, with the advent of the refrigerated rail car and the regional centrality of the city's Union Stock Yards.6
 During its first century as a city, Chicago grew at a rate that ranked among the fastest growing in the world. Within the span of forty years, the city's population grew from slightly under 30,000 to over 1 million by 1890. By the close of the 19th century, Chicago was the fifth largest city in the world,7 and the largest of the cities that didn't exist at the dawn of the century. Within fifty years of the Chicago Fire, the population had tripled to over 3 million.8
 Artist's rendering of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.In February of 1856, the Chesbrough plan for the building of Chicago’s (and indeed the United States’) first comprehensive sewerage system was approved by the Common Council;9 a project that necessitated the physical raising of much of central Chicago to a new grade. Untreated sewage and industrial waste now flowed into the Chicago River, thence into Lake Michigan, polluting the primary source of fresh water for the city. The city responded by tunneling two miles (3 km) out into Lake Michigan to newly built water cribs. Nonetheless, spring rains continued to carry polluted water as far out as the water intakes. In 1900, the problem of sewage was largely resolved when Chicago undertook an innovative engineering feat. The city actually reversed the flow of the river with the construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal leading to the Illinois River which joins the Mississippi River.