During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times between France, Britain, Spain and the United States.

[10] Historian Milo Milton Quaife regarded Kinzie's account of Point du Sable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated",[11] later putting forward a theory that he was of African and French-Canadian origin.

[14] Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa (Christianized to Catherine) on 27 October 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia in the Illinois Country, a longtime French colonial settlement on the east side of the Mississippi River.

[16] Point du Sable supported his family as a frontier trader (voyageur or coureur des bois) and settler during a period of great upheaval for the former southern dependencies of French Canada and in the Illinois Country, where the regions changed hands several times over the course of half a century.

From the summer of 1780[23] until May 1784, Point du Sable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands owned by British officer Lt. Patrick Sinclair, on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan.

[24][n 3] The earliest known record of Point du Sable living in Chicago is an entry that Hugh Heward made in his journal on 10 May 1790, during a journey from Detroit across Michigan and through Illinois.

On 12 October 1968, the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission erected a granite marker at the site believed to be Point du Sable's grave in the third St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery.

[7] Researchers using a combination of ground-penetrating radar, surveys, and excavation of a 9-by-9-foot (2.7 m × 2.7 m) area did not find any evidence of any burials at the supposed grave site, leading the archaeologists to conclude that Point du Sable's remains may not have been reinterred from one of the two previous cemeteries.

[39] Quaife was unable to find a direct link to Point du Sable, but he identified descendants of Pierre Dandonneau as living around the Great Lakes region in Detroit, Mackinac, and St. Joseph.

[41] Based on family recollections and tombstone inscriptions, he claimed that Point du Sable was born in Saint-Marc in what was then Saint Domingue, studied in France, and returned to the island to deal in coffee before traveling to French Louisiana.

[44] This book presented Point du Sable as the son of the mate on a pirate ship, the Black Sea Gull, and a freedwoman called Suzanne.

[45] Despite lack of evidence and the continued debate about Point du Sable's early life, parentage, and birthplace, this popular story has been repeated and widely presented as being definitive.

[48] This document has been taken by Quaife and other historians as evidence that Point du Sable lived at Peoria on the Illinois River prior to going north to settle in Chicago.

[51][52] Nicholas Jarrot, the claimant, was involved in many false claims,[53] and Swenson suggests that this one was also fraudulent, made without Point du Sable's knowledge.

He sold his property to Jean La Lime, a trader from Quebec, and moved to the Missouri River valley, at that time part of Spanish Louisiana.

[11] In her 1953 novel, Graham suggests that Point du Sable left Chicago because he was angered that the US government wanted him to buy the land on which he had lived and called his own for the previous two decades.

[57] The 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which ended the Northwest Indian War, and the subsequent westward migration of Native Americans away from the Chicago area might also have influenced his decision.

[59][n 5] Over the following years, visits by the French continued and occasional intermittent posts were established, including those by René LaSalle, Henri de Tonti, Pierre Liette[62][63] and the four-year Mission of the Guardian Angel.

[68] Point du Sable was generally forgotten during the 19th century; instead, the Scots-Irish trader John Kinzie from Quebec, who had bought his property, was often credited for the settlement.

[70] In the planning stages of the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition, several African-American groups campaigned for Point du Sable to be honored at the fair.

[71] At the time, few Chicagoans had even heard of Point du Sable,[72] and the World's Fair organizers presented the 1803 construction of Fort Dearborn as the city's historical beginning.

[73] In 1965, a plaza called Pioneer Court was built on the site of Point du Sable's homestead as part of the construction of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America building.

At this site in 2009, the City of Chicago and a private donor, Haitian-born Lesly Benodin, erected a large bronze bust of Point du Sable by Chicago-born sculptor Erik Blome.