Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable is the founder and first resident of the city of Chicago.
DuSable was born around 1745 in Saint-Marc, in Saint-Domingue, and died on August 28, 1818 in Saint Charles, Missouri. He was the son of a French sailor and an enslaved African mother. He received his education in France.
In 1765, he arrived in New Orleans, then under Spanish control, twenty years before the arrival of French refugees from Saint-Domingue in America. He traveled up the Mississippi into what is now the state of Illinois. He built a first house in Peoria and married a Native American woman, the daughter of a local Potawatomi chief, with whom he had a son, Jean, and a daughter, Suzanne.
He then settled at the present site of Chicago (Illinois), where he built his second house around 1779, thirty years before the construction of Fort Dearborn. There he established a trading post on the north bank of the mouth of the Chicago River. It served as a supply post for trappers, merchants, voyageurs, and Native people. His business quickly became prosperous because of its location and became the origin of the permanent settlement.
During the War of Independence, he was briefly imprisoned in Detroit, Michigan, by the British, who suspected him of being an American spy. He did not recover his house until 1784. DuSable made several trips to Canada to acquire furs, and it is said that he was very closely associated with French Canadians (Quebecers).
In 1800, DuSable sold his property to the French-Canadian trapper Jean La Lime, who sold it four years later to John Kinzie, a merchant from New York. He returned for a time to Peoria before settling in Saint Charles, Missouri. The reason he left Chicago is unknown.
Although the “founder of Chicago,” he was long ignored by historians, partly because of his origins (he was Black), and partly because the first historical accounts were written by friends or descendants of John Kinzie, to whom DuSable sold his house in 1800.
It was not until 1968 that Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable was finally recognized as the founder of Chicago. On Monday, October 19, 2009, a bronze bust was unveiled on the east side of Michigan Avenue, north of the Chicago River. The sculpture was a gift from members of Chicago’s Haitian community.
The Chicago Afro-American Museum of History, opened in 1961, was renamed the DuSable Museum of African American History in 1968, after the official proclamation by the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago of Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable as “founder of Chicago.”
In 1987, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp of Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable in the Black Heritage series.
