Make Me a City by Jonathan Carr

"But if what survives of our legacy is a patchwork of threads, I believe the historian has a duty to try to stitch them together." ~the ficitonal Mr Winship, Professor of American History at University of Chicago, in Make Me A City by Jonathan Carr

As a family genealogy researcher, I have delved into many turn-of-the-century place histories in which people still living recollected earlier days. Make Me A City is patterned in part on these late 19th c. volumes. Central is a fictional history of Chicago's first hundred years, offering an alternative narrative of its founding families. Interjected are other fictional primary sources. The overarching narrative is the development of the city, but the stories of these characters drives the book.

Jonathan Carr offers a French-born mulatto trader as the first European to settle at Echicagou where the Illinois River meets Lake Michigan. Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable built his family an admirable home before an unscrupulous man determines to take it from him.

We follow Jean and his descendants through the century, along with the stories of men who built Chicago, the visionary engineers and the immigrant workers, the con men and the idealistic journalists.

The story keeps weaving back to Jean and those early days when all was set in motion--the disenfranchisement of people of color, the anti-immigrant prejudice, the powerlessness of women.

Toward the end of the book, Antje Van Voorhis Hunter, whose lineage traces back to Jean, travels to see a statue erected by Pullman to commemorate the Massacre at Fort Dearborn. Her grandmother survived that massacre and her version of history has been recorded by Prof. Winship.

The statue portrays a white woman and a baby on the ground with a scantily clad Native American raising a tomahawk overhead. Another Native American stands with his hand out to stop the massacre; this man is taller and wears buckskin trousers. The civilized Native heroically is stopping the violence. No soldiers appear in the scene.

Antje and her husband discuss the implications of the statue's version of history, "like using perfume to cover up a bad smell." The myth portrayed in the art has become an accepted and shared truth.

"If you take on somebody more powerful than yourself and play by the rules and beat them, they annul the result," Antje thinks, adding, "Then nothing has changed. "It's in our blood," Mr. Winship believes, referring back to the first violence committed against Jean.

I made a family tree to keep the families straight.

 Read an excerpt here.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Make Me A City
by Jonathan Carr
Henry Holt and Co.
Publication: 03/19/2019
$30.00 hardcover
ISBN: 9781250294012