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Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (or Point de Sable, Point au Sable, Point Sable, Pointe DuSable) (before 1750 – August 28, 1818) is regarded as the first permanent resident of what became Chicago, Illinois. Little is known of his life prior to the 1770s. In 1779, he was living on the site of present-day Michigan City, Indiana, when he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American sympathizer in the American Revolutionary War. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan, before moving to settle at the mouth of the Chicago River. He is first recorded living in Chicago in early 1790, having apparently become established sometime earlier. He sold his property in Chicago in 1800 and moved to St. Charles, Missouri, where he died on August 28, 1818. Point du Sable has become known as the "Founder of Chicago". In Chicago, a school, museum, harbor, park and bridge have been named, or renamed, in his honor; and the place where he settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court. ==Biography== There is no known record of Point du Sable's life prior to the 1770s; his birth year, place of birth, and parents are unknown, though he is known from contemporary sources to have been of African descent. Juliette Kinzie, another early pioneer of Chicago, Illinois, never met Point du Sable but stated in her 1856 memoir that he was "a native of St. Domingo" (the island of Hispaniola). This became generally accepted by scholars as his place of birth. Historian Milo Milton Quaife, however, regarded Kinzie's account of Point du Sable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated". Quaife later put forward a theory that he was of French-Canadian origin. A historical novel published in 1953 (see below) helped to popularize the commonly recited claim that he was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa (Christianized to Catherine) on October 27, 1788 in a Catholic ceremony〔 〕 – it is likely they were earlier married in the 1770s in the Native American tradition – they had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne. In a footnote to a poem titled ''Speech to the Western Indians'', Arent DePeyster, British commandant at Fort Michilimackinac from 1774 to 1779 (a former French fort in what was by then the British Quebec Territory), noted that "Baptist Point de Saible" was "handsome", "well educated", and "settled in Eschecagou". When he published this poem in 1813, DePeyster presented it as a speech that he had made at the Indian village of Abercroche (now Harbor Springs, Michigan) on July 4, 1779. This footnote has led many scholars to assume that Point du Sable had settled in Chicago by 1779, however letters written by traders in the late 1770s suggest that Point du Sable was at this time settled at the mouth of Trail Creek (''Rivière du Chemin'') at what is now Michigan City, Indiana. In August 1779, Point du Sable was arrested at Trail Creek by British troops and imprisoned briefly at Fort Michilimackinac.〔Letter of Lieut. Bennett to Major De Peyster, 9th Augt. 1779; published in 〕〔Report of Lieut. Bennett to Major De Peyster, Sept. 1st 1779; published in 〕 From the summer of 1780〔Letter of Sinclair to Guthrie, 31st July 1780; published in 〕 until May 1784, Point du Sable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands claimed by British Lt. Patrick Sinclair on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan.〔 Point 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.〔 (Mitts cites her source as "the old Day Book and Ledger" of the Pinery.)〕 Point du Sable settled on the north bank of the Chicago River close to its mouth at some time in the 1780s. The earliest known record of Point du Sable living in Chicago is an entry that Hugh Heward made in his journal on May 10, 1790 during a journey from Detroit across Michigan and through Illinois. Heward's party stopped at Pointe du Sable's house en route to the Chicago portage; they swapped their canoe for a pirogue that belonged to Point du Sable, and they bought bread, flour and pork from him. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, described Point du Sable as a large man who was a wealthy trader. In 1800 he sold his farm to John Kinzie's frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres; today〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm )〕 ).|group=n}} the bill of sale, which was rediscovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, outlined all of the property Point du Sable owned as well as many of his personal artifacts. This included a house, two barns, a horse drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy and a smokehouse. The house was a log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings.〔 After Point du Sable sold his property in Chicago he moved to St. Charles, Missouri,〔 where he was commissioned by the colonial governor to operate a ferry across the Missouri River.〔 He died in 1818, and was buried in St. Charles, in an unmarked grave in St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery. His entry in the parish burial register does not mention his origins, parents, or relatives, it simply describes him as ''negre'' (French for black). The St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery was moved twice in the 19th century, and oral tradition and records of the Archdiocese of St. Louis suggested that Point du Sable's remains were also moved. On October 12, 1968, the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission erected a granite marker at the site believed to be Point du Sable's grave in the third St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery. In 2002 an archaeological investigation of the grave site was initiated by the African Scientific Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.〔 Researchers using a combination of ground penetrating radar surveys and excavation of a area did not find any evidence of any burials at the supposed grave site, leading the archaeologists to conclude that Point du Sable's remains may not have been moved from one of the two previous cemeteries. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jean Baptiste Point du Sable」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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