French speakers did continue to come to Indiana even after the territory became a state in 1816. The fur trade in the Great Lakes region continued to attract traders and voyageurs from French-speaking Canada through the middle of the 19th century. Spots such as the “parc aux vaches,” a bend in the St. Joseph River just north of present-day South Bend, and la Rivière du Chemin or Trail Creek at present-day Michigan City, had been small trading posts for some years by 1800, and continued to attract both English-speaking and French-speaking traders like Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, best known for his role in establishing Chicago as a trading center. In what is today South Bend, Pierre Navarre, an agent of the American Fur Company, established a trading post on the St. Joseph River in the early 1800s. The Pierre Navarre cabin is part of The History Museum of South Bend.
Other French-Canadian traders chose to settle in the new state of Indiana. Zachariah Cicott was born to a French-speaking family in the Detroit area in 1776, and married a Potawatomi woman named Pe-say-quot. He built a trading post and home on the Wabash River in what is now Warren County sometime after the War of 1812. Archaeological excavations at the trading post site have found evidence of the stone foundation and wood house, and at least one researcher has found it is likely the house was built in the pièce-sur-pièce construction style which is one of the styles typical of French-Canadian building at the time. The town of Independence, platted by Cicott, is the site of his home and trading post. Today the spot where his trading post stood is a park maintained by the Warren County Parks Department.
A contemporary of Cicott was Joseph Bailly de Messein, born near Montreal in 1774. He also made a career in the fur trade, and though his headquarters was in Michilimackinac (Mackinac), Michigan, for his early career, in 1822 he and his family settled in Porter County, Indiana. The site was on the Little Calumet River, just two miles from the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and on several long-established paths including the Detroit-to-Chicago trail. Bailly married twice, each time to a woman of mixed Native-European heritage: his first wife was Angélique McGulpin, whose mother was Odawa, and his second wife was Marie, born in the River Raisin area of southwest Michigan and also of mixed Odawa-European heritage. Among Bailly’s children, his son Alexis went on to work in the fur trade and play a role in the fledgling state of Minnesota, and his daughter Eleanor became a nun in the Sisters of Providence order—Mother Mary Cecilia Bailly—and was the second General Superior of the Congregation at Saint-Mary-of-the-Woods convent in Terre Haute, Indiana. Joseph Bailly continued to trade at his property on the Little Calumet, and planned to found a town which he proposed to call Baillytown, but died before it could be formed. The site of his homestead is now within the Indiana Dunes National Park in Porter, Indiana.
The nineteenth century also saw the arrival in the United States and in Indiana of members of French Catholic religious orders such as the Congregation of the Holy Cross (C.S.C.). In 1842 Father Edouard Sorin C.S.C. along with several brothers founded the University of Notre Dame du Lac. When the Bishop of Vincennes requested assistance from France, Sister St. Theodore (later Mother St. Theodore) and several companions came to St-Mary-of-the-Woods in 1840 and founded the Sisters of Providence of St-Mary-of-the-Woods. Sister St. Theodore founded an academy for girls one year later; today, the College of St. Mary of the Woods continues to offer undergraduate degrees.
During the early nineteenth century, the Native people who had lived on this land for many centuries were forced to leave, “removed” to land farther west. The land they left, ostensibly signed away through treaties, was made available for American and European immigrant settlers. Some groups of French speakers were among those early immigrants. Around 1801, a group of French-speaking Swiss settled on land north of the Ohio River in southeastern Indiana (Indiana Territory at that time), establishing vineyards and founding the town of Vevay in Switzerland County.
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