|
Chicago Portage
The Chicago Portage was an ancient portage that connected the Great Lakes waterway system with the Mississippi River system. Connecting these two great water trails meant comparatively easy access from the mouth of the St Lawrence River on the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and the Gulf of Mexico. The approximately six-mile link had been used by Native Americans for thousands of years during the Pre-Columbian era for travel and trade. In the summer of 1673 members of the Kaskaskia, a tribe of the Illinois Confederation, led French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette, the first known Europeans to explore this part of North America, to the portage. A strategic location, it became a key to European activity in the Midwest, ultimately leading to the foundation of Chicago. In 1848, the water divide was breached by the Illinois and Michigan (I&M) Canal cutting through the portage. Created by a glacier The history of the Chicago Portage begins at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Illinois And Michigan Canal
The Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. In Illinois, it ran from the Chicago River in Bridgeport, Chicago to the Illinois River at LaSalle-Peru. The canal crossed the Chicago Portage, and helped establish Chicago as the transportation hub of the United States, before the railroad era. It was opened in 1848. Its function was partially replaced by the wider and deeper Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in 1900, and it ceased transportation operations with the completion of the Illinois Waterway in 1933. Illinois and Michigan Canal Locks and Towpath, a collection of eight engineering structures and segments of the canal between Lockport and LaSalle-Peru, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. and Portions of the canal have been filled in. Much of the former canal, near the Heritage Corridor transit line, has been preserved as part of the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pre-Columbian Era
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, the era covers the history of Indigenous cultures until significant influence by Europeans. This may have occurred decades or even centuries after Columbus for certain cultures. Many pre-Columbian civilizations were marked by permanent settlements, cities, agriculture, civic and monumental architecture, major earthworks, and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first permanent European colonies (c. late 16th–early 17th centuries), and are known only through archaeological investigations and oral history. Other civilizations were contemporary with the colonial period and were described in European historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Maya civilization, had their own ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Des Plaines River
The Des Plaines River () is a river that flows southward for U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map , accessed May 13, 2011 through southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois''American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,'' Fourth Edition in the United States Midwest, eventually meeting the Kankakee River west of Channahon to form the Illinois River, a tributary of the Mississippi River. Native Americans used the river as transportation route and portage. When French explorers and missionaries arrived in the 1600s, in what was then the Illinois Country of New France, they named the waterway ''La Rivière des Plaines'' (River of the Plane Tree) as they felt that trees on the river resembled the European plane tree. The local Native Americans showed these early European explorers how to traverse waterways of the Des Plaines watershed to travel from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River and its valley. Parts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chicago River
The Chicago River is a system of rivers and canals with a combined length of that runs through the city of Chicago, including its center (the Chicago Loop). Though not especially long, the river is notable because it is one of the reasons for Chicago's geographic importance: the related Chicago Portage is a link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The river is also noteworthy for its natural and human-engineered history. In 1887, the Illinois General Assembly decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River through civil engineering by taking water from Lake Michigan and discharging it into the Mississippi River watershed, partly in response to concerns created by an extreme weather event in 1885 that threatened the city's water supply. In 1889, the Illinois General Assembly created the Chicago Sanitary District (now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District) to replace the Illinois and Michigan Canal with the Chi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Niagara River
The Niagara River () is a river that flows north from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. It forms part of the border between the province of Ontario in Canada (on the west) and the state of New York in the United States (on the east). There are differing theories as to the origin of the river's name. According to Iroquoian scholar Bruce Trigger, ''Niagara'' is derived from the name given to a branch of the locally residing native Neutral Confederacy, who are described as being called the ''Niagagarega'' people on several late-17th-century French maps of the area. According to George R. Stewart, it comes from the name of an Iroquois town called ''Ongniaahra'', meaning "point of land cut in two". The river, which is occasionally described as a strait, is about long and includes Niagara Falls in its course. The falls have moved approximately upstream from the Niagara Escarpment in the last 12,000 years, resulting in a gorge below the falls. Today, the diversion of the river for ele ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lake Chicago
Lake Chicago was a prehistoric proglacial lake that is the ancestor of what is now known as Lake Michigan, one of North America's five Great Lakes. Fed by retreating glaciers, it drained south through the Chicago Outlet River. Origin The city of Chicago lies in a broad plain that, hundreds of millions of years ago, was a great interior basin covered by warm, shallow seas. These seas covered portions of North America from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Evidence of these seas is found in the fossils of coral, such as those unearthed in Illinois quarries at Stony Island Avenue, Thornton Quarry, and McCook, Illinois, or at 18th Street and Damen Avenue in Chicago. Evidence may also be found in the fossils in the Niagara limestone bedrock found throughout the Chicago area and extending all the way to Niagara, New York. Much later, the polar ice cap crept four times down across the continent, covering the region with ice to a depth of a mile (1500 m) or more. As the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wisconsin Glaciation
