Gurdon Hubbard, a true Chicagoan, arrived well before the Town of Chicago was incorporated in 1833.

Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (1802-1886) was born in Windsor, Vermont.

Hubbard became an entrepreneur in 1813 at the age of eleven when his father moved the family to Montreal. Gurdon borrowed twenty five cents from a friend and began buying "the remnants of (farmer's) loads of poultry, butter, cheese, etc. and peddling them… realized from eighty to one hundred dollars, all of which went into the family treasury."

While his early life in the fur trade was filled with high adventure and feats of daring and strength, Hubbard was always focused on improving and expanding his businesses. 

Prior to his arrival in Chicago, he had made the acquaintance of Morris Kinzie, who gave Hubbard a letter of introduction to his father, John Kinzie. 

As a young man, Hubbard became friends with a Kickapoo chief, Waba, who adopted him as his son. Hubbard also went on to marry a Pottawatomi woman, Watseka. The two divorced after two years and she went on to marry Noel LaVasseur.

Hubbard settled in Danville, Illinois in the early 1820s. Beginning in 1822, Hubbard began moving his trade goods by pack ponies from his 80 acre farm on the Iroquois River north of Danville, south along an old buffalo trace, known as the Vincennes Trail. He took his hogs and cattle to sell at the population, transportation and market center of Vincennes, Indiana on the Wabash River.

At one point, upon learning that a band of Indians were planning a raid on Danville, Hubbard walked 75 miles to Danville in a single night, earning the nickname "Pa-pa-ma-ta-be" or "Swift-Walker." As stories of his feat spread, a local Indian tribe questioned the veracity of the story. According to legend, Hubbard challenged the tribe to put up a champion and succeeded in beating him in a race by several miles.

Following that he would use the trail to carry traded goods from Chicago to the south, and to bring his furs north. He established trading posts every forty to fifty miles. Over the following years traffic increased as settlers from the east moved into the Indiana and Illinois farmlands. Hubbard's livestock and wagons widened and hardened the trail into a road. It began to be known as "Hubbard's Trace 'or Hubbard's Trail.

While serving in the Illinois General Assembly in the 1830s, Hubbard lobbied to have the Illinois & Michigan Canal built to connect the Chicago River to the Illinois River, defeating a competing proposal to build the canal from the Calumet River to the Illinois. Hubbard would eventually go on the serve as a director of the I&M Canal Board.

In 1834 the state legislature designated the Hubbard Trail as the first State Road. It was marked with milestones from Vincennes to Chicago. Most of the old trail's route through Illinois today is still marked as State Route 1. Hubbard's old trail is known as State Street at its northern end in Chicago.

Seeing the vast potential of Chicago's location, Hubbard and his second wife Eleanora moved from their Iroquois River farmhouse to Chicago on January 4, 1834. It took them six days to travel up Hubbard's Trail to Chicago in a procession of cattle, hogs and horse drawn sleighs. Winter weather made travel over the frozen trail, and passage over the frozen rivers, easy.

After moving to Chicago in 1834, Hubbard opened a land office and began reaching out to East Coast investors. 

Hubbard built a three story brick warehouse in the winter of 1843 while his freshly killed hogs were preserved on the ice of the Chicago River. In the spring his building was finished. It had a large insulated room for keeping meat cold through the warm months with ice cut from the river and nearby marshes  It was the first brick warehouse built in the small town and detractors labeled it "Hubbard's Folly." Within a few years his businesses had outgrown the building on the north side of the Chicago river, near modern-day LaSalle Street, and in 1836 he built an even larger warehouse (for $44,000) on the north bank.

To his meat packing business he added warehousing, freight forwarding and "lightering" (moving cargo and passengers between shore and ships anchored in the lake). In 1860, one of his ships, the Lady Elgin, sank off the coast of present-day Highwood.

Hubbard was elected as an alderman for the 7th Ward in 1860. He began writing his autobiography, which had grown to more than 800 pages when Hubbard lost his manuscript in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. 

Building his fortune in meats and furs allowed Hubbard to enter into the insurance business, and he was the first underwriter in Chicago. Following the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, he was nearly bankrupted by the insurance payments he had to make, but he was able to survive the setback.

Following the fire, he began to recreate it, but only managed to get to 1829 when he died (although the manuscript has since been published).

With Chicago destroyed by fire, Hubbard set out for the East Coast, where he drew maps of Chicago from memory to interest backers in helping to rebuild the city. His success meant that he was able to rebuild his fortunes before his death.

Hubbard married three times. His second wife was the former Eleanora Berry of Urbana (married from 1831-1840) and his third was his cousin, Mary Ann Ellis Mills Hubbard (married from 1843 until his death). He had one son, Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, Jr., with Eleanora (b.1838).

