USA > Indiana > A history of Indiana from its exploration to 1850 > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43
Along with this plan of D'Iberville it was decided to construct a sufficient number of forts within the north- western country to protect it from the English traders who were rapidly becoming interested in the western fur-trade. D'Iberville himself established a post in 1699 at Biloxi, Mississippi. La Motte Cadillac fortified the post at Detroit in 1701. Forts Chartres and Kaskaskia were established over on the Mississippi in southern Illinois. Since the In- dians were moving toward the east, it was planned to fortify the route from Lake Erie to the Mississippi by way of the Wabash. It was in carrying out this policy that most of the permanent posts of the Northwest were founded. These guarded the important river thoroughfares and the great portages. Around, and in them the missionaries and traders made their headquarters and for this reason the Indians also frequently gathered near. The policy of the king in selling the exclusive right of the fur-trade to a single man or company had not only ruined the fur-trading business but had demoralized the traders.
In the early eighteenth century the only white people in what is now Indiana were the roving fur-traders, called coureurs de bois, and the Jesuit missionaries. The French fur-traders had become divided into two classes. Those who had no license were called coureurs de bois or woods rangers, partly because they had no fixed homes. They were either petty criminals from France, or Canadians, driven from home by the severe trading laws of the time. They lived with the Indians in true Indian fashion. Their life was hard. In storm and shine they plied their paddles along
10
HISTORY OF INDIANA
the lakes or on the small streams, overhung by boughs and grapevines and obstructed by drift, rocks, or sunken logs. While they, at times, feasted on venison and turkey, their usual fare was parched corn and bear grease. Once in a long while they visited the French towns of lower Canada spending a few weeks there in drunken revelry; but they were always in danger of being taken as outlaws. Reck- less, careless, lawless, openhearted, trusty, and jovial, they had the characteristics of the modern cowboys of the plains.
The licensed traders formed a more orderly class. At Quebec and Montreal they had headquarters, from which they carried their goods to the western posts in canoes. The Indian pony, a horse from Normandy, was soon brought in for a pack horse; still later Canadian carts were used at such portages as Niagara and Ft. Wayne, but never for long journeys. Very little record was left of this period of our history. Rarely could more than one man of a party or at a post write, and all his time was taken in listing furs and keeping accounts.
§ 4 MIAMI INDIANS
REFERENCE has been made heretofore to the Indians inhabitating the soil of what is now Indiana. It is of course impossible to gather enough data to write a satis- factory account of the Miamis or any other of the western tribes in the seventeenth century. A short account, how- ever, will give some idea of the location, numbers and char- acteristics of these forest folk.
In 1658, Gabriel Dreuillettes, then stationed at the mission of St. Michael on the west shore of Lake Michigan, reported that the Miamis, evidently the whole nation, for they numbered according to his estimate eight thousand men or twenty-four thousand souls, were in the southwest corner of what is now the State of Michigan. This is in harmony with other reports which go to show that the val- ley of the St. Joseph of the Lakes was one of their favorite homes.
The Iroquois of New York seem to have invaded the
11
THE FRENCH IN INDIANA
western country, what is now Indiana and Illinois, about 1670 and caused a panic among the native tribes. They had succeeded in getting firearms from the Dutch at New York about 1630. During the next forty years they waged incessant and victorious war on all their neighbors, almost exterminating the New England tribes on the east, the Dela- wares on the south, the Eries on the west, and the Hurons on the north and northwest. With these tribes subdued they led their war parties farther to the west and attacked the Miamis and the Illinois on the prairies. For this reason, presumably, the Miamis next appear in history west of Lake Michigan.
In 1670 Claude Allouez, then stationed at Green Bay, reported a Miami village a day's journey in the interior from that mission. At the same time another band was living near the Illinois towns down on the Illinois river.
The same year, Allouez made a trip to central Wisconsin where, mingling with the Foxes and the Mascoutins, he found what he took to be the whole Miami nation. The mis- sionary, Allouez, adds significantly that they were all in terror because a war party of Iroquois had swooped into the neighborhood recently and destroyed a Fox village.
Allouez was impressed with the general character of the Miamis. He called them gentle, affable, and sedate. Their language was in harmony with their dignity. They spoke slowly, manifesting great interest in what the Jesuit, Al- louez, had to say. Two years later, 1672, when Allouez re- turned to this station there yet remained ninety cabins of Miamis. The Jesuit relation of the same year also stated that the village near Green Bay still remained.
