Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (1750 – 28 August 1818) is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois. He was of African descent, but little else is known of his life prior to the 1770s. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British on suspicion of being an American Patriot sympathizer. He married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa on 27 October 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia, a longtime French Illinois Country colonial settlement.
About Jean Baptiste Point du Sable in brief
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (1750 – 28 August 1818) is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois. He was of African descent, but little else is known of his life prior to the 1770s. 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 the city of St. Clair, Michigan north of Detroit. He married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa on 27 October 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia, a longtime French Illinois Country colonial settlement on the east side of the Mississippi River. They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne. Point du Sable supported his family as a frontier trader and settler during a period when Great Britain, and later the newly formed United States, were seeking to assert control in the former southern dependencies of French Canada and in the Illinois Country. His successful role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century. A school, museum, harbor, park, and bridge have been named in his honor. The site where he settled is identified as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.
The following year, Point duSable was ordered transported to the Pinery by British Lt. Lt. Pinery, owned by Pinery on the St Clair River, to serve as an officer in the American Civil War. He died in 1818, and was buried at the St. Paul Cathedral in Chicago. He is buried in a plot of land that is now part of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Pioneer Court, which is also known as the “Pioneer Court” campus. He had two children with a Native American woman, Kitiwaha, and they had two kids. There are no records of Point du sable’s life prior to the 1770s, but it is known from sources during his life that he was ofAfrican descent, his birth year, place of birth, and parents are unknown. A historical novel published in 1953 helped to popularize the claim that Point du Sable was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in Saint Domingue. In 1856, another early pioneer of Chicago, Juliette Kinzie, stated in her 1856 memoir that he was \”a native of St Domedo\”. This became generally accepted as his place ofBirth. In 1800, 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. He sold his Missouri River Ferry business in 1800, and went on to become a well-known trader and ship owner in the Midwest.
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This page is based on the article Jean Baptiste Point du Sable published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
