Habits, Hearts and the Irish Heroines of Chicago

As I mentioned, the Illinois legislature gave powers for the Illinois and Michigan Canal to the first sod to be kind of dug in 1836.

And this canal, it becomes a kind of hub.

It allows Chicago to become a hub of industry, effectively, because this makes it so that Chicago can be connected to the West, but also kind of the South and across to New York eventually.

Lake Michigan is now kind of connected to the wheat fields and the kind of cattle ranches of Wisconsin and Iowa and all of the kind of surrounding big states.

And also, I mean, Illinois is also is an agricultural state.

If you go outside of Chicago, this becomes very obvious very quickly.

So the canal allows for those kind of massive industries to be built up.

in Chicago.

So you can bring all your cattle, all of your kind of livestock into Chicago.

Then what develops from the canals, the Navis are kind of developing their own cultures along the route of the canal as well.

So you start having kind of Catholic churches, very small ones kind of popping up.

Often what we see when you have this massive expansion, especially canals and railroads and things like that, is that people might bring their families to the starting point, so Chicago, but it's not necessarily safe for their families to be coming along with them, especially because they're moving so often.

These men are often living in really kind of bad conditions.

So they're often leaving their families if they bring them in Chicago.

or in one of the bigger towns, and then they're going off, working as labourers, and then coming back.

So we start seeing female-dominated communities popping up and family kind of life in the cities, and then men leaving and then coming back.

But these are really dangerous professions as well.

So you start getting kind of the, not so much unions at this point, but at least kind of fraternal orders, which might...

Say, if you pay into something like the Irish National Foresters, and then if you die in an industrial accident, or as many people do when they're actually kind of digging the canals, there is a little bit of money sent to your family.

But to go back to the kind of importance of the canals, the canals allow for transport.

So if you're bringing all your livestock into Chicago, then you start getting the slaughterhouses and stockyards, which the Irish dominated throughout 19th century.

There are stories of kind of every 25 Irishmen working in the stockyards, you have one person of a different background.

And then with the stockyards come different industries.

So if you are slaughtering huge amounts of animals, you get a tanning industry as well to use their skins.

So a tanning industry comes up.