The Swift Walker: How A Fur Trader Founded the Chicago Board of Trade

Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard (1802-1886) and the Making of Chicago

This biography is a companion to Ventureology Episode 1: The 82 Merchants Who Invented Modern Finance. That episode tells the story of how the Chicago Board of Trade was founded in 1848. This piece answers the question the episode doesn't have space to ask: who was the man whose name appears first on the CBOT charter, and why was he there?

Today, the Board of Trade Hubbard helped found has become CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives marketplace, processing over one quadrillion dollars in annual notional trading volume. In December 2025, CME Group launched FanDuel Predicts, a platform that lets anyone trade event contracts on the S&P 500, oil prices, or GDP data for as little as one dollar. This is a perfect example of the efficient market-clearing mechanisms that CBOT was built to enable. This is the story of the man who started it.

In the early 1820s, a young fur trader named Gurdon Hubbard set out from a Potawatomi camp to walk to his trading post near Hennepin, Illinois, a two-day journey through soft, muddy prairie. A warrior from a neighboring band appeared and said he was heading the same direction. Hubbard gave him supper and told him they'd leave at dawn.

What Hubbard didn't know was that two bands had made a wager on him. They had secretly arranged the race without telling him, betting that the young American could outwalk any man they could produce.

He noticed his companion's competitive pace within the first few miles. About noon his companion stopped to smoke, but Hubbard, having decided this was a race, kept going as fast as he could and opened a long lead. When he reached the Illinois River opposite his trading house, he found his canoe stolen and the bottomlands flooded. He jumped in and swam across, reaching his house about dark.

The next morning Hubbard sent his men back across the river to look for his companion. They found him with a party of others on horseback, chagrined and lame. The distance walked that day was seventy-five miles. Hubbard suffered no inconvenience from it, though his companion was sore for days. (Hamilton, p. 126)

It was not the first time Hubbard had displayed such indefatigability. The Potawatomi had long since given him their name: Pa-pa-ma-ta-be. The Swift Walker. (Hamilton, p. 127)

Sixty years later, at age eighty-two, Hubbard would demonstrate the same iron will. An abscess had cost him the sight of his left eye, and in April 1884, the eye had to be removed. He refused anesthesia. He lay down on the table, with no one holding his hands, and let the doctor cut. Two years later, his remaining eye was also removed. A friend who witnessed his composure wrote that "the steady nerve and self-control that so distinguished him in his earlier years enabled him simply to lie down and have his eye cut out." (Hamilton, pp. 175-176)

Between those two moments, the muddy prairie walk and the unflinching surgery. Hubbard transformed from a teenage fur trader into the only figure who bridged Chicago's two founding economies. He arrived in 1818 when Chicago was a military outpost with a handful of cabins. He helped create the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848 when it became the pivot point of American commerce. He was, as the historian A.T. Andreas wrote while Hubbard was still alive, "the only person connected with the modern commerce and trade of the city, who had been connected with the rude Indian traffic which centered in Chicago in the earlier times."

No one else made that transition. Only the Swift Walker.

On October 1, 1818, Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, sixteen years old and five months into a five-year indenture with John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, walked into Chicago for the first time. (Hamilton, p. 32)

He had traveled since May: by batteau up the St. Lawrence from Montreal, by ox-cart across the portage to Lake Simcoe, by boat along the northern shore of Lake Huron, and finally by the brigade's vessels down Lake Michigan. The journey had taken nearly five months. His salary was $120 per year (roughly $2,900 today). Two-thirds of it, eighty dollars a year, he sent home to support his mother and dependent sisters. (Hamilton, p. 174)

What he found at Chicago was barely a place at all.

Fort Dearborn stood on the south bank of the river, whitewashed government buildings that sparkled in the autumn sun. Across the river sat John Kinzie's log cabin with a crude piazza facing the water. The American Fur Company maintained a log storehouse. A few other cabins scattered the area, including one at Bridgeport called "Hardscrabble," Antoine Ouilmette's cabin on the north side, and the Kinzie and Beaubien houses.

