In 1691, Augustin Legardeur de Courtemanche, along with a dozen soldiers, was sent to build a fort on the St. Joseph River, then known as the River of the Miamis. The small fort, which was in existence for nearly a century, probably housed some three dozen or so European inhabitants at any one time—soldiers, a blacksmith, an interpreter, a priest, and traders with their families. The site of this fort, just across the Indiana-Michigan border in today’s Niles, Michigan, has been the subject of archaeological investigation since 1998.
Fort St. Joseph, along with three others that the French built later in what is now Indiana, was constructed with several purposes in mind. Areas closer to the main French settlements in the St. Lawrence River valley were beginning to have fewer fur-bearing animals available, and consequently traders were looking for sources farther afield, starting in the western Great Lakes area. In addition, the French needed to create and maintain relationships with their vital Native trade partners. They relied on Miami, Potawatomi, Odawa, Piankeshaw, Wea, and many other people to supply them with furs in exchange for the trade goods that they imported.
These trade goods included metal objects like knives, kettles, or axes; cloth and blankets; and items for personal adornment like glass beads and silver bracelets and pins. In return, the most valuable fur received was the beaver, which was exported to Europe and made into felt used for hatmaking. In order to cultivate these relationships and keep the flow of furs and skins flowing, they needed to try to dampen intertribal conflicts and also to convince their Native trade partners to trade with them—the French—and not their European rivals, the English, who were not far away in what is today Ohio and points east.
With few French settlers in North America (by 1760 there were only some 90,000 French speakers in North America, of which 90% lived in the St. Lawrence River valley colonies) and a vast territory in which they wanted to carry out the fur trade, the French chose to establish a series of small forts on important waterways. Throughout the Great Lakes region, forts were sited on major transportation routes. Fort St. Joseph, for example, was on the St. Joseph River with its link to both Lake Michigan and the Mississippi drainage through the Kankakee River portage. It was also close to the Sauk Trail (connecting the sites of present-day Detroit and Chicago). Forts were also often established near Native villages; alternatively, villages sometimes grew nearby after the forts were built because of the proximity to trade opportunities that they offered.
Fort Ouiatenon
There was a substantial Wea (Waayaahtanonki) village on the banks of the Wabash River near present-day Lafayette when the order was given to Ensign François-Marie Picoté, Sieur de Belestre, to construct a fort there in 1717. The fort, which was called Ouiatenon after the Wea people living there, would be populated initially by four additional soldiers as well as a blacksmith. Apparently, the palisaded fort, on the north side of the Wabash River, was large enough to shelter some fifteen families, and on the opposite bank of the Wabash was a Wea village. During the existence of the fort, Kickapoo and Mascouten people are also mentioned as living in proximity to the site. In May of 1725 permission was granted to a Jesuit priest to serve the Ouiatenon post as well as the post at Fort Miamis.
The Fox Wars—conflicts between the Meskwaki (known by the French as the Renards or Fox) and the French and some allied tribes—disrupted travel and trade for the French throughout the Illinois Country, as the French called the area to the east and west of the Mississippi River in what are now the states of Illinois and Missouri. The route to the Mississippi via the Wabash and Ohio Rivers, and thus through the site of Fort Ouiatenon, became more important with the route through the Illinois Country difficult to access. It was the connection between the two administrative parts of New France: Canada in the north and Louisiana, the large territory stretching south from around St. Louis to the new French colonies on the Gulf of Mexico.
After 1763 and the end of the French and Indian War, almost all of the territory that had been claimed as New France was turned over to the British. This includes what is today Indiana. The Native people with whom the French had been trading did not see this as territory changing hands, but rather saw the situation as involving simply changing the set of Europeans with whom to negotiate trade relationships. As the English moved in, Fort Ouiatenon was in fact not occupied by British military forces. It actually continued as a small settlement with a few French-speaking fur trade families living there. When George Rogers Clark and his American forces came through the area in 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the fort apparently still had a stockade and housed a few French families, with a continuing population of Native people in the vicinity, but it seems the families began to leave in the 1780s.
Eventually, the fort disappeared, and its location was forgotten. Amateur historians and local residents with an interest in the fort began a search for the site by the end of the 19th century, and some small archaeological investigations were begun in the 1960s, which appeared to confirm that the site of the French fort had been located. Other more extensive archaeological investigations have taken place since then, the most recent occurring in 2022. The site is now contained within the Ouiatenon Preserve, administered by the Tippecanoe County Historical Society, which also sponsors the annual large reenactment event called Feast of the Hunters’ Moon at a park near the actual site of the fort.
