Second Fort from French to British

by Tom Castaldi

Have you ever taken the pleasant drive north on St. Joseph Boulevard along its name-sake river?  As you pass the intersection of St. Joseph Street, you are at the site of the second French fort of the mid 1700s once known as Fort St. Joseph.  French authorities in Quebec decided in 1750 that the old French outpost on the St. Mary's River two and a half miles west by river travel was no longer tenable.  The French built a new fort, called Fort St. Joseph, closer to the Miami settlement of Kekionga.  However, the French had lost the friendship of the local Indians of the region.  Now for a time, the natives’ allegiance was to the British and their more attractive trading centers in the territories of present-day Ohio.

Long a favored place among the American Indian tribes, the place that was to become Fort Wayne was at the western end of the Great Black Swamp and marked a principal passageway between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. When the Europeans first came among the Indian people of the Three Rivers, the newcomers also were attracted to the crossroads near the swamp which facilitated their travel and trade. Competition for the region was strong, evidenced by the flags that have waved over the land.

Captain Charles de Raimond, the French commandant, wrote to the governor of Canada, "my people are leaving me for Detroit nobody wants to stay here and have his throat cut."  The outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1755 led to the surrender of Fort St. Joseph to the British.  Down came the French banner and up went the British jack.  The fort was then occupied in 1760 by contingents of Roger's Rangers led by Lieutenant John Butler.  French power in the Old Northwest territories was ended and passed into British hands.

British relations with the Indians in its newly won territories quickly deteriorated in the face of arrogant traders and officials, broken promises, and withheld gifts.  The American Indians throughout the Great Lakes country united to drive out the British in the celebrated "Pontiac's Rising" of 1763.  Simultaneously, all the forts north of the Ohio River were attacked, and all but Detroit and Fort Pitt were taken.

At the old Fort St. Joseph, now renamed Fort Miami, an impending attack was signaled when three soldiers were killed by a Miami warrior outside the stockade gates on the night of May 25, 1763.  Ensign Robert Holmes, in charge of the small garrison, ordered the fort closed and prepared for siege.  Two English traders were captured that day by the Indians at Kekionga and witnessed what happened two days later when the fort fell.  A young Indian woman who lived with Commandant Holmes came to tell him that another woman lay seriously ill in a wiikiaami near the fort and urged him to come to her relief.  Having confidence in the young woman, Holmes came in sight of the large number of dwellings in the village when two muskets flashed and instantly killed the ensign.  The storyteller of the episode was shown Holmes' scalp the next day.

For the next thirty years, the Indians of Kekionga enjoyed the absence of a garrison.  During these years a large settlement of confederated tribes, centering on the Miami, emerged at the headwaters of the Maumee River, drawn together by the common hatred of the American intruders from the east. Defending their homes and fields, the Miami Confederacy, under Chief Little Turtle, struck back at the invading United States Army twice, once in 1790 and again in 1791, winning significant victories.  It would not last, however, because of the expansion of the new United States, which eventually overwhelmed the Indian people.  On October 22, 1794, another fort was erected in their midst called Fort Wayne.

Originally published in Fort Wayne Monthly “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi” January 2010, No 62

 Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail” which is broadcast Mondays on 89.1 fm WBOI; and “Historia Nostra” heard on Redeemer Radio 106.3 fm.  Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog “Our Stories” at historycenterfw.blogspot.com.

The Glorious Gate

by Nancy McCammon-Hansen

In the April, 1963 edition of the Old Fort News, there is a photo from “The Glorious Gate—A Calendar of Miami Moons”. This work was written by Bessie K. Roberts and contained 12 illustrations made by Mildred K. Walter, who had been an art teacher at Central High School.

Bessie Keeran Roberts was a sixth generation Hoosier whose roots were in Fort Wayne. A teacher, reporter and free-lance writer, she wrote a number of works about Fort Wayne history including “Fort Wayne Family Album”, which was hailed at its publication by Allan McMahan as “a definite historical need for the community in preserving for future citizens the stories of our Hoosier past”. 

She advocated for “history that the books sometimes miss” and believed that “even the trivial comment may spark the work of the earnest student viewing the scene from a long backward look.”

Roberts' calendar book “of Indian moons tells briefly the story of the period of Miami supremacy at “That Glorious Gate”. The Miami traditions come from word-of mouth accounts.”  

The months are labeled and we include a one or two line phrase from each month’s offering as well as a sampling of the art work.

January—Buck Moon

“In the moon when bucks drop their horns, and ground squirrels come out of their holes, there is time for the old man who tells stories to spend many hours within the lodge. The smell of venison cooking fills the air.”

February—Moon of the Crusted Snow

“How does the Old One know these tales? Belts and pipes illustrating his people’s history are kept in chest in their council house. Some of the belts were of the type made before the white man had come—of the small bones found in the legs of swans and other large birds, attached by means of a cord of wild nettle fiber. They were made with much labor and proudly wrought. Now of course they used wampum for speech and road belts—painted red as a token of war.”

March—Bear Cub Moon

“In council with the white man many moons before, it had been promised to their fathers that the land north of the Ohio should be forever theirs. This promise they have not forgotten.”

