Early Chicago › History

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the founder of Chicago

The first permanent non-Native settler at the place that became Chicago was a trader of African descent named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.

What we know

Records of his early life are thin. He is believed to have been born around 1745, and many accounts place his birth in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, though this is not certain. He married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa, also known as Catherine.

The settlement

By the 1780s he had built a home and trading post on the north bank of the Chicago River near its mouth. A description of the property from the time of its sale lists a house, outbuildings, livestock and tools, which points to a substantial and prosperous farm and trading business.

Leaving Chicago

In 1800 he sold the property and moved west. He spent his last years in St. Charles, Missouri, where he died in 1818.

How Chicago remembers him

• The Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River is named the DuSable Bridge.
• The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center is in Washington Park.
• In 2021 the city renamed its lakefront highway Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive.
• The site of his home near Pioneer Court is a National Historic Landmark.