Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (before 1750 – 1818) is honored as the first permanent non-Native-American settler of what later became Chicago, Illinois. A school, museum, harbor, park, and bridge are named for him, and his 1780s homesite near the mouth of the Chicago River is a National Historic Landmark. A trader in the Illinois Country and Great Lakes region, he was arrested by the British as a suspected partisan during the American Revolution. Of African descent, and described as handsome and well educated, he had two children with his Native American wife, Kitiwaha. His homesite is first recorded in a journal of early 1790. After he established an extensive and prosperous trading settlement, he sold his property in 1800 and moved to St. Charles, in present-day Missouri. Although historians of Chicago knew of him by the 1850s, the general public first became aware of his founding role at the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition, when the fair's organizers presented a replica of his cabin.