Fort Michilimackinac was originally established by the French in 1691 where the town of St. Ignace, Michigan now stands. It was continued there for six years and then removed to Detroit. In 1714 it was moved to the place which is now Mackinac City.  In 1759 all this upper lake country was taken over by the English and was occupied by them for a score of years.  This fort was merely a stockade of timbers and the English garrison felt very uneasy there when the American Revolution was in full progress.  This portion of the country known as Michilimackinac was at that time the envy of many nations; and great wealth and power were in this northern section to which Mackinac Island was the key.  The fortune of the fur industry was there and later was to be realized the value of the greatest copper and iron mines in the world, to say nothing of the vast forests.

After sufficient pressure was brought to bear orders were given for the fort to be removed to Mackinac Island.  Major Sinclair thought the island an excellent place for a fort with its advantageous position, its abundant forests, its wonderful water and its good harbor; consequently, in 1790 the fine block-houses were built, a government house and a few other buildings were erected and the English troops took possession.

   This new fort was declared as a part of our settlement at the close of the war but a settlement which the British were very slow in making, and their reluctance is not to be wondered at.

    When we think of the American Revolutionary War we think of Valley Forge, Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord and Yorktown.  Our thoughts automatically travel those sacred places in the east; we are not about to dwell upon Mackinac Island in Michigan.  And yet the giving over of  Mackinac Island to us by the British was the last act of the Revolutionary War and our final victory.

    We waited, however, for thirteen years before the transfer was made. The English were loath to surrender this jewel of the straits, and made use of every possible technicality to procrastinate and put off the day, when, at last, the Stars and Stripes should he seen floating front the old block‑house. But with his characteristic breadth of vision and pains‑taking detail, President Washington was not to let this slip nor be overlooked in any way.

    When the treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 and all this upper lake country was secured. Great Britain was supposed to withdraw her troops "with all convenient speed".  Washington promptly sent Baron von Steuben to Montreal to receive the forts from Gen. Haldimand; but the General made excuses that he had no orders from his government to hand them over.  Gen. Knox was sent on this errand, also Col. Hull, and our minister to England, John Adams, insisted on the terms of the treaty being immediately carried out-but to no avail.  Great Britain made excuses, and argued that the Americans had not carried out some details stipulated as their part in the treaty; and thus the case was unsettled for a long, long time.  It was not until another treaty came about, the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, that the forts were evacuated and turned over to the United States Government.  George Washington said in his address to Congress in December, 1796:

    "The period during the late session, at which the appropriation was passed for carrying into effect the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, between the United States and his Britannic Majesty, necessarily procrastinated the reception of the posts stipulated to be delivered, beyond the date assigned for that event."  He adds: "As soon, however, as the Governor General of Canada could be addressed with propriety on the subject, arrangements were cordially and promptly concluded for their evacuation and the United States took possession of them comprehending Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac and Ft. Miami."

    When the war of 1812 was upon us, just sixteen years after the British had given over the island with its splendid new block-houses to us, to recover them was one of the very first moves made by England.  The British landed unseen at three o'clock one morning on the northwest side of the island, known to this very day as British Landing.  They planted their cannon on higher ground than that occupied by the fort.  And with some Indian allies of the woods they firmly established themselves.  This was the situation at daybreak.  Our troops found themselves unprepared for resistance, for through some mistake or negligence which has never been determined upon, word had failed to reach the American Commandant that the United States and England were again at war.  Resistance being utterly useless the English flag was again raised at the fort.  This was the first stroke of the war and the fort was held by England until 1815 when by the Treaty of Ghent it again became ours and has remained so ever since.

    Mackinac Island has been voted by the Michigan Society D.A.R. as Michigan's most historic spot.

-Hazel Fenton Schermerhorn.

P.S. from Compatriot, John B. Horton, on 26 Feb 2004.

The Early Years

Fort St. Joseph originated as part of the French government's response to the Iroquois Wars of the late 17th century. The Governor General of New France, the Marquis de Denonville, wanted to strengthen French ties with the Miami Indians along the St. Joseph River to help alleviate the Iroquois threat to the French colony's western posts. To do so, the Crown granted the Jesuits a tract of land along the river to allow them to establish a mission to the Miamis, which was founded about 1684. In the fall of 1691, the governor general dispatched Ensign Augustin Legardeur de Courtemanche, apparently with a small force of soldiers, to build a military post near the mission.

Fort St. Joseph became the keystone of French control of the southern Lake Michigan region. Its site on the juncture of the Great Sauk Trail (a major east-west trade route) and the St. Joseph River was also near the Kankakee River portage, a link in the water route from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. The mission, fort and trading post, collectively termed Fort St. Joseph, served as a military, commercial and diplomatic center to influence and develop trade with the French-allied Indians. Its strategic location helped ensure the protection and growth of the fur trade by defending the area from English incursions.

After the French surrender at the close of the French and Indian War in 1760, Fort St. Joseph fell under English control. A detachment of thirteen or fourteen soldiers of the 60th Royal American regiment, commanded by Ensign Francis Schlosser, arrived in October 1761 to garrison the post. Young and inexperienced, Schlosser alienated both the French habitants and the Potawatomi at Fort St. Joseph. Pontiac's Rebellion erupted in the spring of 1763, and on May 2 the Potawatomi killed most of Schlosser's men. Schlosser himself and a few other soldiers were taken captive and later exchanged at Detroit for Indian prisoners held by the English. Fort St. Joseph was never re-garrisoned.

