Ann Durkin Keating

settler here, but he's setting up a trading outpost.

I hesitate to use the word settler because, and I just did, but I realized that's a word that we should use carefully because we often associate it with people who are claiming land or buying real estate.

And DuSable was not claiming land.

He was building on a site that was Potawatomi-controlled, and he knew that.

He marries a Potawatomi woman, and he starts his own trading outpost then.

Yeah.

I mean, you want to keep in mind what's going on on the East Coast, because this is the time of just after the American Revolution.

And the U.S.

is, in fact, claiming all of this Western territory where Great Britain is controlling Canada to the north.

The boundary between the U.S.

and Canada into the 1780s, into the 1790s is not completely clear yet.

It's not settled really, you know, until Jay's Treaty in 1794.

And throughout all of that time period, the U.S.

government is making this claim about land in the West.

And so it's I think the reason that this picks up speed has got everything to do with the U.S.

now.

coming in and making this claim.

It had been French claims.

And then after the French and Indian War, it was British claims, although there remained a lot of French traders in the region.

And then after the American Revolution, so by the 1780s, the U.S.