The Chicago-Desplaines portage was used to a constantly increasing degree in the following years. Missionaries, traders, and military people found it a convenient point for residence or as a thoroughfare to the Illinois River. But on account of divided counsels among the French authorities at Quebec there were no adequate measures taken to protect the whites from the encroachments and hostility of the savages, so that early in the next century the portage declined in importance and fell into disuse, other routes to the interior being preferred.
The name "Chicago," in some of the numerous forms of spelling employed, is met with on the maps of successively later dates, occasionally in the reports of French commandants at Detroit or Mackinac, and more frequently in the letters of the missionaries preserved in that extensive collection known as the Jesuit Relations. After the victory of Wolfe over Montcalm and the fall of Quebec, the French ceded in 1763 all their western possessions to the English, which "left France without a foothold on the American main."
THE WILD ONION PLANT.
That the name "Chicago" was derived from an Indian word meaning "wild onion," is believed by most authorities. Schoolcraft tells us that the word was Chi-kaug-ong, meaning wild leek or onion.
Cadillac, the French commandant at Mackinac in 1695, mentioned in a report the name of Chicagou as one of a chain of posts on Lake Michigan, and said that the name signified "river of the wild onion;" and in an Indian treaty of 1773, the river was referred to as "Chicagou, or Garlick Creek." Gurdon S. Hubbard, in his Memoirs, states that the name was derived from the wild onion, and Colonel Samuel A. Storrow, who visited this site in 1817, refers in his letters to "the River Chicagou, or in English, Wild Onion River."
The wild onion plant may be seen at the present day growing luxuriantly on the prairies near Chicago.
But so far as the portage at Chicago was concerned this change of sovereignty made little difference. What with the constant strife among the savage tribes whose normal condition was that of warfare, and the dangers to the whites caused by the neglect of military protection, the region was left a solitude; and the few references to its existence during a hundred years indicate confused relations between the tribes and the few whites who ventured to visit the region. The sovereignty of the western country again changed in 1783, this time from the British to the American Government. A few cabins were built in the vicinity in later years, and when the American Government proceeded to the erection of a fort in 1803 these cabins constituted the only evidences of civilization that existed on the spot.