Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable

by Suzanne Hanney

The Haitian-Frenchman Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable is important not only as Chicago’s first nonindigenous settler, but because he established a new European trading network with native peoples on top of their existing ones, says Dr. Christopher Reed, emeritus professor of history at Roosevelt University and Black Chicago expert on WTTW’s “DuSable to Obama” website.

“He lived like a Frenchman even though he was a mixedblood person,” Reed said. “Think in terms of a charismatic figure who could get along with everyone and make money and have paintings on his walls and eat off of china and pewter. He could have been ‘The Bachelor’ if he wasn’t married. Think of somebody who looks like [President] Obama. He was a cosmopolite.”

DuSable was born about 1745 to an African slave and a French mariner, and was possibly educated in France, according to the WTTW website. He spoke French, English, Spanish and several Native American dialects, which served him both as a trader and negotiator. In the early 1770s, he sailed to New Orleans and then traveled up the Mississippi River to Cahokia, where he married Kittihawa (Christian name Catherine) in a Potawatomi ceremony and later, a Catholic one. They had two children, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Jr. and Suzanne.

By 1780, DuSable had settled on the north bank of the Chicago River at about what is now Pioneer Court, (the area between Tribune Tower and the Apple store), but his land extended as far west as what is now State Street and as far north as Chicago Avenue. Suzanne’s wedding to Jean Baptiste Pelletier in 1790, and the birth of their daughter Eulalia in 1796 at the homestead, were Chicago’s first nonindigenous marriage and birth, according to the National Park Service application for Pioneer Court historic status in 1975.

Otherwise, there are no monuments to DuSable in Chicago. Late last year, the Chicago City Council proposed renaming Lake Shore Drive after DuSable; Transportation Committee Chair Ald. Howard Brookins (21st ward), said a vote could come by April. Meanwhile, a 3.4-acre parcel of land at the mouth of the Chicago River near Ogden Slip was set aside for DuSable Park in 1987 by Mayor Harold Washington. The site has undergone environmental remediation for radioactive thorium, a byproduct of a past lamp factory there, but it is otherwise dormant.

DuSable put down roots over two decades and traded goods like metal pots that he received from his French network as well as items produced at his own homestead, Reed said. His customers were British and French explorers and traders, and members of the Potawatomi, Chippewa and Miami tribes.

Map of the United States as it was from 1795 to 1796.

Golbez Gallery

“The key thing to remember is that this is all documented, not subject to conjecture,” Reed said. “For the longest period, up to 100 years ago, people were saying that DuSable was part of legend and myths.”

The earliest reference to DuSable’s Chicago residency is Arent Schuyler DePeyster’s description of him as a “handsome” Black man, “well-educated and settled at Eschikagou but much in the French interest” in a “Speech to the Western Indians” DePeyster claimed to have made on July 4, 1779. DePeyster had been a British officer who commanded posts in northern Michigan and Detroit and who retired to Scotland after the Revolutionary War ended in 1783. The speech appeared in “Miscellanies,” his 1813 autobiographical volume of fanciful verse.

But while he may have set up an outpost here in 1778 or 1779, the DuSable Heritage Association says that DuSable was arrested in 1779 during the American Revolutionary War by the British lieutenant Thomas Bennett and sent to Fort Mackinac. Released for good character after several months, he managed The Pinery, a British trading post on the St. Clair River near what is now Port Huron, Mich. He remained there until 1783 or 84, when he returned to Chicago.

DuSable was prosperous, as shown by the inventory of his property when he sold it to Jean Lalime in May 1800, Reed noted. He owned a 40-foot by 22-foot wooden house; a 20- foot by 18-foot bakehouse, a millstone for grinding grain, a 10-foot-square dairy, an 8-foot-square smokehouse, a 15-foot-square poultry house, a workshop, a stable and a barn.

His livestock holdings included 30 head of grown cattle and two spring calves, 38 hogs, two mules and 44 hens, according to the French document quoted by Milo M. Quaife in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in June 1928 (but only discovered in a Detroit archive in 1913). Interior furnishings included a large feather bed, several copper kettles, a French walnut cabinet with four glass doors, a couch and seven chairs, two mirrors, two pictures, a pair of candlesticks, 20 large wooden dishes, pewter basins, various household and farm tools and two bullet molds.

Why did DuSable leave in 1800?

There is one theory that having lived among the Potawatomi and married within the tribe, DuSable was disappointed when he was not elected a subchief, Reed said.

Another possibility is that DuSable’s wife died.

Drawing of the former home of Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable in Chicago as it appeared in the early 1800s.

But the biggest reason was likely that he saw American settlement coming and he knew that “Americans after 1795 had no interest in seeing a non-American, wealthy Black man controlling trade in this area,” Reed said.

The year 1795 was important because that’s when native tribes surrendered their land rights after being defeated by an American army at the Battle of Fallen Timbers the previous year. The American colonies had been settled along the Atlantic seaboard, but the Treaty of Greenville opened up the Northwest Territory, which became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois.

“The racial thing is important for DuSable,” Reed said. “He left because he wasn’t going to be a big man in Americancontrolled territory because wasn’t white. Every colony had slaves at the time of the American Revolution. They weren’t going to be happy to see a guy like DuSable in charge of anything.”

