Seeker - Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, Becoming, and Unbecoming

10.  Wendell discusses the life of the first non-indigenous permanent resident of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, as well as the events leading to his own life inside and outside of Chicago.

"Middle America" is a podcast using history, storytelling, and music to talk about all of the issues and feelings brought on by the world around us. "Middle America" is an access point to everything under the sun.

Music in this episode:
Jared Grabb “To the Waves”
Jared Grabb “Movies With No Camera (Instrumental)”
Jared Grabb “Patch of Green”
Jared Grabb “Arise (Middle America Version)”
Jared Grabb “Half-Empty Cup”
Jared Grabb “Be a Working Man”
Matt Cobillas “You Give Me”
Matt Cobillas “Ghost Inside My Head”
Jared Grabb “Middle America Ad Music”
Jared Grabb “Prison Bars (Middle America Version)”

The featured music for this episode was “Ghost Inside My Head” and “You Give Me” by Matt Cobillas. Everything else was created by Jared Grabb with help from Thomas Satterfield on drums and Chris Anderson on bass guitar. 

All of Jared Grabb's music is published by Roots In Gasoline (ASCAP).

Editing assistance was provided by Becca Taylor.

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Transcript

Hello. I’m Wendell Bauer. Just a quick note at the top: Most of the events of this episode’s historical subject’s life can be and are contested. I will tell the story of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s life to the best of my knowledge and instinct. Welcome to Middle America. (read slow and relaxed)

Jared Grabb “To the Waves”

10A

In the year of 1745, a boy was born on the island that today contains Haiti[1]and the Dominican Republic.[2]He was born with a French sailor for a father and a former African slave for a mother. His name was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.[3]

When Jean was still a child, his father transported him back to France, providing his son with a good education that among other skills taught him fluency in English and Spanish in addition to his first language of French.[4]

As Jean grew older, he returned to the island of his birth to deal in coffee,[5]and eventually that work in trade led him to Mainland America.

At the age of twenty, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable landed in New Orleans, Louisiana.[6]He then proceeded north on the Mississippi River, eventually becoming well-acquainted with the Potawatomi in Illinois. Here, in 1769, he met and fell in love with a Potawatomi woman by the name of Kitiwaha.[7]

The couple were married in a Potawatomi ceremony,[8]and in 1773 they purchased a plot of land where my hometown now stands. The land was purchased from Jean Baptiste Maillet, who would five years later found La Villa de Maillet where downtown Peoria, Illinois now stands.[9]

Also in 1773, Jean and Kitiwaha’s first child, Jean Baptiste, Jr., was born.

Two years later, in the same year the American Revolutionary War began,[10]their daughter Susanne was born.[11]

The family built a home and cultivated thirty acres of land along the Illinois River between present day Mary and Liberty Streets in Peoria. I mention these particular streets because Mary Street marks where there was a French fortification at the time, while Liberty Street marks the spot where Jean Baptiste Maillet moved south in 1778.[12]

As with most of the French in the region, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was Catholic. In 1778 the family traveled to the French outpost of Cahokia in Southern Illinois. At Cahokia, Jean and Kitiwaha married in a French Catholic ceremony. Kitiwaha picked up the Christian name of Catherine.[13]

Also around this time, Jean Baptiste was likely traveling between Peoria and the land that would eventually become Chicago and cultivating both spaces. His work was soon interrupted however by attacks by Great Lakes Indians led by Captain Charles Michel de Langlade (like Michelle duh Long Glad) in a British advance as the American Revolutionary War raged on.[14]

Jean Baptiste and family fled east but were captured at the site of what is now Michigan City, Indiana. Jean was then transported to Fort Michilimackinac and imprisoned as an American sympathizer. His captors described him as an intelligent and well-mannered man. The combination of Jean’s charisma and help from influential friends soon managed to free him. It seems like a deal might have been struck as the family was transported again, this time to St. Clair, Michigan.

At St. Clair, Jean Baptiste and family were employed at The Pinery, a northeast Michigan trading post owned by a British lieutenant governor.[15]With all this going on, documents confusingly show the family to be residing in Peoria,[16]Chicago, Michigan City, and Michilimackinac in the Fall of 1779.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1784 that Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and his family finally were able to return to their chosen residence on the western border of Lake Michigan and return to the task of building the life that they wished to lead.[17]

Jared Grabb “Patch of Green” (2:05-END)

10B

Coming off tour as Dominic was leaving the band in 2006 was tough.

