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The story
of a fur traper named Du Sable leaves no doubt that this handsome
frenchman/ creole marrried into and remained a good friend
of the Illinois Indians.
He
also maneuvered with the skill of an experienced diplomat as Illinois slipped
from French to British to U.S. control. His personal charm and diplomacy kept
him from being jailed as and enemy agent and won him powerful white and Indian
allies.
There are gaps in his early life. Du Sable
was born somewhere in the Caribbean in 1745 to a French sailor father and an African
slave women. Sent to Paris for an education, he ended up in the Illinois
Territory in 1779. With him came twenty-three French art treasures and a desire
to become a fur trapper.
As a Frenchman in a land recently taken by the
British, Du Sable fell under suspicion. On July 4, 1779, a British officer complained
he "was much in the interest of the French" and Du Sable was arrested
for "treasonable intercourse with the enemy." He managed to escape only
to be arrested again. This time he so impressed British Governer Patrick Sinclair
that Du Sable was released and for five years placed in charge of a settlement
on the St. Charles River.
Du Sable had no difficulty in persuading local
Indians he was a friend. It took much longer for white Chicagoans to recognize
that Du Sable was their city's founder.
Du Sable entered the fur trading business and married a Potawatomi women named Catherine
. Their friends included a host of people, among them Chief Pontiac and Daniel
Boone.
One can only wonder what rough frontiersmen
and Indians thought when they first entered the Du Sable home and saw its dislay
of French works of art. the couple also purchased and developed some eight
hundred acresof land in Peoria, but Chicagowas their great love and they lived
there for sixteen years.
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Their trading post became prosperous and the
Du Sables soon had son and a daughter. Centrally located, their store and home
attracted many trappers and swelled to include a forty by twenty-foot log cabin,
a bakehouse, a diary, a smoke house, a poultry housel; a workshop, a barn, and
a mill. Du Sable made a living as a trader, but was also a miller, a cooper, and
a farmer.
The Du Sables became devout Catholics
and in 1798 were formally married in a church ceremony. They were delighted
when, two years later, their daughter married another Frenchman in a Catholic
ceremony.
Jean and Catherine , although doing well, sold off twenty one
of his French paintings, perhaps to finance his next career move. He announced
his candidacy for chief of a local Indian Nation at Mackinac, but he lost the
election.
As the couple grew older they decided to sell their Chicago
home and move in with their daughter's new family in St. Charles, Missouri. For
the property and houses alone, they received $1200, and they also sold thirty
head of cattle, thirty-eight pigs, two mules, and many chickens.
When
Catherine died in 1800, the founder of Chicago began to worry about his future.
He did not want to die penniless or to be buried in any but a Catholic cemetary.
Though, in 1814 he did have to file bankruptcy papers, he
was laid to rest four years later in St. Charles Borromero Roman Catholic Cemetary.
| Picture
and text taken from:
Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage
by William Loren
Katz |
Footnote
During the first part of the 20th Centuary many Creoles left Louisiana seeking a better life that Louisiana FAILED to provide..Many more left escaping Racial oppression, Economic deprevation and, moreover, a Better quality of Life the South did not offer...Many settled in the big Cities of the North and Westward to California .. |
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