Archange Chevalier Ouilmette

Archange Chevalier Ouilmette Soundex Code O453

Archange Chevalier Ouilmette was the married name of Archange Marie Chevalier.

Archange Chevalier Ouilmetteand her husband, Antoine Ouilmette attended the marriage of Dr. Alexander Wolcott, Jr. and Ellen Marion Wolcott in the Kinzie Mansion on July 20, 1823.

Chopa Neebosh Chevalier was the mother of Archange Chevalier Ouilmette and Suzanne Francoise Chevalier

A pall of mystery has always enveloped the history of Archange Chevalier Ouilmette, after whom the Village of Wilmette is named. No one knows what she said or thought about anything: no word she spoke was ever written down. We have no idea what she looked like: there are no photographs, no paintings or sketches. Nobody who met her left behind any description.

Part of this quandary is owed to her having lived so long ago--she died in 1840, before portrait photography even existed--and on a frontier, but most of it must be attributed to her having been a woman of Native American and European parentage (known as Métis). Her husband, Antoine, was, himself, an obscure figure; but, several descriptions of him have come down to us from old settlers' accounts. There is even a surviving letter that he dictated in hopes of compensation for his losses from the burning of Fort Dearborn. Of his wife there is no comparable record. And yet it was to Archange by name, and her children, not to Antoine, that the U.S. government in 1829 deeded the two sections of land (about 1,280) acres (Ouilmette Reservation) that would later form the heart of the Village of Wilmette. Despite much speculation over the years since, no accounts from the time give a reason for the gift.

Even about her parentage and place of birth there are questions. By one account, Archange was the daughter of Potawatomi Chief Sauganash (one who speaks English). By another, Archange Marie Chevalier was born at Sugar Creek, Michigan (???); by still another, she was a local girl, born south of Chicago in the Calumet region. The best source in the Wilmette Historical Society's records lists Archange's parents as Pierre Chevalier, a French fur trader, and his Potawatomi wife, Chopa Neebosh Chevalier. In 1796 or 1797 Archange married Antoine Ouilmette, a French Canadian trader who had come to the Chicago outpost in 1790 from the Montreal area.