Coming home from tour had been tough in general for several years. For me, I felt like my true self was lived in a van moving down the highway. My true self was the person who hollered from stage night after night and town after town. Home from tour in Peoria, I would sleep during the days in a spare room at my parents’ house and pathetically get drunk every night.

Dominic, however, held a different perspective. Dominic’s true self was at home, close to family. Tour was fun for him, but for his tastes, it dragged on too long. The band we made together was Dominic’s first act that didn’t count his brother or sister in its members, and that made the time away even more difficult.

And, financial stress was always a dark cloud overhead. We were each living off five dollars per day and very, very rarely were able to afford a hotel room. We were often able to make friends and find a floor to sleep on, but it wasn’t uncommon that we would sleep in the van.

One particularly brutal night comes to mind where we were set up in a Walmart parking lot to sleep for the night. It was the winter before Dominic’s departure from the band. Temperatures outside were well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. We were each bundled up in full clothes inside sleeping bags, upright in bucket seats. It was so cold that every thirty minutes we would wake up with teeth chattering and need to run the car with the heater on full for another thirty minutes before falling asleep again for thirty minutes to restart the cycle.

I think Dominic was fairly disappointed with me that night.

It was also the case that we were lonely. Neither Dominic nor myself had been able to keep a girlfriend in a couple years. Few people consider seeing their significant other for only three months per year as a desirable option. Also, few people find dating someone who lives with their parents and has no money desirable.

In the Spring of 2006, Dominic had had enough.

The band had been on an upward trajectory with more national name recognition, better billings, and better audience turnouts, but it can fail to be thrilling to progress incrementally from uncomfortable, lonely, hungry, and cold.

I, on the other hand, had not had enough. An offer for an opening spot of a larger tour was made just as Dominic chose to stay home. Dominic is one of my best friends, but I think I was just like, “how hard can it be to replace a drummer when the most difficult tours have already been performed?”

The band toured continuously for another year after Dominic left. Each tour had a different drummer behind the kit. Each tour felt lonelier and lonelier as I saw my bandmates have little shared investment in the project.

By the Summer of 2007, I had run out of steam. I was a lonely drunk with writer’s block. I had ceased to be proud of what I was making under the band moniker and had run out of drummers willing to drop their stable lives at home to hit the road in discomfort.

Stuck in Peoria, I took a job as a house painter for the summer. This put some much-needed money in my pocket. Seeing opportunity for change, I then started saving and by the Fall, I was able to get out of town.

I moved in with an old friend at Chicago. I got a couple jobs collecting door money and working security for promoters that I had previously booked my band with.

My hope was that with a far larger city as my disposal, I would find a drummer that made a good fit, make more influential connections in the music scene, and find a girlfriend that hadn’t already been an acquaintance of mine for at least a decade.

Scouts Honor “Arise” (Middle America Version)

10C

After four years of being sidetracked by the British in Indiana and Michigan, Jean Baptiste and family returned to their Chicago home, likely using funds from a sale of land back in Peoria to facilitate the move.[18]Here they built up a business utilizing skills picked up at The Pinery. By the time Jean’s daughter Susanne married in 1790,[19]their Chicago trading post contained a wooden homestead, a bakehouse, a smokehouse, a poultry house, a dairy, a workshop, a horse mill, a barn, and two stables.

Both the English and the French used the trading post as a pit stop.[20]The Chicago River and Lake Michigan made it an ideal place to restock supplies when heading into or out of the heart of North America.

By 1794, travelers were describing Jean Baptiste Point du Sable as a wealthy man.[21]He was also noted to be quite an art lover, with several paintings hanging throughout his frontier residence.

It seems that Jean had built up quite a successful business and comfortable life by the 1790s, which is why many historians are confused as to why the family left Chicago in 1800. Many hypothesize that the move was the result of a failed candidacy in local tribal elections.

And, I must say that this blows my mind. Jean Baptiste had been living among the Potawatomi for over thirty years, but the idea that a foreigner could actually attempt to be a regional chieftain sounds unthinkable.

Well, he did run, but he failed. Baptiste ended up selling his property to a newer trader and Indian agent in the area by the name of Jean La Lime. The traders William Burnett and John Kinzie signed off as witnesses to the sale. Yes, John Kinzie bought Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s house and property and then Kinzie’s family tried to claim Kinzie to be Chicago’s first permanent resident. It would be laughable if it hadn’t worked for 150 years.

Following the sale at Chicago, Jean moved back south to Peoria for five years and then on to St. Charles, Missouri to be near his son, Jean Baptiste, Jr., who was working on the Missouri River.