By 1674 Allouez had gathered a goodly colony of them at the mission of St. Francis Xavier on Green Bay. The missionaries invariably spoke well of the Miamis, praising especially their ability as hunters, and their faithfulness.
Jean de Lamberville, writing September 20, 1682, to Count Frontenac stated that the Iroquois had at that time a large number of Miami captives whom they would soon torture unless French intervention saved them. De Lam- berville also feared that an Iroquois army, twelve hundred
-
12
HISTORY OF INDIANA
strong, then forming, as the missionaries supposed, at the instigation of the English for an invasion of the Illinois country, would completely annihilate the Miamis and their neighbors the Siskakon and Ottawa tribes on the head- waters of the Maumee, on their return journey.
In 1680, as has been noted in the account of La Salle's exploration, the Iroquois attacked the Illinois with disas- trous results to the latter. There were many traditions of this Iroquois war handed down to the missionaries and traders among the western Indians. What battles were fought, what tragedies were enacted, what heroism dis- played, or what the final result was, can never now be known. One of these traditions, dear to the Miamis, was to the effect that a Miami chief having seen an army of Iroquois pass on its way to attack the Illinois at once dis- patched runners to all his villages and to the villages of all his kinsmen, summoning all to meet him, prepared for des- perate battle. With his tribesmen he formed an ambuscade on the banks of the Wabash and, as the Iroquois warriors returned, delirious with blood and plunder, fell upon them with such fury that only a few escaped. This battle was said to have been fought where Terre Haute now stands. The place was known among the Indians as the "Old Battle Ground."
Whether there is any truth in the tradition, or whether Miami ingenuity contrived it to hide the shame of their submission to the Iroquois, the fact is beyond question that the Miamis were back on their old hunting grounds in northeastern Indiana and western Ohio about the year 1700. By this time they had secured firearms from the French and English and it is possible that in this tradition- ary battle in which they handled the Iroquois so roughly they fought with firearms on equal terms.3
Gen. William H. Harrison, who was well acquainted with the western Indians, said the Miamis occupied all of Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin south of the Fox and Wis- consin rivers, and Ohio east of the Scioto. He thought them
3 Jesuit Relations, index "Miamis"; Lewis H. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 14; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, index.
THE FRENCH IN INDIANA
13
Lake Superior
St. Esprit 1665
St. Marie 7.668
Lake Huron
Ft /Michilimackinac 1669
St. Xavier 1669
Lake Michigan
Detroit 1701
Lake Erie Presque Isle 1759
Ft. Miami 1679
@Ft. St. Louis 1682 "Ft. Crevecoeur 1679
Fort Pitt 1751
Cuitenon 1732
Cahokia 1700 Ft. Chartres 1720/ Kaskaskia. 1695
Vincennes 1732
1
Forta erected by the French before the opening of the French and Indian War
THE FRENCH EXPLORERS. BY E. V. SHOCKLEY.
14
HISTORY OF INDIANA
the most powerful confederacy of Indians in America.4 He did not think they had ever submitted to the Iroquois.
§ 5 THE FIRST SETTLEMENT IN INDIANA
AROUND this difficult question a local literature has grown up. The difficulty seems destined to remain without final solution. As Joliet floated down the Missisippi in the summer of 1673 he noted the mouth of the Ohio, river, giving to the stream the Indian name "Ouabouskigou," evidently the same name which we write Wabash. This was, no doubt, the first sight of the mouth of the Ohio had by a civilized man. That it was then called the Wabash is significant.5 Marquette, who, as a missionary, accompanied Joliet on this voyage of discovery was attracted by the Illi- nois Indians and in the autumn of 1674 returned to found a mission among them in the vicinity of the site of Chicago. He was detained by illness and did not reach the Indian village of Kaskaskia until the following spring. His health was fast failing and he started to return to St. Ignace at the outlet of Lake Michigan but died somewhere on the east shore of the lake. Effort has been made to prove that Mar- quette crossed by the Kankakee-St. Joseph portage on his return journey toward St. Ignace but there is no evidence on the point and it must remain for the present pure con- jecture.6
There is good reason to believe, however, that the St. Joseph-Kankakee portage had been used before La Salle's voyage. It would have been a strange proceeding for La Salle to lay all his plans to cross by this route had he not known of its possibilities. The inference is that Claude Allouez, founder of the missions at St. Marie and Green Bay, had used this portage in his visits to the Illinois, Potto- wattomie, and Miami Indians.7
4 William Henry Harrison, Aborigines of the Ohio Valley, 23.'
5 Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, IV, 178.
