JEAN BAPTISTE POINTE DE SAIBLE, THE HAYTIAN NEGRO WHO WAS THE FIRST "WHITE MAN" TO SETTLE IN CHICAGO (1776-77).

NOT IN JEST, but in grave, sober earnest, the Indians used to say that "the first white man in Chicago was a nigger." In their view, all non-Indians were "whites," the adjective having to them only a racial significance. Then, too the aborigines had no jests—no harmless ones. Peering into the dim past for early items concerning what is now Chicago, one comes first to the comparatively clear (though positively scanty) records of the French—La Salle, Marquette, Tonti, Hennepin, St. Cosme and their bold associates—who came in by way of the St. Lawrence in the seventeenth century—1672 to 1700.

From that time there occurs a great blank. Scarcely a ray of light or word of intelligence pierces the deep gloom for just one hundred years. Detroit, Mackinaw, Lake Superior, Green Bay, Fort Duquesne and St. Louis are kept in view. Even Kaskasia and Fort Chartres, both in Illinois territory, are on record; a circumstance due to the fact, not generally known, that they were points of importance in John Law's famous Mississippi scheme. But Chicago was almost as though it had sunk below the waves of Lake Michigan when La Salle, Marquette and St. Cosme bade it good-bye.

Suddenly, in 1778, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, the name reappears in literature in a curious way. It comes to us through a poetical allusion from the pen of Colonel Arent Schuyler de Peyster, commandant at Michilimackinac. De Peyster, as his name suggests, was a New Yorker of the ancient Dutch stock He entered the English army and in 1757 was commissioned lieutenant in the Eighth, or King's Regiment of Foot. Necessarily he was and continued to be a royalist, and when war broke out served King George against Gen. George.

Fortunately for our knowledge of the West during Revolutionary times, Colonel de Peyster was a scholar and a gentleman as well a soldier and a Tory He left a volume of "Miscellanies," which was first published (1813) in Dumfries, Scotland, whither the old soldier retired when the bad cause for which he made a good fight came to a disastrous end by the peace of Paris in 1783.[AI] An edition, edited by General J. Watts de Peyster, of Yonkers, was published in 1888.

Colonel de Peyster's post of loyal service was Mackinaw, whither, as the "Miscellanies" tell us, he was sent early in 1774, "to command the post, with the painful task of superintending the lake Indians." "Canoes arrived with passes signed by the American General Wooster, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin, wherein it was stipulated that those traders should not afford any succor whatever to the British garrison."

He adds that "in the spring following they [the Indians] were sent down to assist General Burgoine in his expedition across Lake Champlaine"—an entry which recalls the fate of poor Jane McCrea, whose death at the hands of the Indians, near Saratoga, used to draw tears from our childish eyes in the good old times before patriotism was no more.

In that expedition they seem to have done no valuable service to King George (except the killing of Miss McCrea), and on their return they were assembled at Mackinaw for the purpose of making a diversion in favor of the English General Hamilton, whom George Rogers Clark, our paragon of Western soldiers, had defeated already (though de Peyster did not know it) and sent across the Alleghanies, a prisoner, to Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia.

Now comes in the mention of Chicago. De Peyster made a speech to the assembled redskins, which speech he next day turned into rude rhyme at the request of a fair lady whom he calls, in gallant French phrase, "une chÈre compagne de voyage." The poem is included in the "Miscellanies."[AJ]

The entire versified speech is too long to quote, interesting though it be as an unstudied sketch of things of that time and place. Any one wishing to know more of it can find it in the "Miscellanies," of which a copy should be easily found in any large library.

SPEECH TO THE WESTERN INDIANS.

So steps upon the stage of history the earliest non-Indian settler of Chicago; a man who built, at about the time of our Declaration of Independence, the house which was standing within the memory of hundreds of Chicagoans of 1892—the well-known "Kinzie Mansion," that faced the north bank of the river where Pine Street now ends.

Mrs. John H. Kinzie, in her delightful book, "Wau-Bun, the Early day in the North-West," calls him "Pointe au Sable," and says he was a native of San Domingo, and came from that island with a friend named Glamorgan; who had obtained large Spanish grants in or about St. Louis. She adds that Jean Baptiste sold his Chicago establishment to a French trader named Le Mai, and went back to Peoria where his friend Glamorgan was living, and died tinder his roof, presumably about 1800. From Le Mai, the property passed in 1803, to John Kinzie, the real pioneer of Chicago.

Hispaniola (Hayti and San Domingo) was discovered and even colonized, by Columbus, in 1492. It had then some two million inhabitants, living like our first parents in Eden (Genesis I, 27), but the unspeakable cruelty of the Spaniards so depopulated the splendid and happy island, that in 1517—twenty-five years later—it was requisite to import negro slaves to carry on the mining, and to-day not one soul of the original race survives.