The nearest post office was Fort Wayne, Indiana. Mail was carried generally by soldiers on foot and was received once a month. (Hamilton, p. 38)

The Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan near a clump of a hundred or more stunted pine trees on the sand-hills about a mile from the fort. There was no harbor. Ships anchored offshore and sent goods in by smaller boat.

This was Chicago in 1818: a portage point between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watershed, useful to fur traders and the military, meaningless to anyone else. Population: perhaps one hundred, mostly soldiers.

The year Hubbard arrived was not incidental. In 1818, Illinois was admitted to the Union as a state, and in a decision with enormous long-term consequences, delegate Nathaniel Pope secured an amendment extending the state's northern boundary 60 miles north of the originally contemplated line to include the Chicago Portage. (Taylor, pp. 84-86) Without that adjustment, Chicago would have been in Wisconsin. Pope foresaw that Illinois needed a commercial outlet on Lake Michigan and that the canal's terminus must be wholly within the state's limits. The sixteen-year-old fur trader stepping ashore that October was arriving at the precise moment the United States had formally decided this geography mattered.

The economy operating here ran on principles entirely foreign to the commodity markets that would later make Chicago famous. The fur trade ran on kinship. Credit extended through personal relationships encoded in marriage, adoption, and ritual obligation. A fur company clerk didn't buy pelts from Native peoples through a contract. He embedded himself in tribal networks, often taking a Native wife whose family connections opened trading relationships that no legal document could secure.

Trust wasn't verified by institutions. It was verified by blood.

The morning after his arrival, Hubbard was invited to breakfast at the Kinzie house. He sat down at a properly set table for the first time since leaving his father's house in Montreal five months earlier. The sight of it, women present, a neat and well-ordered table, overwhelmed him, and he could not suppress his tears.

Mrs. Kinzie saw his distress. "I know just how you feel, and know more about you than you think," she told him. "I am going to be a mother to you if you will let me." She led him into an adjoining room and left him to compose himself.

She was practicing the kinship economy's essential protocol: extending family to a stranger, creating obligation through care. It was how the frontier worked. It was how Chicago would work for the next three decades.

The teenage boy weeping at her breakfast table would be the one to translate that system into something else entirely.

Hubbard had not chosen Chicago. Chicago had chosen him.

His father, Elizur Hubbard, was a Vermont lawyer who lost everything in speculation around 1812. The family relocated to Montreal, where fifteen-year-old Gurdon found work at the hardware store of John Frothingham. When an American Fur Company recruiter came through, the boy signed a five-year indenture, not from ambition, but because his friend John Dyde was going, and the two talked each other into it. It was an escape from poverty, not a bet on the frontier.

His assignment to the Illinois Brigade was itself an accident. Originally slated for the Fond-du-Lac brigade in the far north, Hubbard learned that his father and brother had gone to St. Louis. He requested a transfer to Illinois to be closer to them. The request was granted. The young man who took his place in the northern brigade froze to death that winter.

For the next nine years, Hubbard worked the fur trade's annual rhythm. Winters at interior trading posts, bargaining with Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and other tribes for pelts. Summers at Mackinac Island, the company's regional headquarters, sorting and packing furs for shipment to New York. He made twenty-six round-trip voyages between the interior posts and Mackinac, almost always passing through Chicago. (Hamilton, p. 158)

He dressed like the traders he worked among: buckskin hunting shirt, blue capote belted at the waist, knife and tomahawk tucked into a sash, calico shirt underneath, breechcloth, buckskin leggings, moccasins. At six feet and something more, he cut a striking figure.

The work was brutal. Voyageurs paddled from early morning to sundown, with an hour at noon, and occasional ten-minute breaks "to pipe." Diet was pea soup and salt pork, with hard biscuit on Sundays. Progress under oars averaged fifty miles per day; with fair wind and square sails, seventy-five. The men sang boat songs to keep time.

In winter 1819, at age seventeen, Hubbard was left alone for thirty days to guard trade goods at Muskegon Lake. Every night, a wolf came to eat the fish scraps he had thrown out. "I could see him through the cracks in the house, and could easily have shot him," Hubbard later wrote, "but he was my only companion, and I laid awake nights, awaiting his coming."

