[APPENDIX A.]
JEAN BAPTISTE POINTE DE SAIBLE, THE HAYTIAN NEGRO WHO WAS THE FIRST "WHITE MAN" TO SETTLE IN CHICAGO (1776-77).
COCK-CROW.
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.
ROBERT CAVELIER, SIEUR DE LA SALLE.