Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable - Founder of Chicago

PanAfricast

Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable is regarded as the first permanent, non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois, and is recognized as the "Founder of Chicago". A school, museum, harbor, park, and bridge have been named in his honor. The site where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s is identified as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.

Pointe du Sable was of African descent. During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times among France, Britain, Spain and the new United States. Described as handsome and well educated, Pointe du Sable married a Native American woman, Kitiwaha, and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American rebel sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan north of Detroit.

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 port of St. Charles, where he was licensed to run a Missouri River ferry. Pointe du Sable's successful role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century.