He nearly died at least twice. Once, he fell through ice covering a flooded stream and was swept by the current beneath two layers of frozen water. "I had almost given up hope," he recalled, "when my hand struck a willow bush near the bank and arrested my rapid progress." He broke through the ice with his head and survived.

When asked about these experiences later, he told his nephew: "I did not know the sensation of fear, as I had never experienced it."

The most arresting evidence of what Hubbard endured survives in his own words about crossing the Chicago Portage through Mud Lake, the seven-mile stretch of marsh between the Chicago River and the Des Plaines that was the geographic key to everything Chicago would become. He wrote about it in his autobiography, describing the crossing in dry seasons when the water was gone and the mud was not:

He saved the worst detail for last: when they finally camped for the night, they spent their remaining energy pulling blood-sucking leeches off their bodies. The leeches had to be removed with a tobacco decoction, because pulling them by hand tore them apart and left pieces embedded in the skin. Then the mosquitoes came, and sleep was hopeless.

This was the geography Hubbard believed would anchor a continental commercial empire. He was right. The miserable seven-mile crossing he made twenty-six times over nine years would become the route of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the hydraulic infrastructure that made Chicago into an inland port and, within a generation, the largest grain market on earth.

John H. Fonda, a traveler passing through the Chicago Portage from St. Louis, arrived at Fort Dearborn and recorded what he found: "An agent of the American Fur Company named Gordon S. Hubbard, then occupied the Fort. The principal inhabitants were the agent, Mr. Hubbard, a Frenchman by the name of Ouilmette, and John B. Beaubien." In a settlement of perhaps seventy-five to one hundred people, Hubbard was listed first. He was not merely present in early Chicago. He was, to those who passed through, its defining face.

Hubbard was also Chicago's living oral archive. In 1818, while at the portage, he met Antoine Deschamps and Antoine Beson, two old fur traders who had been passing through the area since 1778, forty years before Hubbard arrived. They told him about a fur trader named Guarie who had operated a trading house on the west bank of the North Branch of the Chicago River before any American had set foot in Illinois. They showed him the remnants of cornfields, "distinctly traceable, though grown over with grass." Hubbard carried that testimony forward. It was his account, cited by historians for the next century, that established the existence of pre-American commerce at the Chicago Portage. He became its custodian.

By his early twenties, Hubbard had become one of the most capable traders in the Illinois country. After the expiration of his original five-year contract around 1823, the company kept him on at the substantial salary of $1,300 per year (roughly $45,000 annually today). But even this wasn't enough. Dissatisfied with the arrangement, Hubbard was on the verge of leaving when the company offered him an interest as a special partner, tying his compensation directly to his results. He accepted. Now his income depended entirely on his own efforts and success.

He was in his early twenties, and the franchise purchase that would anchor his next sixty years was close at hand.

In spring 1827, Hubbard purchased the American Fur Company's Illinois franchises outright. He was twenty-four years old.

His peers in the fur trade were moving west, following the beaver populations toward the Rocky Mountains. The smart money said the Illinois country was finished: too many settlers, too few animals, too much competition from Eastern goods. The fur trade's center of gravity was shifting, and anyone who stayed behind would be left with nothing.

Hubbard stayed behind.

He understood something his competitors didn't. The fur trade was dying, but Chicago was about to be born. The same geography that made Chicago a useful portage point, the short overland distance between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watershed, would make it the pivot of continental commerce once a canal was built. In 1827, there was no canal. The Illinois and Michigan Canal wouldn't open for another twenty-one years. But Hubbard had walked every mile of the route. He knew the terrain better than anyone alive. He bet on the infrastructure that didn't yet exist.

His first move was to abandon the water routes entirely. He scuttled his boats for safekeeping in the South Branch of the Chicago River and assembled a caravan of nearly fifty ponies, purchased from the Potawatomi chief Big Foot, to carry trade goods overland. The trail his caravan marked became "Hubbard's Trail," the only well-traveled road between Chicago and the Wabash country for the next fifteen years.

His second move was to deepen his position in the kinship networks he would eventually translate into institutional commerce.

Around 1824, Chief Tamin of the Kankakee Potawatomi offered Hubbard his eldest daughter in marriage. Hubbard declined. Tamin then suggested that Hubbard might marry his eleven-year-old niece, Watseka, when she came of age. Hubbard did not refuse. They married around 1826, when Watseka was fourteen or fifteen. Her father was Shabbona, a respected warrior who had fought alongside Tecumseh. Her family connections gave Hubbard privileged access to Potawatomi trading networks across Illinois.

The marriage was real, but it was also protocol. In the kinship economy, you couldn't do business with a tribe without becoming part of it. Marriage was the mechanism. Hubbard had already been adopted by Chief Waba of the Kickapoo, who gave him the name Che-mo-co-mon-ess, "the Little American." Now he was family to the Potawatomi as well.

The union lasted about two years. They had one daughter, who died in infancy. By 1828, as Hubbard shifted his operations fully to Chicago, they separated by mutual agreement. He was entering the commodity economy. She was about to be expelled from the continent.

Watseka married twice more after Hubbard. She survived the Trail of Death, the forced removal of the Potawatomi from Illinois in 1838, during which soldiers marched her people six hundred miles to a reservation in Kansas. Over her lifetime, she walked an estimated six thousand miles between reservations and her childhood home in Illinois, returning again and again to land she no longer owned. The city of Watseka, Illinois, is named for her.

By 1829, Hubbard was building infrastructure that would outlast the fur trade. That winter, he slaughtered a large number of hogs but had no barrels to pack them. He piled the pork on the frozen riverbank near where Rush Street now stands and kept it there until spring. (Hamilton, p. 158) His nephew called this "the beginning of the packing industry in Chicago," though Taylor's 1917 history of the Board of Trade credits George W. Dole with the first meat packing business in 1832. The distinction likely reflects scale: Hubbard's was seasonal; Dole's was continuous. Either way, Hubbard was among the first.

In 1831, Hubbard married Elenora Berry of Ohio. She died in Chicago in 1838, six days after the birth of their son, a loss that the historical record passes over in a single sentence.

In 1834, he moved from Danville to Chicago permanently and built "Hubbard's Folly": the first large brick building in Chicago, erected at the corner of LaSalle and South Water streets. (Hamilton, p. 170) Locals mocked the scale of it. Who needed that much warehouse space in a town of a few hundred people? Within a few years, it was too small to handle the demand. The following year, on February 11, 1835, the Town of Chicago was incorporated, with Hubbard named as one of its five original trustees alongside John H. Kinzie, Ebenezer Goodrich, John K. Boyer, and John S. C. Hogan. (Hamilton, p. 170)

By 1835, Hubbard was packing 3,500 hogs annually, the largest operation in the West. He was also packing the first beef shipped from Chicago, and he had become the city's first insurance underwriter, writing for the Aetna Insurance Company of Hartford the first policy ever issued in Chicago. (Hamilton, p. 171) In January 1836, he became one of thirteen incorporators of the Chicago Hydraulic Company, capitalized at $250,000 (~$8.5 million today), to build the city's first water system. Delayed by the Panic of 1837, the works went operational in 1842, a steam-powered pump at the foot of Lake Street distributing water through wooden pipes to the south and west sides. The city purchased the company's franchises in 1852.

In nine years, from 1827 to 1836, Hubbard had transformed himself from fur trader to warehouse owner, meat packer, town trustee, insurance agent, and water company incorporator. He had bet that Chicago's geography would outlast the fur trade, and he had built the physical infrastructure to prove it.

On April 3, 1848, eighty-two merchants gathered above Gage & Haines' flour store on South Water Street to found the Chicago Board of Trade. (Taylor, p. 137)

Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard's name appears first on the membership roll.

Seven days later, the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened.

The timing was not coincidental. The canal finally connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system, making Chicago the transfer point for grain moving from Western farms to Eastern markets. But grain markets were chaotic: prices swung wildly between harvest and winter, quality varied by farmer, contracts were unenforceable, weights and measures unstandardized. The merchants who gathered that April understood that the canal's promise could only be realized if someone imposed order on the chaos.

