City of Chicago City Map Poster

About City of Chicago

The name "Chicago" is derived from a French rendering of the indigenous Miami-Illinois word "shikaakwa", known to botanists as Allium tricoccum and known more commonly as ramps. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as ""Checagou"" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir. Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the eponymous wild "garlic" grew abundantly in the area. According to his diary entry for September 14, 1690, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (the first permanent non-native resident) purchased 800 acres (3 km2) near Lake Michigan and named it "Rivière Pays des Hurons", now called Chicago River because it flowed into Lake Michigan which Du Sable saw on a map; he later sold it to Louis Jolliet who kept an Indian village there called ""Ilinois"" or ""Village des Potawatomis"" ("Potawatomi Village").