DuSable, The Haitian-French Founder Chicago Forgot

Around seventeen seventy-nine, a man arrived at the mouth of the Chicago River and decided to stay. His name was Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable. He had been born in Haiti, the son of a French mariner and an African mother, and he had made his way through the fur-trading networks of the Great Lakes until he reached the narrow place where the river met the lake. What he built there was not a trading post. It was a working farm: a house, a dairy, a smokehouse, a poultry house, a mill, a stable, and a barn. He employed both Native and European workers. When British authorities noted him in their records, they described him as "a large handsome negro," which tells you something about the world he moved through and something about the terms on which he had to move through it.

DuSable sold his compound in eighteen hundred and left. He had no reason to imagine that the flat, muddy junction of river and lake he was departing would become one of the largest cities in the world. Fort Dearborn was not established until eighteen oh three, twenty-four years after he had already built his operation on the same ground. The settlement that became Chicago began with a Black man from Haiti, not a European military post, not a land grant, not a treaty.

For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Chicago's founding narrative skipped over him entirely. The city named its harbor after him in nineteen fifty-three. The street bridge over the river mouth is called the DuSable Bridge. The museum of Black Chicago history carries his name. The renaming happened piece by piece, over decades, as scholars and community institutions worked to put a face on a founding the city had spent a century erasing.

He is standing at this spot before any of it begins.