April—Raven Moon

“There was yet hope, Wayne believed, of compelling the haughty savages to sue for peace before the next opening of the leaves…..Chiefs and warriors rode fine horses back to their villages. While Wayne buried his gallant dead and named his new post Greenville.”

May—Crane Moon

“Little Turtle, the great Miami chief and warrior, counselled peace and was in that instant discredited before the warriors. For Little Turtle knew that all their incantations, leaves of red cedar dried, rubbed on the hands, and thrown to their manito, accompanied by a prayer, were in vain.”

June—Whippoorwill Moon

“At the confluence of the Maumee and Auglaize—the great gathering-place of the tribes—Wayne stopped long enough to build a stockade with four good blockhouses by way of bastions…The stockade was named Fort Defiance.”

July—Hilling Corn Moon

“A faint char now mars the peace pipe especially made of hand-carved birch wood from the northern forests. Its bowl of red catlinite was clamped with three red bands. And Little Turtle, the last to sign, will be the last to break this treaty.”

August—The Moon When the Corn is Fit to be Eaten

“As to your numbers”, he (Chief Little Turtle) said, “your increase is quite inconceivable. More than two lives, supposing eighty years to each, have not gone by since the whites first set foot among us, yet already they swarm like flies, while we, who have been here nobody knows how long, are still as thin as deer.”

September—Elk Moon

“Wells returned to his adopted people, to his Indian wife and their three young daughters. The long and happy association of the Chief and this white captive he had taken in Kentucky as a boy of fourteen, would continue. Ap A Con It, the Wild Carrot—Queen Anne’s Lace—they had named the red-haired youth.”

October—The Moon of the Narrow Fire

“From Baltimore the chief (Little Turtle) went directly to Washington to confer with President Thomas Jefferson, who sent letters to the Ohio legislature and to Congress relating to Indian affairs. Little Turtle and Captain Wells next visited the legislatures of Kentucky and Ohio, to continue their efforts to secure legislation against the sale of liquor to the Indians.”

November—Moon of the Running Deer

“Early in the morning of November 7, the Prophet urged his warriors on. The bullets of the white man, he chanted, would not hurt them. But this time his enchantment failed. The number of their killed was greater than in any previous military action of northern Indians.”

December--Young Buck Moon

“Here, close to a group of large trees, they left him (Little Turtle) to start on his journey to the village at the end of the long road where the Great Spirit dwells.” The year was 1812.

Whistler and the Last Two American Forts at the Three Rivers

Old Fort Wayne in 1797

by Tom Castaldi

John Whistler came to America as a British soldier in the Revolution, under the command of General John Burgoyne. He was captured, paroled and sent back to England. His elopement with Anna Bishop, daughter of Sir Edward Bishop, a close friend of his father, brought the young man and woman to America where they made their first home at Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1790.

The following year, after joining the army of the United States, John Whistler came west with General St. Clair’s army. He escaped after suffering severe wounds received at the “Wabash slaughter field” handed to the Americans by Little Turtle’s warriors at Fort Recovery. Back in Cincinnati at Fort Washington Whistler returned to receive a new assignment and was joined there by his wife.

When General Anthony Wayne’s army arrived, Whistler joined them on the march into northwest Ohio where he participated in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. After defeating the Indian confederation under the leadership of the Shawnee brave Blue Jacket, on August 20, 1794, Wayne moved his “Legion of the United States” up the Maumee River to the large American Indian settlement of Kekionga at the confluence of the Three Rivers.

Wayne ordered a fort to be built in 1794 on the high ground overlooking the confluence of the Saint Mary’s and Saint Joseph rivers and the Miami town of Kekionga. In 1798, Colonel Thomas Hunt began construction of a second American fort at the Three Rivers. This fort, near present-day East Main and Clay Streets, was completed in 1800 and served as a replacement for the first hastily built one erected nearby to the south by General Wayne.

The American forts at the Three Rivers came under attack only once during nearly a quarter-of-a-century while they guarded United States interests in the midst of Indian territory. In 1815, after having withstood a siege three years earlier, this stronghold was replaced under the direction of now Major John Whistler. By 1816, Whistler, the Fort’s Commandant, was transferred to a new assignment in Saint Louis, Missouri. The fort Whistler had rebuilt during 1815 and 1816 was the last in the Three Rivers region and on April 19, 1819, was abandoned by the U. S. Army.

After the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Whistler and his wife resided in the fort at Fort Wayne, and here, in 1800, George Washington Whistler was born, one of fifteen children. George became “Whistler’s Father” the father of James Abbott McNeill Whistler whose renowned oil on canvas, “Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother”, is known to the world as “Whistler’s Mother”.

The Indian Agency continued to operate in the fort after it was decommissioned by the government and the first school in Fort Wayne was established here by the Baptist missionary, Isaac McCoy, from 1820 to 1822. The land immediately around the fort was ceded to Allen County by an act of Congress in 1830 and it wasn’t until 1852 that the last building of the fort was demolished.

Originally published in Fort Wayne Magazine “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi” – January 2008 No. 39 Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com.