Hubbard recovered from his financial setbacks following the Great Chicago Fire, but his health began to deteriorate. In 1883, he became ill and in 1884, he had his left eye removed. The following year, his right eye was removed. Hubbard died on September 14, 1886 and was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.

Chicago honors Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard by naming the street, Hubbard Street for him, as is Hubbard High School and Hubbard's Cave, the nickname given to a section of tunnel on I90 and I94 highway (the Kennedy Expressway).

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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FOOTNOTE

At a time when men of virtues were desperately in short supply, the story of Illinois pioneer Gurdon Hubbard is a compelling one. It reaffirms the conviction that integrity, faith, loyalty, courage and a moral sense of responsibility are virtues worth cherishing.

Two books written by Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard:

1. Autobiography of Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard; pub:1911
2. Incidents and Events in the Life of Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard; pub:1888 

Philippe de Rocheblave, a Military Opportunist in the Illinois Country.

Philippe de Rocheblave

Philippe-François de Rastel de Rocheblave (1727-1802) (commonly known as Philippe de Rocheblave) was a military officer and fur trader in present-day southwestern Illinois in the eighteenth century. His story reveals much about the history of the Illinois Country in the years surrounding the Revolutionary War.

Born in Savournon, Hautes-Alpes, France, Rocheblave came to North America during the Seven Years' War, also known as the French and Indian War. In 1760, he was a lieutenant with the Royal French Marines at Fort de Chartres (which is about 4 miles west of the Village of Prairie du Rocher), in the Illinois Country. He also established a fur trading business at Kaskaskia, another French settlement on the Mississippi.

After the British took control of Kaskaskia in 1763, he switched allegiances and took command of Fort Sainte-Geneviève in the Illinois Country for New Spain. In 1774, he switched allegiances once again and took command of Kaskaskia for the British.

In 1778, during the American Revolutionary War, Colonel George Rogers Clark, commander of the Illinois Regiment, Virginia State Forces, captured Kaskaskia for the Americans and took Philippe de Rocheblave prisoner. Rocheblave was sent to Virginia, where he eluded parole and fled to the British forces in New York City.

Philippe de Rocheblave, the commandant of Fort Gage, was captured while asleep with his wife by Colonel George Rogers Clark and the Illinois Regiment, Virginia State Forces, in 1778, who seized the lightly guarded British outpost of Kaskaskia in the Illinois Country.

After the American Revolutionary War ended, Philippe de Rocheblave brought his family to Montreal; they later settled at Varennes in 1789. He became involved in the fur trade in the Detroit region. In 1796, Rocheblave was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada for Surrey and was re-elected in 1796 and 1800, serving until he died on April 3, 1802, in Quebec City, Lower Canada.

Rocheblave's story presents a quandary. Was he an opportunist who owed his allegiance to whoever was winning at the time? Was he, alternately astute in his allegiances, reacting to the often shifting nature of politics on the frontier? Whichever you lean towards, his story is an interesting chapter in the history of Illinois.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

The Lincoln–Douglas Debates; the First was Held on August 21, 1858.

Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas was the leader of the Democratic Party, and their candidate.

Portrait photographs of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Stephen A. Douglas in 1859.

Did You Know? After moving to Illinois in 1833, Stephen A. Douglas briefly courted Mary Todd, who went on to marry his future rival, Abraham Lincoln.

At the time, U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures; thus Lincoln and Douglas were trying for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois legislature. The debates previewed the issues that Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 presidential election. Although Illinois was a free state, the main issue discussed in all seven debates was slavery in the United States.

In agreeing to the official debates, Lincoln and Douglas decided to hold one debate in each of the nine congressional districts in Illinois. Because both had already spoken in two — Springfield and Chicago — within a day of each other, they decided that their "joint appearances" would be held only in the remaining seven districts. The debates were held in seven towns in the state of Illinois:

1. Ottawa on August 21st
2. Freeport on August 27th
3. Jonesboro on September 15th
4. Charleston on September 18th
5. Galesburg on October 7th
6. Quincy on October 13th
7. Alton on October 15th

The debates in Freeport, Quincy and Alton drew especially large numbers of people from neighboring states, as the issue of slavery was of monumental importance to citizens across the nation. Newspaper coverage of the debates was intense. Major papers from Chicago sent stenographers to create complete texts of each debate, which newspapers across the United States reprinted in full, with some partisan edits. Newspapers that supported Douglas edited his speeches to remove any errors made by the stenographers and to correct grammatical errors, while they left Lincoln's speeches in the rough form in which they had been transcribed. In the same way, pro-Lincoln papers edited Lincoln's speeches, but left the Douglas texts as reported.

