Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable

Each spring, American society celebrates the contributions of Black Americans to the development of this country. Today, we will be celebrating a lesser-known individual, an entrepreneur and pioneer who made dramatic and unique contributions to the fabric of American society.

Many historical figures hail from a time when piecing together backgrounds is all but impossible due to the lack of reliable records. This holds is doubly true for persecuted and enslaved populations because written records often simply don't exist. As a result, stories passed down by oral tradition pass into a quasi-mystical state and historical figures become legend. One such individual is Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, popularly known as the Founder of Chicago.

Jean Baptiste’s precise origins are not known. Although he is generally accepted to be of Franco-African descent, there is considerable debate over whether his ethnicity is Haitian, Dominican, French Canadian, or Creole. Some say Jean Baptiste was a coffee merchant in French Louisiana, others that he was a fur-trader under contract with the British government operating in the Great Lakes region. There is significant evidence, however, that he settled land in Kaskaskia, Illinois, and eventually moved to the Eschecagou Indian territory for which the city of Chicago was named. As far as historians can piece together, Jean Baptiste was born in the early 1750s – probably on the island of Hispaniola, which today is home to both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Very little is known about his childhood and upbringing, although that is not an uncommon state of affairs for Black figures in the early days of the colonization of the Midwest. Contemporary sources have described him as well educated and articulate, leading many scholars to presume that he traveled to France, this being the likeliest source of formal education for a Black man at that time.

Arriving in New Orleans in 1765, Jean Baptiste’s first experience with what would become America was to narrowly avoid enslavement. Having lost his identification papers, taken injury, and fallen ill, white Louisiana locals did not distinguish him from the American Negroes under their captivity. Jean Baptiste sought refuge with French Jesuit priests who protected him until he was well enough to move North.

In his early adulthood, Jean Baptiste was a fur trader operating on Indian Territory in what is now Indiana and Michigan. It was during this period in the early 1770s that he met his wife, Kitihawa, a Native American of the Potawatomi tribe. Though they were wedded in a Potawatomi ceremony, Jean Baptiste and Kitihawa would not be married in the Christian tradition for more than fifteen years, at which time Kitihawa converted to Catholicism and changed her name to Catherine.

As a fur trader in Indiana and Michigan, Jean Baptiste acquired a lease from local Indian tribes to operate a trading post on their land. He also attained a license from the British government permitting him to trade on their behalf in the area. Throughout the 1770s, Jean Baptiste was constantly harassed by both British and American troops as they maneuvered for control of the rich trade routes of the Midwest. In fact, he was at one point arrested by British troops who believed him in league with the American Revolution.

After more than a year in British captivity, Jean Baptiste was granted work release to develop a tract of woodlands on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan on behalf of the British officer in charge of his internment. Jean Baptiste and his family built a home at the mouth of the Pine River on the site of what is now the town of St. Clair. After several years in St. Clair, Jean Baptiste again moved his family, this time to Illinois. Although some contemporary sources suggest that he lived at first in Peoria, a series of fraudulent land claims in that region during the late 1770s cast doubt on this theory. Some corroborating evidence indicates that Jean Baptiste did in fact buy land in the area as early as 1773, and though his well-documented trading activities and subsequent imprisonment render it unlikely that he ever lived there, the evidence suggests that his purchase of the land was legitimate, as well as his speculative sale of the land in 1783.

With the proceeds of his Peoria land sale, Jean Baptiste moved his family from St. Clair to the shores of Lake Michigan in Illinois, a marshy, swampy region local Indians called “Eschecagou” which literally means “place of bad smells”. He built a home on the north bank of the river and began the task of building the city of Chicago. His methods were methodical and deliberate. After taming some 800 acres of land for the obligatory farming operation, Jean Baptiste built a trading post to cater to the itinerant fur traders and hunter-gatherers of both Native American and European descent who populated the region. His fur trading background stood him in good stead and he was able to build a flourishing local economy. Jean Baptiste followed upon this success by building mills, smokehouses, barns, and workshops, converting his little trading post into a major supply station for the development of the Great Lakes region, and a major stopping point for other settlers headed west. Jean Baptiste operated his town for almost two decades, attaining great wealth in the process.

In 1800, following the death of his wife Catherine, the ousting of the local Indian population (whom he regarded as his own by both relation and force of treaty), and US government attempts to claim his town without paying eminent domain due to his African ethnicity, Jean Baptiste left Chicago in disgust, moving to St. Charles, Missouri to work as a ferry pilot. He sold the town of Chicago to another local resident for a sum of what in today's money would be about $17,000, far less than the amount necessary to lease a single bedroom apartment for one year in Chicago today. Jean Baptiste was not able to replicate his Chicago success in Missouri and died penniless. Many public buildings and park spaces in Chicago have been named in his honor, and Chicago still boasts one of the largest Black populations in the United States. For his role as a Black man in the 1700s – having built the industrial foundations of one of the largest, richest, and most magnificent cities in the world with the cunning of his mind, the sweat of his brow and the strength of his back – Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable deserves to be enshrined in the lexicon of Black America's greatest heroes.