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                       Outpost in the Wilderness:
                              Fort Wayne,
                               1706-1828


                                   by
                           Charles Poinsatte

                        Allen County, Fort Wayne
                           Historical Society
                                  1976




                           TABLE OF CONTENTS


                               CHAPTER I
  The French and British Period                                    Page 1


                                CHAPTER II
  The Establishment of Fort Wayne—Government Outpost of Defense,
          Diplomacy, and Trade                                    Page 27


                               CHAPTER III
  The Impending Conflict                                          Page 50


                                CHAPTER IV
  The Siege of Fort Wayne                                         Page 63


                                CHAPTER V
  Evacuation of the Fort and the Increased Indian Trade           Page 79


                                CHAPTER VI
  Platting of Fort Wayne and the First Local Government           Page 94


                               CHAPTER VII
  The Treaty of 1826 and the Removal of the Indian Agency         Page 99


                                 APPENDIX
  Bibliography                                                   Page 106
  Index                                                          Page 111




                                FOREWORD


There was a time when the writer of local history and the academic
professional were two different people; indeed, one is almost tempted to
say, they were two different species. Fortunately for both, this is no
longer true. Many academic historians now recognize local units as the
fundamental units of historical study, presenting hard data in
manageable quantities for precise conclusions. Charles R. Poinsatte was
among the first to recognize this and merge the academic and local
traditions of historical writing, the one supplying rigor and judgments
based on cosmopolitan learning, and the other supplying the vividness
and appeal of the familiar and relevant.

On the academic side, Charles R. Poinsatte got his undergraduate and
graduate education at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. Thomas
T. McAvoy schooled him to precision in judgment and exhaustiveness in
research. Poinsatte also had the good fortune to study under Aaron I.
Abell, a student of Arthur Schlesinger, Senior, whose 1933 book, _The
Rise of the City, 1878-1898_, initiated a new kind of American history.
Professor Abell first got Poinsatte interested in what is now called
urban history. In fact, however, Poinsatte’s career embodies still
another great tradition in American historiography, that of frontier
history as inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner. _Frontier Outpost_
describes the _site_ of an urban area to be, but it is not truly urban
history, as Dr. Poinsatte’s book, _Fort Wayne during the Canal Era,
1828-1855_ (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1969), was. Thus Dr. Poinsatte
writes in this book of Fort Wayne as an aspect principally of the
history of the Old Northwest.

Higher education at Notre Dame, acquaintance with a student of the elder
Schlesinger, and thoughts spurred by the Turner thesis are only part of
the story, of course. The area Dr. Poinsatte decided to study was Fort
Wayne and not Detroit or Chicago or Cincinnati. Here what Nathaniel
Hawthorne called “a sort of home-feeling with the past” worked its
magic. Born in Fort Wayne in 1925, Charles Poinsatte was stirred by the
names he heard as a boy, Little Turtle, Anthony Wayne, and George Rogers
Clarke. Some family property was part of the old Richardville estate,
and in his youth he explored an old Indian burial ground there. He has
never gotten over his fascination with those men, and now he examines
them with his academic tools.

Dr. Poinsatte has always been able to reconcile seemingly conflicting
movements in American historical writing. Urban history and frontier
history, he argues, are in many ways complementary, for frontier
historians can explain to urban historians why the entities they study
are located where they are and how they got their start. Likewise, local
history and history as most often written by academic professionals
benefit from cross-fertilization. Local history always needs to be
written from a broad perspective which keeps the local historian from
claiming unique status for developments which took place in many other
localities at the same time. Likewise, in-depth studies of certain
localities provide tests for the larger generalizations of academic
historians, generalizations that are too often based on unrepresentative
samplings of evidence from national elites and large cultural and
political centers like New York and Washington.

Still, one suspects it is the excitement of particular locality’s
history which accounts for Dr. Poinsatte’s work. It has already taken
him to England and France in search of the records and documents which
explain the early history of Fort Wayne. He intends to return to Europe
next year to explore still another aspect of history suggested by Fort
Wayne’s story, the lives of French military officers who fought in the
American Revolution. After that, he might consider a history of Fort
Wayne in the railroad era, from 1855 (where Dr. Poinsatte’s work on the
canal era ended) to the Progressive Era. Whatever the course of
Professor Poinsatte’s future studies, Fort Wayne’s citizens will look
forward to reading the results. He has already enriched our
understanding of ourselves beyond measure.

  September 4, 1975
  Fort Wayne, Indiana
  Mark E. Neely, Jr.




                                Preface


Early Fort Wayne played an important and definite role in the history of
the old Northwest. Its unique position as a portage site between the
Wabash and Maumee rivers made the Wabash route one of the natural
waterways from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi river and brought
Indians and fur traders to this spot at an early date. It is most likely
the oldest continuous site settled by white men in Indiana. During the
French, British, and American occupation of the region, forts were built
here as outposts of defense in the Indian country. Its strategic
importance was recognized in all the plans for military campaigns in the
area between the Great Lakes and the Ohio river for almost a century.
Here was located at a later date an important government Indian agency,
and to the town on certain days of the year flocked hundreds of Indian
traders. Fort Wayne was also situated in the heart of the rich
Maumee-Wabash fur producing region.