The French began to come in 1630, and by the treaty of Ryswick [1697] the island was divided between France and Spain. Then began the greatness of the Haytian negro, which culminated in Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of his race from French slavery and his land from French domain; and later, victim to Napoleon's perfidy. Under the French rule many free negroes were educated in France, very probably Baptiste Pointe de Saible among the rest. At any rate he was of the adventurous spirit which would rather be first in a new sphere than last in an old, and so, with Glamorgan, he came over to Mobile or New Orleans. Then (probably on one of John Law's "Compagnie de l'Occident" bateaux) he came up the Mississippi to Kaskaskia, Cahokia, St. Louis, and at last to Peoria, on the Illinois, where he left Glamorgan, and pushed on to the Pottowatomie outposts where we find him in 1778, the object of Colonel de Peyster's admiring dislike.

Edward G. Mason, in an address before the Historical society, gives a tradition in regard to Pointe de Saible's welcome on Chicago soil, which tradition appears in "Early Western Days," a volume published by John T. Kingston, formerly a state senator of Wisconsin. It runs thus: An Indian living south of the Portage River—now called the Chicago—being out hunting, suddenly came upon a strange object, half hidden by the underbrush. It was a black face with white eyes and woolly hair! (Probably no Indian of his tribe had ever seen a negro.) After gazing at the novel sight awhile, he grunted, "Ugh! Mucketewees!" (black meat.) He captured the odd animal and carried him to the village, whither came the Indians from far and near to gaze, to wonder, and to speculate. Fortunately for Baptiste, for Chicago and for history, the consensus of opinion called it "bad meat," and so the creature's life was spared.

Shaubena, a chief of the Pottowatomies, was in and about Chicago long after their war dance of 1836. He had seen Pointe de Saible, but unfortunately his knowledge concerning him is not on record. Mr. Mason says regretfully:

One other mention of Pointe de Saible is thrown up from the almost barren shore of Western history. The third volume of the Wisconsin Historical Society's collection contains certain "Recollections" of Augustin Grignon (a grandson of Sieur Charles de Langlade), who became the first permanent white settler of Wisconsin about 1735, and, as we have seen, is named by de Peyster in his verses, among which "Recollections" occurs the following precious bit:

"At a very early period there was a negro who lived here (Chicago) named Baptiste Pointe de Saible. My brother, Perish Grignon, visited Chicago about 1794 and told me that Pointe de Saible was a large man, that he had a commission for some office, but for what particular office or for what government I cannot now recollect. He was a trader, pretty wealthy, and drank freely. I do not know what became of him."

With these bits of chance allusion—touches here and there—we get a quite distinct impression of the lonely Baptiste. His origin shows possibility of greatness, for it was the same with that of FranÇois Dominique Toussaint, surnamed l'Ouverture. Like him, he was a French West-Indian mulatto. He was large, handsome, well-educated and adventurous, traits which mark pretty clearly his migrations and his fortunes. Neither in Mobile, New Orleans, Kaskaskia, nor St. Louis could he probably feel at home, for at each of these places nigritude was associated with servitude. Among the Peoria Indians he probably found scanty elbow-room, especially if his friend and rival trader, Glamorgan, was, as his name implies, of Welsh blood—a race which gleans close, and thrives where others starve.

Not unnaturally would he, as tradition suggests, aspire to headship of the great tribe of Pottowatomies, for he knew how vastly superior he was to the best of them; and quite as naturally would he fail, seeing that the red strain of blood and the black have even less in common than has each with the white. At the same time, considering the state of domestic relations at that time and place, we may be very sure that he did not fail to "take some savage woman"—one or more—to rear his dusky race in large numbers and much rude, half-breed gaiety and contentment.

As to his office, one would like greatly to know something about it, and is prone to wish that somebody would look it up—in the general government archives, or those of the North-West Territory, which had been established in 1788, General St. Clair being its first governor, and Cincinnati (Losantiville) its capital. Why should it not have been under Harrison and Wells? It would scarcely have been an English office in view of the unpleasant allusion by de Peyster, though the English maintained emissaries hereabouts—fomenters of discontent—away on almost to the war of 1812. Still, it might be worth while to try the Canadian records. Barring swell a discovery, it seems probable that the last word has been written about him.

Jean Baptiste's name "Pointe de Saible" (or Sable) might be suspected of being a description of his residence rather than an inheritance from his forefathers, for the cabin of squared logs, so early built and so lately destroyed, stood at the head of the great sand-point which of old interrupted the course of the Chicago river lakeward, and turned it south for about half a mile to where it flowed over a long, fordable, narrow bar formed by the ceaseless sandstream that moves from north to south along the western shore of Lake Michigan. But the records and traditions are old enough and exact enough to uphold the name as a patronymic, and leave the place as a mere coincidence. One might almost as easily trace it to his lack of grit and perseverance, seeing that he put his hand to the plow and looked back; that he came to Chicago in hope and moved away in despair; that having a "homestead location" he did not stay and "prove up;" that, owning, by occupation, a thousand million dollars worth of real estate, he sold it for a song instead of waiting for a "boom." Point de sable—"no sand."

The two other characteristics of Chicago's first merchant-prince, which are preserved for us by lucky chance, are that he was "pretty wealthy" and that he "drank freely." Only one of these traits has come down to his successors of a century later. [From "Liber Scriptorum," published by the Authors' Club, New York.]

Joseph Kirkland.