The Wisconsin Glacial Episode, also called the Wisconsin glaciation, was the most recent glacial period of the North American ice sheet complex. This advance included the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which nucleated in the northern North American Cordillera; the Innuitian ice sheet, which extended across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago; the Greenland ice sheet; and the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered the high latitudes of central and eastern North America. This advance was synchronous with global glaciation during the last glacial period, including the North American alpine glacier advance, known as the Pinedale glaciation. The Wisconsin glaciation extended from approximately 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, between the Sangamonian Stage and the current interglacial, the Holocene. The maximum ice extent occurred approximately 25,000–21,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, also known as the ''Late Wisconsin'' in North America. This glaciation radically altered the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ice Age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and greenhouse periods, during which there are no glaciers on the planet. Earth is currently in the Quaternary glaciation. Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed '' glacial periods'' (or, alternatively, ''glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades'', or colloquially, ''ice ages''), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called '' interglacials'' or ''interstadials''. In glaciology, ''ice age'' implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in both northern and southern hemispheres. By this definition, Earth is currently in an interglacial period—the Holocene. The amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emitted into Earth's oceans and atmosphere is predicted to prevent the next glacial period for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lake Chicago
Lake Chicago was a prehistoric proglacial lake that is the ancestor of what is now known as Lake Michigan, one of North America's five Great Lakes. Fed by retreating glaciers, it drained south through the Chicago Outlet River. Origin The city of Chicago lies in a broad plain that, hundreds of millions of years ago, was a great interior basin covered by warm, shallow seas. These seas covered portions of North America from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Evidence of these seas is found in the fossils of coral, such as those unearthed in Illinois quarries at Stony Island Avenue, Thornton Quarry, and McCook, Illinois, or at 18th Street and Damen Avenue in Chicago. Evidence may also be found in the fossils in the Niagara limestone bedrock found throughout the Chicago area and extending all the way to Niagara, New York. Much later, the polar ice cap crept four times down across the continent, covering the region with ice to a depth of a mile (1500 m) or more. As the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glacial Lakes
A glacial lake is a body of water with origins from glacier activity. They are formed when a glacier erodes the land and then melts, filling the depression created by the glacier. Formation Near the end of the last glacial period, roughly 10,000 years ago, glaciers began to retreat. A retreating glacier often left behind large deposits of ice in hollows between drumlins or hills. As the ice age ended, these melted to create lakes. This is apparent in the Lake District in Northwestern England where post-glacial sediments are normally between 4 and 6 metres deep. These lakes are often surrounded by drumlins, along with other evidence of the glacier such as moraines, eskers and erosional features such as striations and chatter marks. These lakes are clearly visible in aerial photos of landforms in regions that were glaciated during the last ice age. The formation and characteristics of glacial lakes vary between location and can be classified into glacial erosion lake, ice-block ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Midwest
The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four Census Bureau Region, census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. It was officially named the North Central Region by the Census Bureau until 1984. It is between the Northeastern United States and the Western United States, with Canada to the north and the Southern United States to the south. The Census Bureau's definition consists of 12 states in the north central United States: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The region generally lies on the broad Interior Plain between the states occupying the Appalachian Mountains, Appalachian Mountain range and the states occupying the Rocky Mountains, Rocky Mountain range. Major rivers in the region include, from east to west, the Ohio River, the Upper Mis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacques Marquette
Jacques Marquette S.J. (June 1, 1637 – May 18, 1675), sometimes known as Père Marquette or James Marquette, was a French Jesuit missionary who founded Michigan's first European settlement, Sault Sainte Marie, and later founded Saint Ignace. In 1673, Marquette, with Louis Jolliet, an explorer born near Quebec City, was the first European to explore and map the northern portion of the Mississippi River Valley. Early life Jacques Marquette was born in Laon, France, on June 1, 1637. He came of an ancient family distinguished for its civic and military services. Marquette joined the Society of Jesus at age 17. He studied and taught in France for several years, then the Jesuits assigned him to New France in 1666 as a missionary to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. When he arrived in Quebec, he was assigned to Trois-Rivières on the Saint Lawrence River, where he assisted Gabriel Druillettes and, as preliminary to further work, devoted himself to the study of the loca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.JPG "Click for more on -> Lake Chicago")