6 Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, IV, 220; George A. Baker, The St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage, 23; John Gilmary Shea, Dis- covery and Exploration of the Mississippi, 57.
7 Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, 26.
15
THE FRENCH IN INDIANA
In the fall of 1700, Gravier, then on a hunting trip with the Kaskaskia Indians, stopped at the mouth of the Ohio river. The main stream he called the Wabash. It was formed, he observed, of three rivers, the Wabash proper, which came from the country of the Miamis; the Ohio, which came from the lands of the Iroquois; and the branch " from the southeast, which flowed from the land of the Shawnees who traded with the English. These remarks show that the Jesuits had an accurate general idea of the Ohio Valley.8
The next notice of the Ohio river has nothing to do directly with the history of Indiana though it has given rise, through a misunderstanding, to a great deal of contro- versy. Charles Juchereau de St. Denis, in the autumn of 1702, established a trading post and tannery on the lower Ohio, perhaps where Fort Massac was later built. The purpose was to overawe the English traders on the Ohio. Father Mermet accompanied Juchereau from Kaskaskia. The site of Juchereau's post was unhealthful and it was found impossible to keep the Indians there. The com- mandant himself died two years later at which time the post was abandoned. It was only a temporary post and all trace of it was soon gone. The earlier historians of the West were confused by the Jesuit relations calling this "la poste sur la Vabache." It was thought to refer to the founding of "Au Poste" or Vincennes.9 The French were driven away by the hostile Miamis.10
By this time a peace had been patched up between the Seneca Indians, an Iroquois tribe, and their western neigh- bors. The Miamis were again settled in Indiana and north- western Ohio. The Shawnees had returned to Ohio from their fastnesses in the mountains of Kentucky and Tennes- see and fur traders were visiting regularly the tribes on the Indiana streams. A keen rivalry soon sprang up between the English and Dutch on the one hand and the French on the other.
8 Winsor, Mississippi Basin, 61.
9 The Jesuit Relations, LXV, 268; LXVI, 39.
10 Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, 70.
16
HISTORY OF INDIANA
During the closing years of the seventeenth century the Miamis, Ouiatanons, and other smaller tribes began settling, or resettling, in what is now Indiana. The reasons for this are not plain. Besides the tradition concerning a defeat of the Iroquois, it may be suggested that the founding of Detroit in 1701, the presence of at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 armed Frenchmen in and around Detroit,11 the effort of the English to prevent the westward forays of the Iro- quois which were preventing English traders from enjoying the patronage of the northwestern Indians, and an inter- tribal war all influenced the Miamis and their kinsmen to return to the eastward.
At first these tribes gathered in pretty close around De- troit. But as fear of the English and Iroquois diminished they moved farther and farther south. First on the St. Joseph of the Lakes in 1702; in 1712 they were down on the upper Maumee trading secretly with the English; and later they had ventured far down on the Wabash and the Scioto. The French soon realized their mistake in bringing the Miamis so far east, where they were falling under the control of the English. The policy of France in the west during the next forty years was dominated by the purpose of preventing the English from enjoying the trade with these Indiana and Ohio tribes. The expedition of Celoron Bienville down the Ohio, and the building of Fort Du- quesne on the site of Pittsburg were parts of the same general program. Sieur de Vincennes had been sent by Frontenac, governor general of Canada, as early as 1697 to command a post among the Miamis. The exact location of this post does not appear but most probably it was the one established by La Salle near the mouth of the St. Joseph in southwestern Michigan.
In 1704 Vaudreuil, who succeeded Frontenac in 1698, sent Vincennes again on a mission to the Miamis to prevent them, if possible, from attacking the Iroquois. The gov- ernor added that Captain Vincennes was "much beloved" by these Indians. He took with him some goods, six men, and two canoes. Several times, on later occasions, Vau-
11 Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York, IV, 701.
