Jean Baptiste Point du Sable
early founder of Chicago
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ batist pwɛ̃ dy sɑbl]; also spelled Point de Sable, Point au Sable, Point Sable, Pointe DuSable, or Pointe du Sable; Around
1745 – August 28, 1818) is regarded as the first permanent settler of what would become Chicago, Illinois, United States 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 Black African and possibly European 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 du Sable married a Potawatomi 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 was transported to work for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on a British owned 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Baptiste Point du Sable” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.