The CBOT existed to do exactly that: standardized contracts, uniform grades, enforceable rules, centralized trading. The personal relationships that had governed frontier commerce, the kinship protocols Hubbard had spent two decades mastering, would give way to impersonal markets where grain from any farmer, properly graded, was interchangeable with grain from any other.

The Board's organizational details reveal how seriously the founders took this standardization mission. George Smith, the Scottish banker who had done more than any individual to create Chicago's money supply, was elected the CBOT's first president and declined to serve. Thomas Dyer replaced him. At the first meeting, Hubbard was appointed Inspector of Fish and Provisions, alongside Sylvester Marsh and John Rogers. (Taylor, p. 137) This was the first move ever made in the city toward securing uniformity in grades, or guaranteeing the quality of any merchantable product sold. Hubbard's assignment wasn't ceremonial. It was operational, focused on the exact standardization mission that would define the institution.

Hubbard had helped make the canal possible in ways beyond his CBOT membership. In the 1832-33 legislative session, representing Vermilion County, he introduced a bill for canal construction, which passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. He then substituted a bill for a railroad, which was also defeated by the casting vote of the presiding officer. He attended every session of the legislature thereafter to lobby for the canal, until the bill was finally passed in 1835-36.

In 1835, Governor Duncan appointed Hubbard, William F. Thornton, and William B. Archer as the first board of Canal Commissioners. (Hamilton, p. 170) They served until 1841. On July 4, 1836, the commencement of the canal was celebrated, and Hubbard dug the first spadeful of earth. It was the same route through Mud Lake that he had crossed twenty-six times as a young voyageur, the miserable seven-mile marsh where he had pulled leeches off his legs by firelight. Now he was breaking ground on the infrastructure that would transform it into an inland waterway.

In 1843, Hubbard married Mary Ann Hubbard of Chicago. The ceremony was performed by Rev. Dr. Bascom, the same minister who, forty-one years later, would deliver the eulogy at Hubbard's funeral. (Hamilton, p. 187)

At the CBOT's founding, Hubbard was forty-five years old. He had arrived in Chicago thirty years earlier, when the population was perhaps one hundred. Now it was approaching thirty thousand. He had witnessed and enabled the transformation from a kinship economy to a commodity economy.

This is what we call Protocol Translation: the capacity to operate simultaneously in two incompatible economic systems, and in doing so, to control the transition between them. Hubbard was Chicago's original Protocol Translator. He held both systems in his head and his history simultaneously. He knew how kinship credit worked because he had lived inside it for two decades. He knew how institutional markets worked because he had helped build them. No one else in Chicago in 1848 could say both things.

Hubbard was the first, but Protocol Translation turned out to be a structural feature of Chicago's development rather than a personal trait. The city's geography kept producing the same demand: someone who could stand in two economic worlds at once and force them to connect.

George Smith, the Scottish banker who was elected the CBOT's first president but declined the position, operated simultaneously within Edinburgh's institutional capital networks and Chicago's frontier economy. He brought credibility from one system and deployed it in the other, and by 1854 his private bank notes backed 75% of Chicago's money supply. William Ogden arrived from New York the same year as Smith, skeptical that his brother-in-law's real estate investments in Chicago were worth anything. Within two years he was the city's first mayor. He applied the same infrastructure-first logic to railroads that Hubbard had applied to warehouses and canals, building the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad and proving that rail could bind a continent. Neither Smith nor Ogden learned the pattern from Hubbard. They didn't need to. Chicago's position at the junction of two economic systems created the demand, and the men who thrived were those who could operate in both systems.

Twenty-three years after the CBOT's founding, the fire came.

On Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, Gurdon Hubbard attended services at the Reformed Episcopal Church with his wife Mary Ann. Afterward, they had dinner with cousins at the new Palmer House hotel. As Mary Ann combed her hair before bed, she noticed a large fire burning to the southwest.

By Monday morning, the Great Chicago Fire had consumed everything Hubbard had built. His home on LaSalle Street. His warehouses. His insurance investments. The original eight-hundred-page autobiography he had written, covering his entire life.

