in 1953 helped to popularize the claim that Point du Sable was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in Saint-Domingue (later known as Haiti). If he was born outside continental North America, there are competing accounts as to whether he entered as a trader from the north through French Canada, or from the south through French Louisiana. Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa (Christianized to Catherine) on 27October 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia in the Illinois Country, a longtime French colonial settlement on the east side of the Mississippi River. It is likely that this couple was married earlier in the 1770s in a Native American tradition. They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne. Point duSable supported his family as a frontier trader 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. In a footnote to a poem titled Speech to the Western Indians, Arent DePeyster, British commandant from 1774 to 1779 at Fort Michilimackinac (a former French fort in what was then the British province of Quebec), noted that "Baptist Point deSaible" was "a handsome negro", "well educated", and "settled in Eschecagou". When he published this poem in 1813, DePeyster presented it as a speech that he had made at the village of Arbrecroche (now Harbor Springs, Michigan) on 4July 1779. This footnote has led many scholars to assume that Point duSable had settled in Chicago by 1779. But letters written by other traders in the late 1770s suggest that Point duSable was at this time settled at the mouth of Trail Creek (Rivière duChemin) at what is now Michigan City, Indiana. In August 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, Point duSable was arrested as a suspected Patriot at Trail Creek by British troops and imprisoned briefly at Fort Michilimackinac. An officer's report following his arrest noted that Point du Sable had many friends who vouched for his good character. The following year, Point du Sable was ordered transported to the Pinery on the St. Clair River north of Detroit. From the summer of 1780 until May 1784, Point duSable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands owned by British officer Lt.Patrick Sinclair, on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan. This may have been