du Sable, Jean Baptiste Point
(1745?–28 August 1818)
- Richard C. Lindberg
Extract
du Sable, Jean Baptiste Point (1745?–28 August 1818), explorer and merchant, was born in San Marc, Haiti, the son of a Negro slave woman (name unknown) and Dandonneau (first name unknown), scion of a prominent French-Canadian family active in the North American fur trade. Surviving historical journals record the name of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (Point au Sable by some accounts), a Haitian of mixed-blood ancestry, as the first permanent settler of Chicago. In her 1856 memoir of frontier life in the emerging Northwest Territory, ...
