A pioneer and entrepreneur, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable is acknowledged as the founder of the settlement that later became the city of Chicago. Du Sable was an African man born in St. Marc, Santa Domingo (eastern Haiti) in 1745 to an African mother and a French father. His mother was a freed slave from an African region that later came to be the Congo nation. His father was a successful French mariner and merchant on the “Black Sea Gull” ship. DuSable’s father took him to France for his education, and there, along with his native French, DuSable learned English and Spanish. During the years of his education in France, he also acquired a taste for the fine arts and culture and assembled a striking collection of valuable works of art.
It was through this education and the work that he performed for his father on his ships, that he learned languages including French, Spanish, English, and many Indian dialects. At that point, the the French colony of Saint-Domingue had been colonized by Spain and France, and its inhabitants were a blend of Indigenous peoples, Spanish, French, and enslaved people from Africa. On his voyage from St. Dominique to New Orleans, the then-French colony, his ship was damaged and he was badly injured. By the time he reached the mainland, he had lost his identification papers and received the shocking news that the Spanish had taken control of the city. Thus, he was arrested and even faced enslavement. Fortunately, a group from the French Jesuit protected him until he recovered from his injuries and was healthy enough to continue his travels. During that period, he started to develop an interest in exploring the interior of the American wilderness.
DuSable travelled north, up the Mississippi River and in the early 1770s went to the Great Lakes area of North America, settling on the shore of Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Chicago River. Gradually, he acquired what totals about 800 acres of land. He also formed close relationships with the Pottawatomie Native American tribe, from whom he got married to Kihihawa who after her marriage became known as Catherine. The natives called the area where Du Sable settled Eschikagou, which translates as “Place of Bad Smells” or “Land of the Wild Onions“. However, DuSable who foresaw the value of the location managed to befriend the tribes of the area and established the first permanent home in the region. The homestead and trading post they built on the mouth of the Chicago River, with a comfortably appointed cabin, workshop, bake house, stable, smokehouse, and more, was the first settlement on what would become the city of Chicago. An explorer and entrepreneur, Du Sable was a well-known and highly respected businessman in the Northwest territory of the United States.
During his career, the areas where he settled around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times among France, Britain, Spain and the new United States. From here on, DuSable started to flourish financially. He traded heavily with neighboring tribes and established the main supply station for westward bound White men who were moving from the English colonies. He took advantage of the strategic location of this land and started to create a complex of commercial buildings including a trading post, a smokehouse, a bakehouse, a workshop, a mill, a dairy, a barn and a horse stable along other buildings. DuSable’s complex soon became the main trade and supply depot for traders, woodsmen, trappers, pioneers and Native Americans.
He offered good prices for raw agricultural materials and animals and used them to make profitable products such as meat, furs and flour. His trade reached locations as far as Detroit and Canada. Eschikagou grew to be the main trading route for the Great Lakes area. He spoke fluent French, Spanish, English and several Native American languages. Fur traders were the advance guard of the international capitalist market and invasive settlement. Many traders were welcomed by Indians because they brought metal tools and, just as important, wool and cotton cloth. Sadly, another staple of the trade was alcohol. Like most other traders, DuSable trafficked in liquor. The DuSables’ household was a five-room house of a substantial structure and with all the necessary amenities of the time. His fine taste appears in every aspect of the house built in the middle of a wilderness. It was built of imported French walnut wood and filled with fine furniture and artistic paintings indicating that the family grew wealthy and became prosperous for the time and region.
In 1779, DuSable, being a free, multilingual Black man aroused suspicions by the British and the French, during the Revolutionary War. He was living on the site of present-day Michigan City, Indiana, when he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American sympathizer. These allegations were never substantiated. He and his family were detained for five years by the British. Once freed, Pointe du Sable pursued his interest in accumulating property and building a business in earnest. He spent the next few years as their prisoner at Fort Mackinac. Pointe du Sable gradually began putting down roots with a thirty-acre farm in Peoria, Illinois, in 1780, although he continued to move throughout his life. From 1780 to 1783 he managed for his captors a trading post called the Pinery on the St. Clair River in present-day Michigan, after which he returned to the site of Chicago. He built a home on the north bank of the Chicago River, claimed about 800 acres of land and established a thriving trading post which included a mill, smokehouse, workshop, barn and other smaller buildings.
The post became a major supply station for other traders in the Great Lakes region. At this point, Chicago was hardly a vast empty space. It was already a trading post inhabited by Indigenous peoples. By 1790 Du Sable’s establishment there had become an important link in the region’s fur and grain trade. Over the following years visits continued, and occasional intermittent posts were established, including those by René LaSalle, Henri Tonti, Pierre Liette and the four-year Mission of the Guardian Angel. Point du Sable 1780s establishment is recognized as the first settlement that continued on and ultimately grew to become the city of Chicago. He is therefore widely regarded as the first permanent resident of Chicago and has been given the appellation “Founder of Chicago“.
For unknown reasons, in 1800 Du Sable sold his Chicago holdings to a European trader for $1,200 ($17,000) and moved from Chicago to the Missouri River Valley where he lived in St. Charles on a property that they owned. DuSable’s post, with its diverse clientele of Indian, French and American traders, established a tradition of commerce that would provide the foundation of Chicago’s economy for decades to come. He left the region that would become a great metropolis. While living in St. Charles, he was commissioned by the colonial governor and granted a license to operate a ferry across the Missouri River. There are many theories as to why he left that area, but many believe that his imprisonment during the Revolutionary War by the British may have precipitated his move from the region as the “westward expansion” of Europeans continued to advance. In 1818, DuSable passed away in St. Charles at the age of 73. By the 1850s, historians of Chicago recognized Point du Sable as the city’s earliest non-native permanent resident. Point du Sable was generally forgotten in the 19th century and instead the Scots-Irish trader John Kinzie, who had bought his property, was often credited for the settlement. Point du Sable’s successful role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century. It was then that Chicago would, finally honor its first citizen.