'''Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable''' (Founder of Chicago on October 26, 1968.<ref>[http://www.usps.com/communications/community/_pdf/bhm06_poster.pdf United States Postage Service]</ref>

==Biography==

Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable first arrived on the western shores of Lake Michigan around 1779.  Born in Saint-Marc, Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), he built the first permanent settlement at the mouth of the river just east of the present Michigan Avenue Bridge on the north bank<ref>[http://www.dusableheritage.com/history.htm  "History of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable", DuSable Heritage Association, on line.]</ref>.

Of African and French descent, he may have been born as early as the 1730s and no later than 1745, to a slave named Suzanna and a French pirate mate named Pointe du Sable who served on the ''Black Sea Gull''.<ref name="Leeds">Patricia Leeds. ''Du Sable's Pioneer Role is Recalled''. ''Spanish raid on Haiti.  Perhaps  Jean Baptiste escaped by swimming out to his father's ship. After his father sent him to study at a Catholic school in France, du Sable and a friend, Jacques Clamorgan, traveled to Louisiana and then to Michigan, where he married a Potawatomi woman name Kittahawa (fleet-of-foot). To marry her, the twenty-five-year-old Jean Baptiste had to become a member of her tribe.  He took an eagle as his tribal symbol.<ref>''The Collected Works of Langston Hughes'', Langston Hughes, University of Missouri Press, p. 217, 2001</ref> The Potawatomi called him "Black Chief," and he became a high-ranking member of the tribe. They had a son and daughter, Jean and Susanne. Du Sable's granddaughter, Eulalia, was the first non-Indian born in Chicago.

Before it was anything else, smokehouse.<ref name="heise">Keenan Heise. ''Jean Baptiste Point du Sable'' <nowiki>[</nowiki>''sic''<nowiki>]</nowiki>). ''Chicago Originals'', Bonus Books, 1990. pp 3-4.</ref> His home was a 22 by 40 foot log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings. In 1913, Milo M. Quaife, an historical librarian with the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, discovered the bill of sale from du Sable to Jean La Lime archived in Detroit, Michigan. This document outlined all of the property du Sable owned as well as many of his personal artifacts.<ref>Quaife discusses du Sable's importance in "Documents: Property of Jean Baptiste Point Sable," ''Mississippi Valley Historical Review'' 15 (June 1928): pp. 89-92</ref>

During the Revolutionary War, he was imprisoned briefly by the British at capture of Vincennes during the war.<ref name="Leeds"> </ref> From the summer of 1780 until May of 1784, du Sable managed the Pinery, a huge tract of woodlands claimed by British Lt. Patrick Sinclair on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan. Du Sable and his family lived at a cabin at the mouth of the Pine River in what is now the city of St. Clair.<ref>Mitts, Dorothy Marie, ''That Noble Country'', Dorrance & Co., Philadelphia, pp. 44-46, 1968 (Mitts cites her source as "the old Day Book and Ledger" of the Pinery.)</ref>

In St. Charles in 1813, where his granddaughter lived. He died in 1818, the year Illinois became a state, and was buried in St. Charles. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Borromeo Cemetery.  A granite marker was erected in 1968 at his grave.<ref name="Leeds"> </ref> The deed books in the office of the St. Charles County Recorder of Deeds do not support the assertions of some authors that du Sable sold land to Alexander McNair, who would become the first governor of Missouri.<ref>[http://www.uic.edu/orgs/asri/images/ASRIGAZZETT1.pdf Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, In St. Charles, Missouri 1800-1807], by Kris Zapalac Ph.D., ASRI Historical Preservation, Spring 2005</ref>

==Legacy and honors==
left|thumb|du Sable National Historic Landmark
Bronzeville high school that opened in 1934. A few famous Du Sable attendees/graduates include: Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Harold Washington, and Redd Foxx. Today it is a building for three schools. Daniel Hale Williams Prep School of Medicine, Bronzeville Scholastic Institution, & Dusable Leadership Academy. Dr. Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, a prominent African-American artist and writer and co-founder with her husband of the Du Sable Museum of African-American History, taught at the school for twenty-three years.

The DuSable Museum of African American History, on Chicago's South Side, is named in his honor. Chicago commemorated du Sable's homestead in 1912 with a plaque on the corner of Kinzie and Pine Streets.  Du Sable appears in a 1965 frieze created for the Illinois Centennial Building.<ref>[http://www.co.cook.il.us/PDFTransfers/ccbhm_dusable.pdf ''Jean Baptiste Point DuSable: The first resident on the City on the Lake'']</ref>

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'''Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable''' (1745- 28 août 1818), fut le premier étranger à s'installer dans la région qui deviendra plus tard Chicago en Illinois. Bien que "fondateur de Chicago", il fut longtemps ignoré par les historiens d'une part en raison de ses origines (il était métis né homme libre à St-Marc, Saint-Dominique en Haïti) et d'autre part, car les premiers récits historiques furent écrits par des amis ou des descendants de John Kinzie, à qui du Sable vendit sa maison en 1800. Ce n'est qu'en 1968, que du Sable fut finalement reconnu fondateur de Chicago.

'''Du Sable''' disait-on, était le fils d'un marin français et d'une mère africaine devenue esclave. 

Son père l'amena en France où il reçut son éducation. 

En Mississippi jusque dans la région actuelle de coureurs des bois et les autochtones.

Du Sable épousa la fille d'un chef local Guerre d'indépendance, il fut brièvement emprisonné à Detroit, Michigan, par les Anglais qui le suspectaient d'être un espion à la solde des américains.<ref>Charles Balesi. ''The Time of the French in the Heart of North America, 1673-1818.'' Alliance Française.</ref>

'''Du Sable''' fit plusieurs voyages au Canada pour acquérir des fourrures et on raconte qu'il était très étroitement associé aux français de la Nouvelle-France.