Point du Sable, Jean Baptiste

Impact on the world

Settling on the north bank of the Chicago River in a marshy area the Potawatomi called Eschikagou, Point du Sable built an extensive trading operation — eventually including a large 40-by-22-foot house, a horse mill, bakehouse, smokehouse, poultry house, workshop, stable, and barn on roughly 800 acres — that became, by 1790, a key supply link in the regional fur and grain trade, serving traders, Native nations, and military travelers of multiple nationalities passing through the area. Though his role was minimized for over a century in favor of the white trader who purchased his property, John Kinzie, the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois formally recognized Point du Sable as the city's founder in 1968; his settlement site is now a National Historic Landmark in Pioneer Court, and a museum, high school, park, harbor, and the bridge over the Chicago River bearing his name now honor him as, in Chicago's own official language, the “Father of Chicago.”

Life & background

Born around 1745, likely in Saint-Marc in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to a French father and an enslaved or formerly enslaved Black mother, Point du Sable's early life is not well documented, though contemporary accounts describe him as “a handsome negro, well educated.” He worked as a frontier trader across the Great Lakes region through the upheavals of the American Revolution, was briefly arrested by the British in 1779 on suspicion of American sympathies and made to manage a British trading post in Michigan, then returned to establish his Chicago River settlement by the mid-1780s. He married a Potawatomi woman, Kitihawa (known as Catherine), in a tribal ceremony and later a Catholic one in 1788, and the couple had two children; he sold his Chicago property in 1800 for 6,000 livres and relocated to St. Charles, Missouri, where he worked as a farmer and licensed ferry operator until his death on August 28, 1818.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; BlackPast.org; Field Museum