17
THE FRENCH IN INDIANA
dreuil sent Vincennes on missions to the Miamis. Finally in his communication of October 28, 1719, he stated that the Sieur de Vincennes had died at his post among the Miamis, where the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, now stands.
It seems that the Indians were on the point of mi- grating with Vincennes to the northern St. Joseph river but upon his death they refused to leave what they called their ancestral town of Kekionga.
In 1672 the Wea Indians were in central Wisconsin, gathered with their kinsmen around the mission of St. Jaques on the Fox river, under the care of Claude Allouez. They were at this time a small band.12 By 1710 they had returned to northern Indiana and were under the control of missionaries from Detroit.13 In an official report on the Indians of the Lake-Erie country, dated 1718, the agent said five villages of Ouiatanons or Weas dwelt on the Wa- bash. In language, customs, and dress they resembled the Miamis. They had a "fort" situated on a high hill from which one could see countless buffalos grazing on the prairie. These Indians had earned an enviable reputation among the traders for their cleanliness. They allowed no dirt or filth to remain on the floor of their "fort" which they kept sanded like the "Tuilleries." They had, at that time, over two leagues of cleared land where they raised corn, pumpkins and melons. The men numbered one thousand or twelve hundred, wore very little clothing, and played and danced incessantly.14
To keep the Iroquois out the French constructed a stockade at Ouiatanon on the north bank of the Wabash in . 1720. This was on the main western trail from Post Miami at the site of Fort Wayne.
Governor Vaudreuil was very apprehensive lest all the Miamis go to New York to trade, as eight or ten canoes had done the previous summer. In order to forestall this movement, the governor had decided to send Sieur Dubuis- son to take charge of the post at Ouiatanon. This was in
12 Jesuit Relations, LVIII, 23, 293.
13 Jesuit Relations, LXIX, 193.
14 Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York. IX. 891.
18
HISTORY OF INDIANA
the autumn of 1719. He wrote as if the post had already been established.15
The purpose of Dubuisson was to get the confidence of the Indians as soon as possible and lead them to the St. Joseph river, away from the Maumee-Wabash route, which seems to have been much frequented at that early day by English traders. On the St. Joseph of the Lakes the Indians would be under the control of the garrison and traders of Detroit.16
Dubuisson remained in command but a short time until he was relieved by Francois Morgane de Vincennes, thought to be the founder of Post Vincennes. He seems to have been a nephew of the Sieur de Vincennes who died at the post where Fort Wayne now stands. It is probable that Vincennes remained in command at Ouiatanon until he was called down the river to take charge of the post that has since borne his name. Ouiatanon remained an occupied post till its destruction by the Indians in Pontiac's War.17
In his report to the Lords of Trade May 24, 1765, Sir William Johnson, the British agent for the northern In- dians, stated that several French families of the worst sort lived at the Miami (Fort Wayne) and several at Ouiatanon, and, in short, at all the places where they formerly had had posts or trading houses.18 The same person writing in 1767, after Pontiac's war, complained that Ouiatanon had not been re-established as he had recommended. Its con- venient location in the neighborhood of several tribes, he observed, would make it a most convenient post for the traders.19
The best that can be done now in the matter of the first permanent settlement of Indiana is to give briefly the tes- timony of the Jesuit relations and other fugitive references
15 Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, 286.
16 Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York, IX, 894.
17 For references to the history of Quiatanon see Early Western Travels, index. The best single discussion of these early posts on the Wabash is by J. P. Dunn, Indiana, 41 seq.
18 Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, VII, 716.
19 Ibid, 973.
19
THE FRENCH IN INDIANA
of the French officers and traders. A more careful search- ing of the French records may yet bring to light satisfactory evidence as to the time and manner of its establishment. Such discovery is problematical and, if made, will be in the nature of an accident.
Nicholas Ignace de Beaubois took charge of the parish - of Kaskaskia, July, 1720. September 15, following, the Company of the Indies filed a petition with the government asking that a post be established on the Wabash. It seems, however, that no action was taken; for Charlevoix, writing November 8, 1721, after visiting the Illinois country, points out the great advantage a post on the Wabash would have. La Harpe, in 1724, and Boisbriant, the commandant at Chartres, wrote in 1725 as if no post had yet been estab- lished.
In the accounts of the colony of Louisiana for 1726 is the following item: At the Wabash, when it is established, one priest, 600 livres; for a servant 185 livres. De Beau- bois, then at Chartres, was especially urgent that a post be established in the direction of the Ohio, since all re- ports indicated that English traders were making deep inroads on the Indian trade in that quarter.
A list of the missionaries supported by the Company of the Indies, written by some clerk of the Company, or per- haps a monk, and dated November 21, 1728, included Pere d'Outrelay at the "Ouabache." A long struggle had been going on between the Capuchins and the Jesuits for the control of the missionary posts in Louisiana. Pere de Beaubois, who was no doubt the promoter of the mission at Vincennes, had in 1728 just been displaced by Pere Petit. Most of Beaubois' papers are, unfortunately, lost.
A letter from the Company of the Indies to the governor of Louisiana, M. Perier, September 30, 1726, directed the latter to furnish eight or ten soldiers to Sieur de Vincennes in order to found a post on the lower Wabash. Sieur de Vincennes was then at Quiatanon, the post among the Weas.
Etienne d'Outrelay, a Jesuit who spent twenty years in
20
HISTORY OF INDIANA
the Mississippi Valley, returning to France in 1747, is men- tioned as having been at the fort on the Wabash in 1728.20
A memorandum by M. de St. Denis, commandant at Nachitoches, dated November 30, 1731, stated that the Way bash post had always been neglected, that it guarded the only avenue by which the English could attack Louisiana, and that he would favor a station there with 400 men rather than one with 300, as seems to have been intended. The commandant, he added, should receive 800 livres. This latter allowance Maurepas, the royal minister, had also fixed upon.
Finally the letters of M. de Vincennes to the governor, dated March 7, 1733, and March 21, 1733, leave no doubt that a permanent post had been established before that date, at a point eighty leagues up the Wabash from its mouth. The date of the founding of the post, he left in obscurity. The position, he wrote, was well suited to the establishment of a large post, and he would have established one had he had the necessary troops. There had never been so great a need of troops during the three years of his stay at the post as there was at that time. The Illinois and the Miami were growing insolent, due no doubt to the contact with the English. The fortifications had been begun three years previous but nothing much had been done toward their completion. There was a stockade with two houses enclosed. The immediate construction of a guard house and barracks for the soldiers was recommended. Without more troops it would be impossible for him to remain there longer. The post, in his opinion, needed thirty men and an officer. The garrison consisted of ten men, and the "fort" was not large enough to accommodate even that number. There were evidently some French settlers around the post, since in the second letter the writer said the Chickasaws had, during the previous fall, killed six Frenchmen who lived at the Wabash.
That the dominating motive in the establishment of the post was the protection of the fur trade is evident from the tone of the correspondence. "It is possible," observed Sieur
20 Jesuit Relations, LXVII. 342, note.
21
THE FRENCH IN INDIANA
de Vincennes, "to send out from this post every year about 30,000 skins. That, Monsieur, is all the skins that can be secured for the present." The commandant was accustomed to borrow large sums of money from the voyageurs who frequented the place. There is evidence to show that quite a large number of these independent traders were then on the Wabash and its branches and doubtless they had other stockade posts in what is now Indiana.21
Louis Vivier was stationed there as a Jesuit missionary, 1754-1756.22 Francais Philibert Watrin, writing from Paris, September 3, 1764, said the "post called Vincennes or Saint Ange, from the names of the officers who com- manded there," was about eighty leagues from Kaskaskia and about seventy leagues up the Wabash from its mouth. He says nothing about its founding or its founders, unless we should infer that since he named two commanders he would have named them had there been others. Winsor thought the post Vincennes was known among the fur traders as early as 1722.23
These Indiana posts, excepting Vincennes, never came to be real settlements. For a while Ouiatanon remained the most important fur-trading and missionary post on the Wa- bash; but its importance diminished after eight or ten years. The old French post at Kekionga, or as it was usually called Fort Miami, if any fort was ever built, dis- appeared entirely, later, but Vincennes maintained its ex- istence unbroken.
The dates of the first settlement of these places will, from the nature of the case, always remain uncertain. Each marks the location of an important Indian village. Fur traders made these places their temporary headquarters doubtless as early as 1700. Missionaries visited them as early or perhaps earlier. We do not even have the record of the first military stations established here. In 1736, a
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.