In September of 1833, bands of Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, and other Anishinaabe and Algonquin peoples gathered in a small fur-trapping town called Chicago, where a shimmering prairie met a vast inland sea. After weeks of coercion, they signed the Treaty of Chicago, transferring to the U.S. government 15 million acres of territory they had inhabited since time immemorial. Though the treaty forced them west, their names for that river—and the town it ran through—stuck.
According to some histories of Chicago, early French explorers derived “Chicago” from a sloppy transliteration of “shikaakwa,” the Miami-Illinois word for smelly wild onions, or “Zhigaagong,” an Ojibwe word meaning “on the skunk.” (Chemically, skunk spray and onions contain oily, sulfurous compounds called thiols, which make them both extremely pungent and difficult to wash away.) Telling the story of the 1833 treaty, Nelson Sheppo, an elder of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi, calls the place his ancestors gathered “skunk town.”
“The whole area of Chicago is named after that animal,” says Edith Leoso, tribal historic preservation officer for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, whose reservation is in northern Wisconsin. She recalls stories of her Anishinaabe ancestors traveling from their homes on southwestern Lake Superior to the mouth of that smelly river each fall, right as young skunks were setting out in search of new territory. Leoso says that her people often trapped the furry omnivores for their sacs of highly concentrated musk, which Ojibwe medicine people use as a treatment for pneumonia.
The words for skunk and the area’s similarly smelling wild allium plant are inextricably linked in Algonquian languages; Margaret Noodin, an Anishinaabe language teacher, says some Ojibwe people call the plant “skunk cabbage” because of its stench. According to Kyle Malott, a language specialist with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, the morpheme “zhegak” refers to the way a skunk’s tail stands straight up when threatened, just as the onion grows straight out of the ground. Given these linguistic connections, the plant- and animal-based theories behind the name “Chicago” may both be true.
One thing is certain: Skunks have been part of Chicago’s history since before it was “Chicago,” and 200 years later, they continue to thrive in its urban landscape. Rebecca Fyffe, the director of research for ABC Human Wildlife Control and Prevention, has been sprayed 31 times—six of which were direct hits to the face. Her company removed 832 skunks in 2015 and nearly three times that—2,491—in 2019.