While giving a comprehensive background of the French and British
occupation of the site of Fort Wayne, I have stressed its importance in
the early days of American settlement. The gradual decline of the fur
trade, followed by the removal of the Indian agency in 1828 and the
opening of the area to white settlement by the Indian treaties of that
decade, all combined to usher in a new era in the history of Fort Wayne.
By the 1830’s the people of Fort Wayne were feverishly making plans for
the Wabash and Erie canal. This opened a new period in Fort Wayne’s
history which has been studied in my previous work.[1] Since then the
development of the city has been consistent and substantial.

From the modern growing city it is a far cry back to the time of the
Miami Indians and the old fort in the wilderness with its little
garrison of men puzzled at times, no doubt, to understand their choice
of a life of loneliness in an environment which gave little opportunity
for the refinements of life. The people of today are none too thoughtful
of their obligation to the pioneer soldier, trader and settler. It is my
hope that in addition to contributing to the annals of the Old
Northwest, this work may create a deeper appreciation of these early
builders. At the same time it has been my desire to treat all these
people objectively rather than in the fictitious way of the
sentimentalist.

Previous histories dealing with the early history of Fort Wayne, while
furnishing valuable material, have either been incomplete or inaccurate,
chiefly because many primary sources were not available to the writers
or were not known to exist. I have made extensive use of primary
material found in the Burton Collection at Detroit, the Chicago
Historical Library, and the Fort Wayne Public Library as well as in the
British Museum and the Public Records Office in London and the _Archives
des Colonies_ in Paris. Part of the European research was made possible
by a summer grant from St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Acknowledgments are due to many individuals who have so kindly given
assistance, especially to the staffs of the various archives and
libraries which I have used in Chicago, Detroit, Paris, and London. Mr.
Albert Diserens, chief of the Indiana collection of the Fort Wayne
Public Library, aided me in every way. A special debt is due to the
officers and members of the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society
and in particular Mr. Fred Reynolds who assisted immeasurably in
arranging for the publication of this work. To the late Reverend Thomas
T. McAvoy of the University of Notre Dame I owe deep gratitude for first
encouraging me to study the history of my hometown.

While almost all early American cities which originated as military
outposts later changed their names—Cincinnati (Fort Washington). Chicago
(Fort Dearborn)—or simply dropped “fort” from their titles—Defiance,
Ohio—for some reason the citizens of Fort Wayne never followed this
common practice. The old “Fort Wayne” fell into ruins, but the name
survives. Undoubtedly few individuals have even wondered why, but I
believe, or would like to believe, that somehow the later citizens of
Fort Wayne wanted to retain an identity with the past—a past that is
worth knowing and remembering. It is to these citizens—past and present
and to my own family that I dedicate this book.


[1]_Fort Wayne during the Canal Era._




                               Chapter I
                     The French and British Period


To know the history of any town is to know the significance of its
geographical position. This is particularly true of the early history of
Fort Wayne (Known to the Indians as Kiskakon or Kekionga[1] and to the
French and English as Fort Miami). Therefore, it is necessary to explain
the significance of the site of Fort Wayne in an era of exploration and
trade when wilderness was king and waterways were the arteries of
communication. The story of Fort Wayne begins as the history of the
Maumee-Wabash portage. Located at the confluence of rivers, St. Joseph
and St. Mary’s, which together form the Maumee or Miami of Lake Erie,
Fort Wayne is situated at the northeast starting point of the seven mile
portage to the Little River, (see map on page 2) Twenty-two miles
southwest of Fort Wayne, the Little River joins the Wabash, which, in
turn, empties into the Ohio and then into the Mississippi. The
Maumee-Wabash portage was from the early seventeenth century until the
mid-nineteenth century a vital overland link that tied together the
great waterway systems of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi. In other
respects the site of Fort Wayne was at the “crossroads”. From this point
the traveler could journey northeast up the St. Joseph river into the
present state of Michigan, or turn southeast up the St. Mary’s river
into the central portion of the present state of Ohio. This, then, is
the significance of the words of Little Turtle, the great Miami chief,
who once called the site of Fort Wayne, “that glorious gate... through
which all the good words of our chiefs had to pass from the north to the
south, and from the east to the west.”[2]

    [Illustration: Map]

Of the five great portage routes used by the French,[3] the
Maumee-Wabash was the last to be exploited, for, unlike the more
northern routes, it was along the line of “most resistance”. The
Iroquois warfare in this region and as far west as the Illinois country
made it virtually impossible for the French to use the routes extending
through southern Lake Erie. With the establishment of the French posts
along the lower Mississippi, however, the Maumee-Wabash portage gained
importance, as it proved to be the shortest route connecting the
settlements of New France (Canada) and Louisiana. The first white man to
use this portage may have been some unknown French “coureur de bois”,
pursuing his lawless life of adventure and fur-trading. There is some
claim that LaSalle used the Maumee-Wabash portage in his explorations of
1670 or later, but it is based, for the most part, on conjecture and is
still open to various interpretations.[4] In any event, LaSalle’s
description of the territory between Lake Erie and Lake Michigan
indicates a familiarity with the region, and it was he who first
directed the attention of the French to this portage by pointing out the
way to shorten the route to the lower Ohio river.[5] Whatever LaSalle’s
plans were for opening up this easy channel of communications[6] they
had to be abandoned because of the failure of the French to appease the
Iroquois. This powerful confederacy had all but annihilated the Erie
Indians earlier in the century and were now pressing their attacks upon
the western tribes south of Lake Michigan. Out of fear of the Iroquois
the area of Indiana was largely abandoned by the Miam