Antoine Ouilmette (c. 1760–1841) was a fur trader and early resident of what is now Chicago, Illinois. He was of French Canadian and possibly Native American ancestry. The village of Wilmette, Illinois (phonetic spelling of Ouilmette) is named in his honor.[1]
Little is known about Ouilmette's background and early life. In 1908, amateur historian Frank Grover wrote that previous claims that Ouilmette was an "Indian chief" were false, and that he was instead a white voyageur of French Canadian ancestry.[2] However, "Ouilamette" was a name associated with the Potawatomi tribe decades before Antoine Ouilmette's birth, and so in 1977 anthropologist James A. Clifton speculated that Antoine Ouilmette was "probably a Métis descendant" of Ouilamette, a Native American who was prominent in the Lake Michigan region beginning in the 1680s.[3] Grover wrote that Ouilmette was born in Lahndrayh, near Montreal, in 1760,[4] although another source says that he was baptized as "Antoine Louis Ouimet" in 1758.[5]
Ouilmette was employed by the American Fur Company,[6] and moved to Chicago in July 1790[7] where he built a log cabin on the north side of the main branch of the Chicago River, just to the west of the property of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.[5] In 1796 or 1797 he married Archange Marie Chevalier, a French-Potawatomi woman, at Grosse Point (now Evanston and Wilmette).[5] He was employed by John Kinzie after Kinzie settled in Chicago in 1804. Ouilmette and his Métis family were friendly with most of the local native American population and so they remained in Chicago in the four years that followed the Battle of Fort Dearborn in 1812.[8]
In 1829 he was instrumental in persuading local Native Americans to sign the second Treaty of Prairie du Chien; in recognition of this the U.S. government awarded 1,280 acres (5.2 km2) of land in present-day Wilmette and Evanston to Ouilmette's wife Archange and her children. Shortly after this Ouilmette and his family moved to a cabin on this reservation. In 1836 the Potawatomi were relocated west of the Mississippi River and Ouilmette and his family moved with them. He died at Council Bluffs, Iowa in December 1841.[5]
Grover, Frank R. (1908). Antoine Ouilmette. Evanston Historical Society. http://www.archive.org/details/antoineouilmette00grov. Retrieved September 7, 2010.