By this time Jean Baptiste Point du Sable was in his sixties and needing to think about end-of-life care. To acquire this, he signed over his property in St. Charles to his sixteen-year-old granddaughter Eulalie and her husband Michael Derais (like Deh Rise) in exchange for care and funeral duties. Eulalie and Michael did not follow through with these duties, and Jean Baptiste, Jr. passed away in 1814. This left Jean Baptiste Point du Sable to fend for himself with little to his name.

Jean Baptiste wound up applying for “the benefit of the law relative to insolvents.”[22]And, so it was that a free black man who at one time owned a large trading post and over eight hundred acres of land[23]died comparatively poor and was buried in an unmarked grave on October 28, 1818.[24]

It wouldn’t be until 1965 that the city of Chicago would recognize him as its true father.[25]

Jared Grabb “Be a Working Man”

10D

That first winter in Chicago was fairly rough for me. I didn’t have money for gas, so I learned to ride my bike in freezing temperatures for the few miles between my apartment in Logan Square and the clubs where I worked in Wicker Park.

I did start dating a girl that I met at a house party, but the relationship was short-lived.

Once things finally started warming up around May, life got a lot better.  I no longer dreaded my daily commute, and I was able to explore the city further.

The biggest seasonal improvement was that one of my good friends had a stoop that we could drink on through the warm nights.

I had known Lucas since high school, and around our senior year he had become one of my closest pals. While he moved away to Chicago after high school, our friendship had only strengthened with the distance. Through the years that I had attended Bradley University and toured with music afterward, I had often traveled up to spend New Year’s Eve and birthdays with Lucas. Inversely, Lucas would come back to Peoria to party with me on occasion.

We were both artists, and throughout our young adulthood had remained valuable critics of each other’s work. I had wanted to be a comic book artist in college, but Lucas had actually made it happen and had made a nice name for himself in the Chicago arts community.

So, during this summer of 2008, Lucas was working nights waiting tables in a restaurant. It worked out well that when we each got off work in the early AM, we could drink together until sun-up. Neither of us had much money, as Lucas had a lot of school debts that he was still paying off. This made drinking in bars rather impossible, so buying a “cube” or a “dirty 30” of Old Style or PBR was the standard.

Sometimes we would gather a small group on the stoop with other acquaintances. Lucas’s roommates would join us. We’d say hi to strangers passing by. Co-workers would follow us home.

We’d laugh and sing to tunes that squawked through a tiny thrift store radio with an extension cord running up to Lucas’s third story apartment window. Lucas would sketch between sips of beer.

Looking back, it seems so innocent and care-free. We were disastrous messes of people, but it was the best of times in those long, cozy nights.

Of course, Fall did eventually come around, and it became clear that I wouldn’t make it through another winter in Chicago while working in the clubs. At this point I picked up a job in a grocery store with early morning hours, and so my lifestyle was killed off. At 29 years old, I had rarely worked a 40-hour work week at a straight job. It was painful but necessary.

While I did find a steady drummer for the band and we did get to play some shows out of state and in Europe, we never achieved the full-time rock ’n’ roll status that the band had back in Peoria. Rent was just too expensive.

I dated several women over the next several years and even experienced the joy of living alone.

Chicago never quite fit me, though. After falling in love with the woman who would become my wife, we started immediately discussing our long-term future. The band wasn’t in it, and neither was Chicago.

After nine years in the Chicago, I moved with my wife and our toddler down to the city where I was born, returning to Peoria, Ilinois. The band with and without Dominic had been a grind, but back in Peoria I then found myself working sixty-hour work weeks in order to take care of the family. Different day. Different grind.

Matt Cobillas “Ghost Inside My Head”

Jared Grabb “Prison Bars” (Middle America Version)

10OUT

Thank you for listening to Middle America.

The featured music for this episode was “Ghost Inside My Head” and “You Give Me” by Matt Cobillas. Everything else was created by Jared Grabb with help from Thomas Satterfield on drums and Chris Anderson on bass guitar. You can see a full listing of the music used in today’s episode on the episode’s webpage at midamericapod.buzzsprout.com.

Editing assistance was provided by Becca Taylor.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support it, 5-star reviews on Apple Podcasts and subscriptions over at patreon.com/midamericapod are the best ways to do that. Speaking of which, thank you so much to Juddypower and fortunebloom for your recent reviews.

Keep on fighting the good fight, folks. Until next time…