<P> Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa (Christianized to Catherine) on October 27, 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia, an old French Illinois Country town on the Mississippi River, though it is likely they were married in the Native American tradition in the 1770s . They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne . Point du Sable supported his family as a frontier trader and settler during a period when Great Britain, and later the newly formed United States, were seeking to assert control in the former southern dependencies of French Canada and in the Illinois Country . </P> <P> In a footnote to a poem titled Speech to the Western Indians, Arent DePeyster, British commandant from 1774 to 1779 at Fort Michilimackinac (a former French fort in what was then the British Quebec territory), noted that "Baptist Point de Saible" was "a handsome negro", "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 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; but 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, during the American Revolutionary War, Point du Sable was arrested as a suspected partisan at Trail Creek by British troops and imprisoned briefly at Fort Michilimackinac . An officer's report following his arrest noted that Point du Sable had many friends who vouched for his good character . The following year, he was ordered transported to the Pinery . From the summer of 1780 until May 1784, Point du Sable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands claimed by a British officer, Lt. Patrick Sinclair, on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan . Point du Sable and his family lived in a cabin at the mouth of the Pine River in what is now the city of St. Clair . </P> <P> 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 Point 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 and wealthy trader . In 1800 Point du Sable sold his farm to John Kinzie's frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres . 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 effects . This included a house, two barns, a horse drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy, and a smokehouse . The house was a 22 - by - 40 - foot (6.7 m × 12.2 m) log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings . </P> <P> After Point du Sable sold his property in Chicago, he moved to St. Charles, now in Missouri but at that time in Spanish Louisiana, where he was commissioned by the colonial governor to operate a ferry across the Missouri River . In St. Charles, he may have lived for a time with his son, and later with his granddaughter's family, and late in life, he may have sought public or charitable assistance . He died in 1818 and was buried 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 negro). </P>

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