==History==
Chicago's locational advantage is the link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system. Its first permanent resident, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Frenchman West Indian and African descent, and operated an fur-trading 1780-1800. The U.S. government erected Fort Dearborn in 1803 three years later. In the War of 1812 it was captured by Indians and the residents massacred. After 1830 the rich farmlands of Northern Illinois attracted Yankee settlers. Yankee real estate operators crated a city overnight in the 1830s. Hundreds of wagons a day of farm produce arrived, so the entrepreneurs built grain elevators and docks to load ships bound for points east. By the 1850s the railroads made Chicago a major hub with over 30 lines. The main lines from the East ended in Chicago, and those oriented to the West began in Chicago, so the city became the nation's trans-shipment and warehousing center by 1860. Factories were created, most famously the harvester factory opened in 1847 by [[Cyrus Hall McCormick]]. The Wisconsin forests supported the mill-work and lumber business; the Illinois hinterland provided the wheat, as well as hogs and cattle that were slaughtered, preserved in salt and shipped east; by 1870 refrigerated cars allowed fresh meat to ship.
[[File:Chicago Art Institute..JPG|thumb|left|Chicago Art Institute.]]
As the city grew large numbers of Irish Catholics and Germans arrived. Their saloons became the focus of attacks by the Know-Nothing Party, which was anti-immigration and anti-liquor, and called for the purification of politics by reducing the power of the saloon-keepers. In 1855, the new party elected Levi Boone mayor and he banned Sunday sales of liquor and beer, angering the Germans who frequented beer gardens, and Irish who frequented saloons. Law enforcement resulted in the Lager Beer Riot of April 1855, which erupted outside a courthouse where eight Germans were being tried for liquor ordinance violations. After the Civil War, saloons became community centers only for local ethnic men, as reformers saw them as places that incited riotous behavior and moral decay.