DuSable moved to Peoria and then to what is now St. Charles, Mo., where he died in 1818. This was French country, along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

“The French did not discriminate to the extent the English did,” Reed said. “He could live in peace [in Missouri]. The English were color-conscious, built up their empire on color-consciousness.”

The Treaty of Greenville also permitted U.S. Army outposts at Detroit, Fort Wayne and “one piece of land, six miles square at the mouth of the Chicago river, emptying into the south-west end of Lake Michigan.” Three years after DuSable’s departure, in 1803, the American government built Fort Dearborn there, on the south side of the Chicago River, across from DuSable’s former compound. The next year, John Kinzie bought the property from Lalime.

DuSable didn’t establish his own colony, so once he was gone, there were no people of African descent here, Reed said, until free people of color began to come from adjoining states in the 1830s and 1840s. They worked in saloons, hotels, as servants and as riverfront and lakefront dockhands.

Reed maintains, nonetheless, that as an influencer of the Euro-American trade network, DuSable helped create the city’s reputation as a place where go-getters could slowly gain an economic foothold. Perhaps also, with people-to-people contact being the only recreation on the frontier, oral history cherished an origin story of a man who looked like them.

John Jones was an entrepreneur in the next phase of Chicago Black history. A free man of color born in North Carolina, he learned tailoring in Tennessee and came here in the 1840s; by the 1850s, he had a store at Washington and Dearborn Streets and a Chicago society clientele.

“By the time of the Civil War [1861-65], there was a Black business tradition,” Reed said. “Even though Black people were discriminated against, they made the best of every opportunity afforded them.” Although the 1860 population showed roughly 1,000 Blacks, or 2 percent of the population, they had established a significant foothold, with tailors, barbers, a carriage service and a few other small businesses.

DuSable had become an iconic figure by 1884, when A. T. Andreas wrote his “History of Chicago,” according to the online Encyclopedia of Chicago. Although no portrait of DuSable exists, Andreas created one for the frontispiece of the book’s first volume, along with an imagined drawing of his riverfront home. The drawing, however, was only about a tenth of the home’s actual size, when compared to the 1800 bill of sale.

Modern grave marker for Baptiste Pointe DuSable, placed by the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission in 1968.

Nicholas Lemen

By 1920, the DuSable origin story was common knowledge and inspired Black organizational pride, Reed said. Two Black Chicago banks controlled 1/3 of all Black banking assets in the United States, as he wrote in “The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis: 1920-29” (University of Illinois Press, 2011). There were ice cream parlors, barber shops, haberdasheries, theaters, dress shops and cab services up and down South State Street, as well as several major insurance companies. The Black population continued to grow, despite white efforts to restrict it to certain areas: from 100,000 people in 1920, to 200,000 in 1930.

“People hear stories of Black success in Chicago and they keep flooding to the city, many bringing capital,” Reed said. “The myth is everyone comes impoverished. The reality is some did, some came with pockets filled with gold. It’s easier to go with the myth of Black incompetence and lack of contributions to the City’s growth and development.”

One indication to the contrary was that the elite Union League Club sent members of its commerce committee to the South Side in the 20s to report on areas of both poverty and prosperity, he said.

African-American groups managed to get a story about DuSable as “Chicago’s First Citizen” into the “Official World’s Fair Weekly” at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. The fair also exhibited DuSable’s cabin – the small 1884 version envisioned by Andreas, however.

Meanwhile, to relieve overcrowding at the existing high school in Bronzeville, a new one opened in 1935 at 4934 S. Wabash Ave. that was named for DuSable. It became a “who’s who” of Bronzeville, with attendees like singers Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington, Mayor Harold Washington, entertainer Redd Foxx, publisher John Johnson and hundreds of musicians trained under Capt. Walter Dyett and showcased at his annual Hi-Jinks show. The building now houses Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, Williams Prep and DuSable Leadership Academy.

The last 50 years have seen a revival of interest in DuSable, Reed said. He cited a WFMT ad created by the Leo Burnett agency for United Airlines in 1971 that said “DuSable had a vision that’s led the Chicago economy progressively forward.” In addition, the Museum of Negro History and Art, founded as the Ebony Museum in the home of Dr. Margaret Goss Burroughs and her husband Charles, moved to new headquarters in Washington Park in 1973 and was renamed the DuSable Museum of African American History.

The DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park

DuSable Museum photo

Another example is the 1975 National Park Service application for historic status for DuSable’s homestead. Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation’s Historical Projects Director Lynne Gomez Graves wrote that DuSable was nationally important as one of the most prominent fur traders and independent entrepreneurs of the colonial and revolutionary era, “representative of contributions of Afro-Americans in the initial economic and developmental stages of the nation’s growth.”

Nowadays, Reed points to Kenneth Chennault, the CEO and chairman of American Express from 2001 to 2018, and Andrea Zopp, who stepped down as CEO of World Business Chicago in December after being appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel three years before.

“Leading Black business minds have joined in with the big conglomerates, they’re not heading Black companies. Maybe that’s good. Maybe we’ve come full circle, because DuSable was not a Black man doing something, he was an entrepreneur doing something and then something built on him for all people.”