Fort St-Philippe des Miamis
The Wabash River drainage was not the only important river site where the French wanted to establish a presence: the large Miami village of Kekionga, near present-day Fort Wayne, was another gathering place for Miami people that was an obvious choice for the French to build a trading post. The Miami village was situated at the point where the rivers today called the St. Marys and St. Joseph (different from the St. Joseph flowing into Lake Michigan) conjoin to form the Maumee River. The French first established a trading post at the site; it was there that French agent Jean-Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, who had been working with the Miami on behalf of the French for some years, died sometime in 1718-19. He would be succeeded in his official role by his son, François-Marie, who had joined his father at Kekionga in 1717. (François-Marie also became commander of Fort Ouiatenon in the early 1720s.)
The fort on the Maumee River, named Fort St-Philippe des Miamis, was completed in 1722 and was soon known simply as Fort Miami. It was first occupied by a commander, two cadets and a sergeant along with an interpreter and an unspecified number of soldiers. Like many other forts, it was surrounded by palisades and contained a powder magazine and a blacksmith’s forge. The fort served as a center for the fur trade, and later reports indicate that there were a small number of houses within the palisade, many of them occupied by fur traders who spent only part of the year there. In 1750 construction of a new fort began nearby, in what was seen as a more defensible position on the St. Joseph River (again, different from the St. Joseph flowing into Lake Michigan). Fort Miami was handed over to the British after the end of the French and Indian War without incident, although a 1774 report indicated that several French families were still living within the fort, opposite a Miami village. The fort was apparently abandoned soon after.
Poste Vincennes
The third fort established by the French in what is now Indiana, also on the Wabash River, had a different fate than did Fort Miami and Fort Ouiatenon. The settlement of Vincennes became more than just a small military and fur-trade post and is today a city of some 17,000 residents. In order to protect the Wabash-to-Mississippi River route, François-Marie Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, was tasked with finding a site for a fort farther downstream from Fort Ouiatenon. The fort, first called Poste des Pianguichats, was located by a Piankeshaw village some 90 miles upstream from where the Wabash flows into the Ohio River. The structure was finished in 1733, with only a couple of buildings inside its palisades. The fort was located in the border area between the two administrative territories of New France—Canada and Louisiana—and in fact evolved as did other posts in the Illinois Country like Kaskaskia, with habitants (the French word for settlers) engaging in some farming as well as the fur trade.
Vincennes was commander at his namesake post for only a few years, as he died in 1736. The commander who followed him, Louis Groton St. Ange de Bellerive, the son of the commander at Fort de Chartres in the Illinois Country, remained commandant until the fort was turned over to the British after the end of the French and Indian War. St. Ange made land grants outside the fort, which encouraged settlement. The post gradually grew into a multicultural community. Some of the French-speaking inhabitants of the village married Native women. In addition, a 1767 report estimated that there were ten African slaves and seventeen Native slaves in a population of somewhat over 200 inhabitants. At about the same time, it is estimated that some 400 Piankeshaw were living in the area; the Native population had been devastated by epidemics spread by their European trade partners in the first half of the 18th century.
The parish of St. Francis Xavier was established in Vincennes by Jesuit Father Sebastien Louis Meurin in 1748 and a church was constructed. It has since disappeared; the current church, the “Old Cathedral,” was begun in 1826 and in 1834 was named the cathedral of the new Diocese of Vincennes.
After the French and Indian War, the fort at Vincennes passed to British hands but was not immediately occupied and was left to decay. The settlement around the fort continued, however, with a distinctive culture among its French inhabitants, who made their living from the fur trade as well as agriculture, cultivating corn, wheat, barley, tobacco, and fruit trees. During the time of the American Revolution, the British rebuilt a stockade which they called Fort Sackville. George Rogers Clark and his American militia took Fort Sackville in February 1789. When Americans began moving to the Vincennes area in the 1780s and 1790s, cultural differences between the French inhabitants and the American newcomers became apparent. The French seemed to have little interest in increasing their farming activities in order to transform the landscape to favor larger-scale agriculture, a priority for the Americans. The newly arrived Americans were also critical of the kinds of tasks carried out by the French women. Nonetheless, French culture persisted: the French language continued to be spoken in Vincennes well into the first decades of the nineteenth century, and French customs around New Year’s and Lent were also observed until that time.
The area where the original French fort stood has been disturbed multiple times by construction, including the erection of the George Rogers Clark Memorial, and little evidence of it has been discovered. One structure that does remain as evidence of the old French village is what is now called the Old French House, built around 1806 by Vincennes resident Michel Brouillet. With the land around it, the house has been the object of some archaeological investigation. The house was built in the French style typical of the Illinois Country, with the upright “post on sill” construction, and the site has yielded artifacts from the French occupation of the area. There is also evidence that the farm properties outside town were organized in the typical French long lot system. In this system, the narrow side of the lots, measuring one to two arpents (one arpent is about 192 feet), front the Wabash River and the long side stretches up to forty arpents (one and a half to two miles) in from the river.
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