Jean-Baptiste-Point DuSable (1745-1818)

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable,  a frontier trader, trapper and farmer is regarded as the first permanent resident of what became Chicago, Illinois.  There is very little definite information on DuSable’s early years. He was born free around 1745 in St. Marc, Saint-Dominique (Haiti). His mother was an African slave, his father a French mariner. DuSable traveled with his father to France, where he embarked on a fruitful education. It was through this and the work that he performed for his father on his ships, that he learned several languages including French, Spanish, English, and many Indian dialects.

DuSable arrived in New Orleans in 1765 whereupon he learned the colony had become a Spanish possession. Having lost his identification papers and been injured on the voyage to New Orleans, DuSable was almost enslaved. French Jesuit priests protected him until he was healthy enough to travel. DuSable migrated north, up the Mississippi river, later settling in an area near present-day Peoria, Illinois.

By the 1770s DuSable had built a cabin, owned 800 acres of land and took a Potawatomie Indian, Catherine, as his common-law wife. They eventually had a daughter and son. In 1779 the DuSables moved to the shore of Lake Michigan in a marshy area the Indians called Eschikagu, “the place of bad smells," present-day Michigan City, Indiana, where he built a home on the north bank of the Chicago River. He established a thriving trading post which included a mill, smokehouse, workshop, barn and other smaller buildings. The post had became a major supply station for other traders in the Great Lakes region.  In the early 1780's he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American sympathizer in the American Revolutionary War. In 1784 his family joined him in his home on the Chicago River. Soon afterwards DuSable and Catherine were married by a Catholic priest. In 1796 their grand-daughter became the first child born in what would become Chicago.

On May 7, 1800, DuSable had become so disillusioned the way he and his family were treated and bitter cold winters, sold his trading post for $1,200 and left the area.  He and his family moved to St. Charles, Missouri.

Point De Sable died almost penniless in St. Charles, on August 28, 1818.

Point du Sable has become known as the "Founder of Chicago". In Chicago, a school, museum, harbor, park and bridge have been named, or renamed, in his honor; and the place where he settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark.