. Point duSable lived near
Lake Michigan and the
Illinois Country (center left).|alt=This map shows the British Province of Quebec in the north around the Great Lakes. To the west, across the Mississippi River, is Spanish Louisiana. The former French Illinois Country spans the Mississippi in the center-west. The thirteen American colonies are to the east.
Early life There are no records of Point du Sable's life before the 1770s. Though it is known from sources during his life that he was of African descent, his birth date, place of birth, and parents are unknown.
Juliette Kinzie, another early pioneer of
Chicago, never met Point duSable but said in her 1856 memoir that he was "a native of St.Domingo" (the island of
Hispaniola). This became generally accepted as his place of birth. Historian
Milo Milton Quaife regarded Kinzie's account of Point duSable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated", later putting forward a theory that he was of African and French-Canadian origin. A
historical novel published in 1953 helped to popularize the claim that Point du Sable was born in 1745 in
Saint-Marc in French
Saint-Domingue (which later became
Haiti). If he was born outside continental North America, there are competing accounts as to whether he entered as a trader from the north through
French Canada, or from the south through
French Louisiana. It is likely that this couple was married earlier in the 1770s in a
Native American tradition. They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne. Point duSable supported his family as a frontier trader (
voyageur or
coureur des bois) and settler during a period of great upheaval for the former southern dependencies of French Canada and in the Illinois Country, where the regions changed hands several times over the course of half a century. In a footnote to a poem titled
Speech to the Western Indians,
Arent DePeyster, British commandant from 1774 to 1779 at
Fort Michilimackinac (a former French fort in what was then the
British province of Quebec), noted that "Baptist Point deSaible" was "a handsome negro", "well educated", and "settled in Eschecagou". When he published this poem in 1813, DePeyster presented it as a speech that he had made at the village of Arbrecroche (now
Harbor Springs, Michigan) on 4July 1779. This footnote has led many scholars to assume that Point duSable had settled in Chicago by 1779. But letters written by other traders in the late 1770s suggest that Point duSable was at this time settled at the mouth of
Trail Creek (
Rivière duChemin) at what is now
Michigan City, Indiana. In August 1779, during the
American Revolutionary War, Point duSable was arrested as a suspected American
Patriot at Trail Creek by British troops and imprisoned briefly. An officer's report following his arrest noted that Point du Sable had many friends who vouched for his good character. The following year, Point du Sable was ordered transported to the Pinery on the St. Clair River north of
Detroit. From the summer of 1780 until May 1784, Point duSable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands owned by British officer Lt.
Patrick Sinclair, on the
St. Clair River in eastern Michigan. This may have been a choice given by him from the British, offering him release from his imprisonment to manage the Pinery. At some time in the 1780s, after the U.S. achieved independence, Point du Sable settled on the north bank of the
Chicago River close to its mouth. The earliest known record of Point duSable living in Chicago is an entry that Hugh Heward made in his journal on 10May 1790, during a journey from Detroit across Michigan and through Illinois. Heward's party stopped at Point duSable's house enroute to the
Chicago portage; they swapped their canoe for a
pirogue that belonged to Point duSable, and they bought bread, flour, and pork from him. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, described Point duSable as a large man and wealthy trader. Point du Sable's granddaughter, Eulalie Pelletier, was born at his Chicago River settlement in 1796. In 1800 Point duSable sold his farm to
John Kinzie's frontman,
Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres. The bill of sale, which was rediscovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, detailed all of the property Point duSable owned, as well as many of his personal effects. This included a house, two barns, a horse-drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy, and a
smokehouse. The house was a log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings. He was commissioned by the
colonial governor to operate a
ferry across the
Missouri River. and was buried in an unmarked grave in St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery. His entry in the parish burial register does not mention his origins, parents, or relatives; it simply describes him as
nègre (French for
negro). The St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery was moved twice in the 19thcentury. Oral tradition and records of the
Archdiocese of St. Louis suggested that Point duSable's remains were also moved. On 12October 1968, the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission erected a granite marker at the site believed to be Point duSable's grave in the third St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery. In 2002 an archaeological investigation of the grave site was initiated by the African Scientific Research Institute at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. ==Theories and legends==