This study shows Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (1745-1818), the founder of the city of Chicago, and depicts that city's evolving history in three separate bands. At the bottom is the earliest phase, represented by an eighteenth-century coach (at left) and a team of horses (at right). In the center is the nineteenth-century city, with a church steeple as the tallest structure (at right). At the top, the early-twentieth-century skyline is dominated by the tall buildings for which Chicago was already world famous.

Du Sable was born on the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to a French father and an African mother. After being educated in France, he returned to the New World and in 1779 established a permanent settlement at the mouth of the Chicago River (just east of the present Michigan Avenue Bridge, on the north bank of the river).