Opening paragraphs............

Before the City, there was the land.  Go back just over a century and a half to the place that became Chicago, and our familiar distinction between city and country vanishes.  At the mouth of the river where the city would one day stand, small human settlements came and went, but their inhabitants would no more have used the word "urban" to describe the place than the word "rural."  Without those words, there could be no city here, not until people came who could dream city dreams in the midst of a cityless landscape.  Chicago remained a gathering place like so many other gathering places scattered between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.  What most distinguished it were the wild garlic plants that grew amid the grasses and sedges of its low-lying prairie.  From them, it gained its name:  Chigagou, "the wild-garlic place."
-William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis:  Chicago and the Great West