After losing the election for Senator in Illinois, Lincoln edited the texts of all the debates and had them published in a book. The widespread coverage of the original debates and the subsequent popularity of the book led eventually to Lincoln's nomination for President of the United States by the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

The format for each debate was: one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute "rejoinder." The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates. Stephen Douglas was first elected to the United States Senate in 1846. In 1858, he was seeking re-election for a third term. During his time in the Senate, the issue of slavery was raised several times, particularly with respect to the Compromise of 1850. As chairman of the committee on territories, Douglas argued for an approach to slavery termed popular sovereignty; electorates at a local level would vote whether to adopt or reject a state constitution which prohibited slavery. Decisions about whether slavery was permitted or prohibited within certain states and territories had been made previously at a federal level. Douglas was successful with passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854. Abraham Lincoln, like Douglas, had also been elected to Congress in 1846. He served one two-year term in the House of Representatives. During his time in the House, Lincoln disagreed with Douglas and supported the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to ban slavery in new territory. Lincoln returned to politics in the 1850s to oppose the Kansas–Nebraska Act, and help develop the new Republican party.

Before the debates, Lincoln said that Douglas was encouraging fears of amalgamation of the races with enough success to drive thousands of people away from the Republican Party. Douglas tried to convince, especially the Democrats, that Lincoln was an abolitionist for saying that the American Declaration of Independence did apply to blacks as well as whites. Lincoln called a self-evident truth "the electric cord ... that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together", of different ethnic backgrounds.

Lincoln argued in his House Divided Speech that Douglas was part of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery. Lincoln said that ending the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in Kansas and Nebraska was the first step in this direction, and that the Dred Scott decision was another step in the direction of spreading slavery into Northern territories. Lincoln expressed the fear that the next Dred Scott decision would make Illinois a slave state.

U.S. Postage Stamp issued in 1958 commemorating the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Both Lincoln and Douglas had opposition. Although Lincoln was a former Whig, the prominent former Whig Judge Theophilus Lyle Dickey said that Lincoln was too closely tied to the abolitionists, and supported Douglas. But Democratic President James Buchanan opposed Douglas for defeating the Lecompton Constitution, and set up a rival National Democratic party that drew votes away from him. The main theme of the Lincoln–Douglas debates was slavery, particularly the issue of slavery's expansion into the territories. It was Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and replaced it with the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which meant that the people of a territory could decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Lincoln said that popular sovereignty would nationalize and perpetuate slavery. Douglas argued that both Whigs and Democrats believed in popular sovereignty and that the Compromise of 1850 was an example of this. Lincoln said that the national policy was to limit the spread of slavery, and mentioned (both at Jonesboro and later in his Cooper Union Address) the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery from a large part of the modern-day Midwest, as an example of this policy. The Compromise of 1850 allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for or against slavery, but it also allowed the admission of California as a free state, reduced the size of the slave state of Texas by adjusting the boundary, and ended the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia. In return, the South got a stronger fugitive slave law than the version mentioned in the Constitution. Whereas Douglas said that the Compromise of 1850 replaced the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of the state of Missouri, Lincoln said that this was false, and that Popular Sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision were a departure from the policies of the past that would nationalize slavery.

There were partisan remarks, such as Douglas' accusations that members of the "Black Republican" party, such as Lincoln, were abolitionists. Douglas cited as proof Lincoln's House Divided Speech in which he said, " I believe this government cannot endure permanently half Slave and half Free." Douglas also charged Lincoln with opposing the Dred Scott decision because "it deprives the negro of the rights and privileges of citizenship." Lincoln responded that "the next Dred Scott decision" could allow slavery to spread into free states. Douglas accused Lincoln of wanting to overthrow state laws that excluded blacks from states such as Illinois, which were popular with the northern Democrats. Lincoln did not argue for complete social equality. However, he did say Douglas ignored the basic humanity of blacks, and that slaves did have an equal right to liberty. Lincoln said he himself did not know how emancipation should happen. He believed in colonization, but admitted that this was impractical. Without colonization he said that it would be wrong for emancipated slaves to be treated as "underlings," but that there was a large opposition to social and political equality, and that "a universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded." Lincoln said that Douglas' public indifference to slavery would result in the expansion of slavery because it would mold public sentiment to accept slavery. Lincoln said Douglas "cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up," and that, in the words of Henry Clay, he would "blow out the moral lights around us" and eradicate the love of liberty.

