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 academicprofessional were two different people; indeed, one is almost tempted tosay, they were two different species. Fortunately for both, this is nolonger true. Many academic historians now recognize local units as thefundamental units of historical study, presenting hard data in manageablequantities for precise conclusions. Charles R. Poinsatte was amongthe first to recognize this and merge the academic and local traditions ofhistorical writing, the one supplying rigor and judgments based on cosmopolitanlearning, and the other supplying the vividness and appeal ofthe familiar and relevant.

On the academic side, Charles R. Poinsatte got his undergraduateand graduate education at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend.Thomas T. McAvoy schooled him to precision in judgment and exhaustivenessin research. Poinsatte also had the good fortune to study underAaron I. Abell, a student of Arthur Schlesinger, Senior, whose 1933book, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898, initiated a new kind of Americanhistory. Professor Abell first got Poinsatte interested in what is nowcalled urban history. In fact, however, Poinsatte’s career embodies stillanother great tradition in American historiography, that of frontier historyas inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner. Frontier Outpost describesthe 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 (IndianaHistorical Bureau, 1969), was. Thus Dr. Poinsatte writes in this book ofFort Wayne as an aspect principally of the history of the Old Northwest.

Higher education at Notre Dame, acquaintance with a student ofthe elder Schlesinger, and thoughts spurred by the Turner thesis are onlypart of the story, of course. The area Dr. Poinsatte decided to study wasFort Wayne and not Detroit or Chicago or Cincinnati. Here whatNathaniel Hawthorne called “a sort of home-feeling with

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