EVO.

This series contains adult language and depictions of graphic violence.

Listener discretion is advised.

They came with the rivers, long before the towers rose from the prairie or railroads etched their destiny into the mud, long before steel screamed from smokestacks and dreams burned in alley fires.

This land was a meeting place, Chicago, the wild garlic field.

The Potawatomi called it home.

They moved silently through tall grasses and marshes,

their canoes gliding across the vast inland waters that shimmered like mirrors of time.

Here at the edge of Lake Michigan, a city would be born.

Not gently, not slowly, but in fire and blood,

rising from ash with a roar that would echo across a continent.

In 1673, French explorers Joliet and Marquette pushed through the wilderness, mapping a new world.

They found native trails and waterways that would become roads and canals.

They marked the place where commerce would someday explode, where wagons gave way to rail cars and trade gave way to industry.

In 1837, Chicago was incorporated, a muddy trading post of 4,000 souls.

Within 50 years, it would be home to over a million.

But with growth came tension.

As immigrants fled in from Ireland, Germany, Poland, Italy, and beyond, the city strained.

Ethnic enclaves flourished.

Unions battled capitalists.

And the poor lived in tenements barely fit for animals.

Chicago was a place of hope and hardship, where fortunes could be made and lives could be lost

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