Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the first non-native permanent settler of what is now Chicago, is a man shrouded in mystery. For every fact we know about him, there are dozens of details lost to history. Instead of aggregating his stories into one narrative, I think that dealing with the gaps in history teach us something valuable. So I've shared several different DuSable origin stories in the series: "Who was DuSable?" Below is an excerpt from Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton.
Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Few studies since have been able to match its scope and magnitude, offering one of the most comprehensive looks at black life in America. Based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, it is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s. Its findings offer a comprehensive analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the first half of the twentieth century.
PART I CHAPTER I
Flight to Freedom
THE POTTAWATTOMIE INDIANS WHO RELINQUISHED THE CHICAGO PORTAGE to the white man in 1835 had a saying: "The first white man to settle at Chickagou was a Negro." Frenchmen-trappers, priests, and ex- plorers-had touched this portage from time to time during the seven- teenth century; and Louis Joliet and Father Marquette crossed it in 1673. But it was a French-speaking Negro, Jean Baptiste Point de Saible, described by a contemporary British army officer as "a hand- some Negro well educated and settled at Eschikagou," who made the first permanent settlement, some time around 1790. At "the place of the evil smell," Point de Saible erected a frontier establishment consist- ing of a large wooden homestead, bakehouse, smokehouse, poultry house, and dairy; a workshop and a horse mill; a barn and two stables. Here the Pottawattomie came to trade; and the English and French, exploring and fighting for dominance in the back-country, stopped to rest and replenish their stores. Reclaimed from the prairie and wrested from the wilderness, this solitary frontier settlement became the seed- bed of skyscrapers and factories. Its trading post was the progenitor of the wheat-pit and its workshop the prototype of factories and mills. The canoes and pirogues that stopped here foreshadowed the commerce of after-years.
Where he came from originally-this Father of Midwest Metropolis we do not know. According to one tradition he was from Santo Domingo, and planned to establish a colony of free Negroes near the shores of Lake Michigan. Another story would have him the descendant of a Negro slave and a French fur-trader in the Northwest Territory. We know with certainty only that for sixteen years he and his Pottawattomie wife Catherine, his daughter Cezanne, and Jean Baptiste fils, lived at the present site of Chicago. In 1796, for reasons unknown he sold his establishment to one LeMai, who in turn sold it to an Englishman, John Kinzie. Point de Saible then moved to Peoria, where he spent most of the remainder of his life, dying in St. Charles, Missouri. Within the house he had built, so tradition says, Chicago's first marriage was solemnized, the first election held, and the first white child born.
Of Point de Saible one student of early Chicago, Milo Quaife, has written: "He was a true pioneer of civilization, leader of the unending procession of Chicago's swarming millions. Even in his mixed blood he truly represented the future city, for where else is a greater conglomeration of races and breeds assembled together?"'
With his departure, only an occasional Negro filtered into the city until the late Forties, when a steady, though small, stream began to arrive.
Drake, St. Clair, et al. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York, Harper & Row. HeinOnline.
-Gabby
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