The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire

by Ann Durkin Keating

When Juliette Kinzie first visited Chicago in 1831, it was anything but a city. An outpost in the shadow of Fort Dearborn, it had no streets, no sidewalks, no schools, no river-spanning bridges. And with two hundred disconnected residents, it lacked any sense of community. In the decades that followed, not only did Juliette witness the city’s transition from Indian country to industrial center, but she was instrumental in its development.

Juliette is one of Chicago’s forgotten founders. Early Chicago is often presented as “a man’s city,” but women like Juliette worked to create an urban and urbane world, often within their own parlors. With The World of Juliette Kinzie , we finally get to experience the rise of Chicago from the view of one of its most important founding mothers.

Ann Durkin Keating, one of the foremost experts on nineteenth-century Chicago, offers a moving portrait of a trailblazing and complicated woman. Keating takes us to the corner of Cass and Michigan (now Wabash and Hubbard), Juliette’s home base. Through Juliette’s eyes, our understanding of early Chicago expands from a city of boosters and speculators to include the world that women created in and between households. We see the development of Chicago society, first inspired by cities in the East and later coming into its own midwestern ways. We also see the city become a community, as it developed its intertwined religious, social, educational, and cultural institutions. Keating draws on a wealth of sources, including hundreds of Juliette’s personal letters, allowing Juliette to tell much of her story in her own words.

Juliette’s death in 1870, just a year before the infamous fire, seemed almost prescient. She left her beloved Chicago right before the physical city as she knew it vanished in flames. But now her history lives on. The World of Juliette Kinzie offers a new perspective on Chicago’s past and is a fitting tribute to one of the first women historians in the United States.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography

272 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2019

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was exceptionally well written, and the topic of women at the founding of Chicago is an interesting one to explore (seeing as all other narratives focus on men as the founders). With that said, Juliette Kinzie was a rough, unsympathetic, irritating, misogynistic, and racist woman who was full of contradictions and complications. She wrote a book about the founding of Chicago that glorified her own role while completely erasing the role that the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi had in helping her and her family get adjusted to the area. She and her husband made their initial fortune through land sales of the acreage that the US government had bought from the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi, and completely threw up their hands to say, "Oh well!" about what happened to their neighbors after. As I put it to my book club, she was the original "Karen," especially in her book, Wau-Bun, about the founding of Chicago by Jean Baptiste Point de Sable. Am I glad to have read about how women navigated being their husband's property while trying to assist with the founding of a city? Yes. Am I glad to have read about the founding of Chicago, complete with maps and stories of the quick rise in population and investment? Yes. Am I glad to have read about this particular woman, especially because of her myriad of flaws that made her entirely unsympathetic? No. It was a frustrating book to read, not because of the writing, but because of the subject, and I was glad when I finally reached the last page.

[Jane Considine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having been a docent at the Indian Agency House for about 10 years, I knew about Juliette Kinzie's life in Wisconsin for the short almost three years that she lived at the Indian Agency House, but historian Ann Durkin Keating examined her life in Chicago in this new (2019) book. She was able to uncover archival materials in Savannah, GA., family collection of letters in Middletown, CT., and the Chicago History Museum. What a treasure this documents are, revealing as they do Juliette's thoughts about women's suffrage, slavery, and the growing emphasis on commerce and industry in Chicago. Throughout author Keating emphasizes Juliette's focus on her household where she provided safe shelter for family members down on their luck, and from which she looked outward to extend her charity and and generosity to her neighbors. While John and Juliette experienced success and acclaim during their early years in Chicago, a gradual decline left Juliette an impoverished widow whose final years were spent still trying to support family members and living in a rented home suffering from rheumatism and asthma.

[Stacy Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography of Juliette Kinzie, an early white Chicago settler and historian of the city and the region, is a stellar example of the form. Keating not only makes the life of a woman mostly forgotten by history come to life, but she also uses biography as a lens to answer wider questions. Particularly fascinating is the erasure of Kinzie’s histories (not to mention her personal story), replaced by histories focused less on the family and community relationship of society and more on an individualistic, industrial, capitalist story that privileged politics and business and deemphasized women and the family. As the Great Chicago Fire became the before and after marker in the city’s history, so too the relevance of one woman. Who it is that writes our history is consequential, and within the ashes are stories told and retold, untold and rewritten. Juliette Kinzie understood this truth in 1844 when she published her first work, and it is no less true today, 181 years later.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This honestly wound up being a lot more than I expected. A biography of a flawed woman whose worldview became outdated even within her life, but which nevertheless merits understanding and elicits empathy. Kinzie was a complicated woman who watched Chicago go from a prairie hamlet to a major industrial metropolis. And I mean she literally watched that--her home at what's now Hubbard and Wabash was ground zero for the emergent industrial capitalism that made Chicago so big so fast.

Learning about her didn't teach me much new facts, in the traditional sense, but gave me a much deeper appreciation for how American society, and women's roles within it, changed in the 35 years before her death in 1870.

[Mary Diebel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was pretty slow at times. I could only read it a bit at a time. The most interesting part was that Juliette Kinzie's granddaughter was Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts. I didn't know about that connection to Chicago. I did learn some history.