Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable is regarded as the first permanent resident of what became Chicago, Illinois. Little is known of his life prior to the 1770s. In 1779, he was living on the site of presentday Michigan City, Indiana, when he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American sympathizer in the American Revolutionary War. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenantgovernor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan, before moving to settle at the mouth of the Chicago River. He is first recorded living in Chicago in early 1790, having apparently become established sometime earlier. He sold his property in Chicago in 1800 and moved to St. Charles, Missouri, where he died in 1818.

There is no known record of Point du Sables life prior to the 1770s his birth year, place of birth, and parents are unknown, though he is known from contemporary sources to have been of African descent. Juliette Kinzie, another early pioneer of Chicago, Illinois, never met Point du Sable but stated in her 1856 memoir that he was a native of St. Domingo . This became generally accepted by scholars as his place of birth. Historian Milo Milton Quaife, however, regarded Kinzies account of Point du Sable as largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated. Quaife later put forward a theory that he was of FrenchCanadian origin. A historical novel published in 1953 helped to popularize the commonly recited claim that he was born in 1745 in SaintMarc in SaintDomingue . Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa on October 27, 1788 in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia, an old French missionary town on the Mississippi River., though they were likely married earlier in the 1770s in the

Source: Wikipedia