The fire destroyed more than property. It destroyed the insurance industry. Fifty-eight companies went bankrupt. Insurers who survived paid claims worth roughly half of policyholders' losses, using legal technicalities to avoid full payment. Total insured losses across the city reached approximately $88 million (roughly $2.3 billion today).

He had invested as an underwriter in several insurance companies. The claims against him were enormous.

Hubbard faced a choice: he could find legal grounds to avoid payment (as others were doing), or he could honor the contracts. He chose to pay.

He sold his own properties to meet claims and was financially crippled, though by some accounts he retained enough to live on. The fire, Hamilton wrote, "destroyed his business, burned his property, and crippled him financially, and from that time he retired from active business life." He was sixty-nine years old.

No surviving quote explains his reasoning, but the logic is consistent with his entire career.

The kinship economy operated on a simple principle: break trust and lose your network permanently. There was no bankruptcy court, no legal restructuring, no second chances. Your relationships were your capital, and betraying them meant commercial death. Hubbard had spent his first twenty years in that system. He had been adopted by chiefs, married into tribes, and earned the name Swift Walker through demonstrated prowess. He had built his reputation on being, as one contemporary put it, one of only two traders who "never cheated or imposed upon the Native peoples."

When he chose to honor his insurance claims in 1871, he was applying the same ethic to the commodity economy. The CBOT had replaced kinship with contracts, but Hubbard understood that the new system's legitimacy still depended on people honoring their word. The institutions were young. If a sixty-nine-year-old founding member, respected throughout the city, chose legal escape over personal honor, the whole edifice of institutional trust would crack.

Hubbard's Economic Transitions: The Protocol Translator's Career Arc

Protocol Translation worked in both directions. He had carried the kinship economy's ethics into the commodity markets on the way up. He carried them again on the way down. After his death, the Chicago Fire Underwriters' Association memorialized him as "the first of its underwriters" and "the father of our profession in this city," praising his course "marked by so much integrity, that we of a later generation may well record... our appreciation of his life and our respect for his character."

He spent the rest of his life rebuilding what he could. In 1882, at age eighty, he borrowed money from wealthy Chicago friends and subdivided eighty acres he owned on Mackinac Island, the same island where he had first arrived in America sixty-four years earlier. He platted 132 building lots and called the development "Hubbard's Annex to the Mackinac National Park." The sales helped restore his family's position. The cottage community he created still thrives today.

He died on September 14, 1886, at his home at 143 Locust Street, blind from the surgeries he had endured, surrounded by his wife and children. He was eighty-four years old.

Chicago held his funeral at the New England Congregational Church on Delaware Place and Dearborn Avenue. (Hamilton, pp. 188-189) The Chicago Times reported the scene: from the moment the doors opened, a ceaseless stream of people entered, and by two o'clock every seat was occupied. The pall-bearers included Ex-Governor William Bross and Judge John D. Caton. The congregation, the Times wrote, "was a sea of white heads, representing the men who came to Chicago when there was no Chicago, and who have lived to see the results of the work they began."

He did not live to see the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The White City, which drew 27 million visitors from around the world and announced Chicago as a global metropolis, was built in Jackson Park along the Lake Michigan shoreline. It was made possible by the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which Hubbard had lobbied for, drafted legislation for, and dug the first shovel of earth to build. The great city at the canal's terminus hosted one of the most celebrated events in American history, seven years after he died.

His name is on a street on the Near North Side. A city in Iroquois County bears the name of his first wife.

And at Portage Woods, the same patch of forest and marsh in what is now Cook County where Hubbard and his voyageurs camped on the banks of Mud Lake, pulling leeches off each other by firelight, a single burr oak still stands. Philip Vierling, a retired teacher who spent his life documenting the Chicago Portage, named it the Hubbard Oak because it was thought to have been growing there when Hubbard first camped at the site in 1818. It is still alive.

That is what Protocol Translation leaves behind: not a dynasty or a company, but a city that learned to trust its own institutions because one man demonstrated that it was possible.

And one very old tree, standing at the geographic hinge where two continents meet, that remembers the man who understood what that hinge was worth.