Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable
There are no known portraits of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable made during his lifetime. This depiction is taken from A.T. Andreas' book History of Chicago (1884).
Born	1740s? unknown
Died	August 28, 1818(1818-08-28) St. Charles, Missouri Territory, U.S.
Nationality	African American ; traditionally stated to be Haitian, from the French colony of Saint Domingue
Other names	Point de Sable, Point au Sable, Point Sable, Pointe DuSable
Occupation	Trader
Known for	"Founder of Chicago"

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (or Point de Sable, Point au Sable, Point Sable, Pointe DuSable) (before 1750 – August 28, 1818) 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 present-day 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 lieutenant-governor 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.

Point du Sable has become known as the "Founder of Chicago". In Chicago, a school, museum, harbor, park and bridge have been named, or renamed, in his honor; and the place where he settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.

There is no known record of Point du Sable's 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" (the island of Hispaniola). This became generally accepted by scholars as his place of birth. Historian Milo Milton Quaife, however, regarded Kinzie's account of Point du Sable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated". Quaife later put forward a theory that he was of French-Canadian origin. A historical novel published in 1953 (see below) helped to popularize the commonly recited claim that he was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa (Christianized to Catherine) 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 Native American tradition. They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne.