I exit the el at Clark and Lake, buy 19 dollars and 20 cents worth of stamps at the postal branch inside the James R. Thompson Center, and step outside onto the pink granite sidewalk lining La Salle Street. I’ve come here on a nature pilgrimage. Precisely 161 years and one month ago, on October 6, 1834, the last bear in Chicago was killed in this vicinity, and I’ve come to trace the path of its last few moments of life.
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I discovered the description of its death in a book called Chicago Antiquities, self-published by Henry H. Hurlbut in 1881. The Chicago Collection at the Sulzer Library on Lincoln owns one of the 500 copies that were printed. The text on the flyleaf describes its contents as “original items and relations, letters, extracts and notes pertaining to Early Chicago; embellished with views, portraits, and autographs.” Hurlbut interviewed John Sweeney, the carpenter who shot the bear, and according to him the animal first appeared in the area of Randolph and La Salle, a corner currently anchored by the two State of Illinois buildings, City Hall, and the Bismarck Hotel. Though plotted at the time, the streets in this area didn’t yet exist. According to Hurlbut’s reconstructed account, the bear “happened to be rambling through the thicket, or woods, in the neighborhood of Randolph Street, somewhere between LaSalle St. and the River” when it was encountered by Samuel George, a man who made his living baking bread in a shop on Lake Street.
The crew headed south after the bear, so I walk in that direction too. Across the street, on the west side of La Salle near Washington, six hawthorns stand like bare-limbed sculptures in black granite planters. On the east side, where I’m walking, tropical crotons and fig trees are clustered together behind the windows of American National Bank. A thin film of steam clouds the glass that separates them from the cold. For the next two blocks there are no trees at all, no signs of any representative of the natural world, until I reach Harris Bank on the south side of Monroe, where a few tall locusts stand. City trees have a rough life; it’s a rare one that lives to be more than 40. These guys are the most mature specimens I’ve encountered thus far, but I suspect they weren’t around when Kennedy was shot, much less when the bear was.
Wilhelm reminds me that Jean-Baptiste-Point Du Sable and various other settlers started moving into Chicago in the late 1700s. By 1834 their influence, particularly their drive to suppress wildfires, was apparent in the areas surrounding the settlement, even though they hadn’t been “improved” in the sense of being cleared or built on. “This was more than enough time for parts of the land to grow up in brush,” Wilhelm says. “It wouldn’t have been a land anyone would describe as forest, but there could have been scattered trees.” His best guess for what the bear might have climbed in its desperate attempt to escape its enemies was a black oak, a tree that thrives on sandy prairie soils.