At the debate at Freeport, Lincoln forced Douglas to choose between two options, either of which would damage Douglas' popularity and chances of getting reelected. Lincoln asked Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. Douglas responded that the people of a territory could keep slavery out even though the Supreme Court said that the federal government had no authority to exclude slavery, simply by refusing to pass a slave code and other legislation needed to protect slavery. Douglas alienated Southerners with this Freeport Doctrine, which damaged his chances of winning the Presidency in 1860. As a result, Southern politicians would use their demand for a slave code for territories such as Kansas to drive a wedge between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party. In splitting what was the majority political party in 1858 (the Democratic Party), Southerners guaranteed the election of Lincoln, the nominee of the newly formed Republican Party, in 1860.

Douglas' efforts to gain support in all sections of the country through popular sovereignty failed. By allowing slavery where the majority wanted it, he lost the support of Republicans led by Lincoln who thought Douglas was unprincipled. By defeating a pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution and advocating a Freeport Doctrine to stop slavery in Kansas where the majority were anti-slavery, he lost the support of the South.

Before the debate at Charleston, Democrats held up a banner that read "Negro equality" with a picture of a white man, a negro woman and a mulatto child. At this debate Lincoln went further than before in denying the charge that he was an abolitionist. While denying abolitionist tendencies was effective politics, the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass remarked on Lincoln's "entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race." In spite of Lincoln's denial of abolitionist tendencies, Stephen Douglas charged Lincoln with having an ally in Frederick Douglass in preaching "abolition doctrines." Stephen Douglas said that "the negro" Frederick Douglass told "all the friends of negro equality and negro citizenship to rally as one man around Abraham Lincoln." Stephen Douglas also charged Lincoln with a lack of consistency when speaking on the issue of racial equality, and cited Lincoln's previous statements that the declaration that all men are created equal applies to blacks as well as whites.

Lincoln said that slavery expansion endangered the Union, and mentioned the controversies caused by it in Missouri in 1820, in the territories conquered from Mexico that led to the Compromise of 1850, and again with the Bleeding Kansas controversy over slavery. Lincoln said that the crisis would be reached and passed when slavery was put "in the course of ultimate extinction." At Galesburg Douglas sought again to prove that Lincoln was an abolitionist. At Alton, Lincoln tried to reconcile his statements on equality. Lincoln contrasted his support for the Declaration with opposing statements made by the Southern politician John C. Calhoun and Senator John Pettit of Indiana, who called the Declaration "a self-evident lie." Lincoln said that Chief Justice Roger Taney (in his Dred Scott decision) and Stephen Douglas were opposing Thomas Jefferson's self-evident truth, dehumanizing blacks and preparing the public mind to think of them as only property. Lincoln thought slavery had to be treated as a wrong, and kept from growing. Lincoln used a number of colorful phrases in the debates, such as when he said that one argument by Douglas made a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse, and compared an evasion by Douglas to the sepia cloud from a cuttlefish. Lincoln said that Douglas' Freeport Doctrine was a do-nothing sovereignty that was "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." The October surprise of the election was the endorsement of the Democrat Douglas by former Whig John J. Crittenden. Former Whigs comprised the biggest block of swing voters, and Crittenden's endorsement of Douglas rather than Lincoln, also a former Whig, reduced Lincoln's chances of winning.

On election day, the Democrats won 40 seats in the state house of Representatives, and the Republicans won 35. In the state senate, Republicans held 11 seats, and Democrats held 14. Stephen A. Douglas was reelected by the legislature, 54-46, even though Abraham Lincoln won the popular vote with a percentage of 50.6%, or by 3,402 votes. However, the widespread media coverage of the debates greatly raised Lincoln's national profile, making him a viable candidate for nomination as the Republican candidate in the upcoming 1860 presidential election. He would go on to secure both the nomination and the presidency, beating Douglas (as the Northern Democratic candidate), among others, in the process.

Lincoln also went on to be in contact with editors looking to publish the debate texts. George Parsons, the Ohio Republican committee chairman, got Lincoln in touch with Ohio's main political publisher, Follett and Foster, of Columbus. They published copies of the text, and titled the book, Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois. Four printings were made, and the fourth sold 16,000 copies.

The Lincoln–Douglas debate format that is used in high school and college competition today is named after this series of debates. Modern presidential debates trace their roots to the Lincoln–Douglas Debates, though the format today is remarkably different from the original.

The first photo is composite image of portrait photographs of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Lincoln in 1860 Douglas in 1859. The second photo is U.S. Postage, 1958 issue, commemorating the Lincoln and Douglas debates.

By Project Gutenberg 
Edited by Neil Gale, Ph.D.