Jean Baptiste Point du Sable
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable is regarded as the first permanent non-Native settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois, and is recognized as the city's founder. The site where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s is memorialized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.
Point du Sable was of African descent, but little else is known of his life before the 1770s. During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times between France, Britain, Spain and the United States. Described as handsome and well-educated, Point duSable married a Potawatomi Native American woman, Kitihawa, and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British on suspicion of being an American Patriot sympathizer. In the early 1780s, he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now St. Clair, Michigan.
Point du Sable is first recorded as living at the mouth of the Chicago River in a trader's journal of early 1790. By then, he had established an extensive and prosperous trading settlement in what later became the City of Chicago. He sold his Chicago River property in 1800 and moved to the river port of St. Charles, where he was licensed to run a ferry across the Missouri River. Point duSable's role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century.
In Chicago, a school, museum, harbor, park, bridge, and road have been named in du Sable's honor.
Biography
Early life
There are no records of Point du Sable's life before the 1770s. Though it is known from sources during his life that he was of African descent, his birth date, place of birth, and parents are unknown. Juliette Kinzie, another early pioneer of Chicago, never met Point duSable but said in her 1856 memoir that he was "a native of St.Domingo". This became generally accepted as his place of birth. Historian Milo Milton Quaife regarded Kinzie's account of Point duSable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated", later putting forward a theory that he was of African and French-Canadian origin. A historical novel published in 1953 helped to popularize the claim that Point du Sable was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in French Saint-Domingue. If he was born outside continental North America, there are competing accounts as to whether he entered as a trader from the north through French Canada, or from the south through French Louisiana.Illinois Country
Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa on 27October 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia in the Illinois Country, a longtime French colonial settlement on the east side of the Mississippi River. It is likely that this couple was married earlier in the 1770s in a Native American tradition. They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne. Point duSable supported his family as a frontier trader and settler during a period of great upheaval for the former southern dependencies of French Canada and in the Illinois Country, where the regions changed hands several times over the course of half a century.In a footnote to a poem titled Speech to the Western Indians, Arent DePeyster, British commandant from 1774 to 1779 at Fort Michilimackinac, noted that "Baptist Point deSaible" was "a handsome negro", "well educated", and "settled in Eschecagou". When he published this poem in 1813, DePeyster presented it as a speech that he had made at the village of Arbrecroche on 4July 1779. This footnote has led many scholars to assume that Point duSable had settled in Chicago by 1779. But letters written by other traders in the late 1770s suggest that Point duSable was at this time settled at the mouth of Trail Creek at what is now Michigan City, Indiana.
In August 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, Point duSable was arrested as a suspected American Patriot at Trail Creek by British troops and imprisoned briefly at Fort Michilimackinac. An officer's report following his arrest noted that Point du Sable had many friends who vouched for his good character. The following year, Point du Sable was ordered transported to the Pinery on the St. Clair River north of Detroit. From the summer of 1780 until May 1784, Point duSable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands owned by British officer Lt.Patrick Sinclair, on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan. This may have been a choice given by him from the British, offering him release from his imprisonment to manage the Pinery. Point duSable lived with his family in a cabin at the mouth of the Pine River in what is now the city of St. Clair.
At some time in the 1780s, after the U.S. achieved independence, Point du Sable settled on the north bank of the Chicago River close to its mouth. The earliest known record of Point duSable living in Chicago is an entry that Hugh Heward made in his journal on 10May 1790, during a journey from Detroit across Michigan and through Illinois. Heward's party stopped at Point duSable's house enroute to the Chicago portage; they swapped their canoe for a pirogue that belonged to Point duSable, and they bought bread, flour, and pork from him. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, described Point duSable as a large man and wealthy trader. Point du Sable's granddaughter, Eulalie Pelletier, was born at his Chicago River settlement in 1796.
In 1800 Point duSable sold his farm to John Kinzie's frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres. The bill of sale, which was rediscovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, detailed all of the property Point duSable owned, as well as many of his personal effects. This included a house, two barns, a horse-drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy, and a smokehouse. The house was a log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings.
Missouri River and burial
After Point du Sable sold his property in Chicago, he moved to St. Charles, west of St. Louis, which at that time was still part of Spanish Louisiana. He was commissioned by the colonial governor to operate a ferry across the Missouri River. In St.Charles, he may have lived for a time with his son, and later with his granddaughter's family. Late in life, he may have sought public or charitable assistance. He died on 28 August 1818 and was buried in an unmarked grave in St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery. His entry in the parish burial register does not mention his origins, parents, or relatives; it simply describes him as nègre.The St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery was moved twice in the 19thcentury. Oral tradition and records of the Archdiocese of St. Louis suggested that Point duSable's remains were also moved. On 12October 1968, the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission erected a granite marker at the site believed to be Point duSable's grave in the third St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery.
In 2002 an archaeological investigation of the grave site was initiated by the African Scientific Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Researchers using a combination of ground-penetrating radar, surveys, and excavation of a area did not find any evidence of any burials at the supposed grave site, leading the archaeologists to conclude that Point duSable's remains may not have been reinterred from one of the two previous cemeteries.
Theories and legends
Origins
Though there is little historical evidence regarding Point duSable's life before the 1770s, there are several theories and legends that give accounts of his early life. Writing in 1933, Quaife identified a French immigrant to Canada, Pierre Dandonneau, who acquired the title "Sieur deSable" and whose descendants were known by both the names Dandonneau and DuSable. Quaife was unable to find a direct link to Point duSable, but he identified descendants of Pierre Dandonneau as living around the Great Lakes region in Detroit, Mackinac, and St.Joseph. He speculated that Point duSable's father may have been a member of this family, while his mother was likely an enslaved woman.In 1951, Joseph Jeremie, a native of Haiti, published a pamphlet in which he said he was the great-grandson of Point duSable. Based on family recollections and tombstone inscriptions, he claimed that Point duSable was born in Saint-Marc in what was then Saint Domingue, studied in France, and returned to the island to deal in coffee before traveling to French Louisiana. Historian and Point duSable biographer John F. Swenson has called these claims "elaborate, undocumented assertions... in a fanciful biography".