By Eshaan Joshi
I’ve spoken a lot about the American Dream, about America, and about the myths that this country was born to. It’s a topic I really enjoy — we’re a new country, and yet, somehow, so deeply old. We have hills and mountains and vistas that have existed since the dawn of humanity and will keep standing tall long after we all pass. And yet, we dot those shining hills with small huts and houses barely designed to last past the turn of the decade. There’s a story to tell in every hill, every river, every forest, and there’s a story to tell in every boarded up window and creaky house I passed on a strange little trip into the Midwest.
It’s not entirely the most romantic part of this country; it’s actually quite possibly considered the least exciting, if the general demeanor of college students from there is anything to go by. I mean, there’s a lot of corn, if that’s your thing?
It gave me pause, because among those stories I had to ask a very simple one — who got us here in the first place? Obviously, the first answer was the driver, but they swapped every few stops and had shouted at me once or twice, so I’d rather not give them credit. But the question was on my mind — what could have ever possessed people to make it out here and set up a life? I made my guesses, my academic estimations, but I really couldn’t get past one, singular thought; the thought which I had hoped might shed some light on this question.
Have you ever wanted to get up and wander? Have you ever felt this unmistakeable desire to give it a rest, to stop what you’re doing and take a wrong turn?
It’s easy to see two roads diverge, and it’s easy to simply travel the one you’re meant to. But there’s an allure, isn’t there? An allure to the strange alleys and odd sidewalks and the woods that you’re not meant to be going into and yet your eyes cannot look away.
There’s a built-in human urge to wander. It’s not something we could ever fight. I mean, we’re the descendents of nomads forced into permanence, the direct lineage of wanderers who bind ourselves to work and play and static.
As much as I’d like to deny it, there’s something about that wanderlust that played into the U.S.’s founding myth. We came, we saw, we wandered. It’s a nice glossy cover to atrocity and hardship, but to some extent, it’s a myth that’s worth looking deeper into. Because there’s a part of us that still believes that myth. There’s a part of us that wants to disappear into lands we’ve never seen before and somehow come back to tell a story or a tall tale just to prove to your friends that you — yes you — could do something so stupid.
So there I was, on my strange little trip to Chicago, Illinois, exploring my own wanderlust in a way that exposed just how bad I am at planning things. I had done something similar, but my wandering unfortunately could not be into the wilds or the strange lands unexplored — I was no Livingstone, I would restrict my exploring to roads traveled.
But still, the wanderlust had bit me, and I’d convinced a few of my friends to join me on a journey and hop on a bus to Chicago. We, in a decision we did not think through, bought tickets, picked out some clothes, packed a bag, and in the early morning hours of a Sunday, got on a Greyhound.
And that bus got me thinking — well, there wasn’t much else to do but think — about where exactly I was going. What possessed us to pick Chicago, what possessed so many to go to Chicago in the first place. Where exactly was I going, and whose path was I following?
It is more than a little fitting how little is known about the founder of Chicago. It would be a crime for the Windy City to have some sort of clean-cut origin, a simple throughline, a Romulus and Remus that makes sense to the rest of us. Chicago is as Chicago does, and Jean Baptiste Point du Sable is more than willing to lend a hand in the muddling of a story. There’s little known about his origins — we have rumors and speculations, but the reality is we don’t have a damn record of the man before the 1770s. What we do know is sometime in the 1780s, he set up a little trading post, somewhere close to the mouth of the Chicago River — a small house mentioned once or twice in historical record. Just a simple spot to buy and sell the few supplies you might need when traveling the region.
We don’t know anything about Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. What we do know is that the wanderlust bit him once, and in doing so, he stumbled into founding one of the most influential cities in the world. And a few years later, that wanderlust must’ve bit him again, because he quit Chicago. I can only imagine what he saw in the north bank — a blank slate that nobody else had considered, a location where he could put himself and make something of himself. He put his mark — the first mark — and I wonder if he knew how many would follow after.
We don’t know what got him to quit Chicago, and honestly I can’t imagine we ever will. A man with no origins, a man who just traveled out west into new territory, saw himself a river and decided that it was there he’d set his mark. And then, a couple decades later, without rhyme or reason, he left. He sold his house in 1800, disappeared off into Missouri, and died in 1818. His remains have been lost to time and reburials.
Isn’t that just a little beautiful? We can’t all have some glorious legacy, a life meticulously poured over by historians or strangers, but we can still make a change. We can be like Jean Baptiste. We can simply wander and see where the road takes us.
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