DuSable left Chicago a few years before the United States Army built Fort Dearborn. The first problem, however, was security. From that point onward, Chicago would become the focus of a division, a conflict of cultures, and an interchange between urban and rural economies. He kept livestock, milked a cow, and baked, while his trading activities brought such pieces of non-native culture as iron axes and hinges to the wilderness.
Although he spoke the Potowatami language and married one of their women, DuSable's presence represented a frontier edge between cultures. For more than a dozen years this trader, who was of mixed French and Haitian descent, presided over an elaborate complex of buildings that totaled nearly 4,000 square feet. But their contact was sporadic, temporary, scattered, and small in numbers.Ĭhicago's frontier age really began with the permanent settlement of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable at the mouth of the Chicago River in the late 1770s. Beginning with Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673, the assorted missionaries and adventurers who passed through the region differed from the native peoples in language, religion, and culture. During the age of exploration, Chicago was only beginning to become part of a frontier. This definition may have been accurate in a narrow sense, but the notion that a frontier was an edge, a division between two things, also helps explain Chicago's unique role in the history of Illinois and the nation. Census Bureau defined it as a "moving line of settlement" that swept steadily across the nation during the nineteenth century. Descriptive words seldom move beyond crude and dusty.īut the frontier was not as vague a concept as we may think. Mention the word frontier and chances are that the image that comes to mind is that of a cowboy and a small town filled with clapboard buildings and horses.
Perry Duis Historical Research and Narrative
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