Revolutionary History

During the American Revolution, Louis Chevalier, an elderly French trader at Fort St. Joseph, served as a British agent, or "King's Man" and provided intelligence information to the British at Michilimackinac. In the summer of 1779, the commander at Michilimackinac, Major Arent Schuyler DePeyster, learned that George Rogers Clark was forming an expedition of 700 infantry and 200 cavalry in the Illinois country to attack Detroit.

Clark's force would pass near Fort St. Joseph, so DePeyster planned an ambush. In July 1779, he sent his second-in-command, Lt. Thomas Bennett, to Fort St. Joseph with a sergeant, a drummer, two corporals, fourteen privates, sixty French volunteers and canoemen, and two hundred Indians. Bennett was to gather intelligence information and intercept Clark's troops if they passed near the fort. DePeyster also sent the armed sloop Welcome to Fort St. Joseph with a cargo of provisions for Bennett's command.

Bennett arrived at Fort St. Joseph on July 23 and put his men to work digging entrenchments on the river bluff near the fort. While he waited at the fort, Bennett sent out a party under Corporal Gascon to capture Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, a black French trader on the River Du Chemin who Bennett believed to harbor anti-British sympathies. Gascon returned with the prisoner, having "commanded the Party very prudently." On August 13, Charles de Langlade, a French trader in the British service, arrived at Fort St. Joseph with a party of 21 Canadians and 60 Ojibwa. Bennett had seen no sign of Clark's expedition, and was faced with dwindling supplies and discontented Indians who would only remain with him if supplied with kegs of rum. In mid-August, he set off with his expedition on the long return trip to Michilimackinac. As it turned out, George Rogers Clark had learned of Bennett's expedition and planned to launch an attack on Fort St. Joseph, but his plans were thwarted by inadequate supplies.

In June 1780, Patrick Sinclair, who had replaced DePeyster at Michilimackinac, decided to remove the French habitants, a "lawless strange class of people" from Fort St. Joseph. The post thereafter continued in use by British traders who had stockpiled a large quantity of trade goods there. DePeyster, then at Detroit, appointed Lt. Dagneau De Quindre, a former officer in the French army, to act as an English representative among the St. Joseph River Potawatomi.

In late 1780, a French officer, Augustin de la Balme, sent a force of sixteen Cahokians commanded by Jean Baptiste Hamelin to raid Fort St. Joseph. Hamelin reached the fort in December while De Quindre was away and almost all the Indians were out on the first hunt of the winter, so Hamelin met with no resistance. He captured the British traders he found, loaded his pack horses with fifty bales of goods and headed for the Chicago River. When De Quindre learned of the raid he hastily assembled the Indians and set off in pursuit. On December 6, 1780, he caught Hamelin's men near the Calumet River and called on them to surrender. Hamelin refused. De Quindre urged his Indians to attack, and in the ensuing skirmish they killed four of Hamelin's men, wounded two and captured seven more. Only three survivors escaped into the woods.

In late 1780, Frenchmen and Indians intent on plundering English goods and avenging property losses suffered in English raids in the St. Louis area, approached the Spanish governor at St. Louis, Francisco Cruzat, and demanded that he authorize and equip an expeditionary force to attack Fort St. Joseph. Cruzat himself feared an English attack the following spring. He hoped that a successful raid on Fort St. Joseph would diminish both English influence and supplies among the Indians and serve to demonstrate Spanish strength. He therefore approved the expedition.

On January 2, 1781, Captain Eugene Poure and sub-lieutenant Charles Tayon set out from St. Louis with sixty-five militiamen and sixty Indians. Louis Chevalier, Jr., son of the elderly trader, accompanied them as interpreter. Along the way, they picked up twelve more militiamen under Jean Baptiste Mailliet, who had been stationed on the Illinois River. On February 12, 1781, they took Fort St. Joseph by surprise. De Quindre was away and the Potawatomi promised to remain neutral in exchange for a share of the loot. Poure took the fort's inhabitants prisoner, raised the flag of Spain, claimed the region for the king of Spain, and left the next day for St. Louis. During peace negotiations preceding the end of the American Revolution, Spain used Poure's proclamation to claim (unsuccessfully) territory east of the Mississippi River. The "Spanish Raid" is generally regarded as concluding Fort St. Joseph's history. American settlers arrived in the St. Joseph River valley in the 1820s and founded the village of Niles, Michigan, near the site of Fort St. Joseph in 1829. The fort was virtually forgotten, but during the 1890s several men "pothunted" the site and accumulated a remarkable collection of artifacts. Most of their artifact collection eventually found its way into the Fort St. Joseph Museum.

                    - Robert C. Myers

French explorers, looking for a passage to China through the unexplored North American continent, visited what is now Michigan in the early 1600s. The native people gave the visitors some much-needed assistance during their journeys, building and navigating canoes, protecting and teaching them about the environment, and helping them forage and hunt for food. The Indians also traded animal furs for guns, powder, ammunition and other tools that moved their culture into the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1679, the French explorer Robert Cavelier de la Salle and French missionary Père Louis Hennepin entered a body of water while sailing on the Griffon up from Lake Erie on what is now the Detroit River. The date was 12 August 1679, which was the day of the religious festival of Sainte-Claire, who founded the order of Franciscan nuns in the 13th century. Ste.-Claire was a contemporary and friend of St. Francis of Assisi. Père (Father) Hennepin held a mass, during which the newly-discovered lake was given the name Lac Sainte-Claire. In time, the river leading north out of Lac Sainte-Claire, the county that developed along it, and a city on the river all took the same name St. Clair. (The name was often spelled St. Clare in English in the 1700s, but most mapmakers had settled on the current spelling by 1840.)

The profits being realized by the French traders prompted British traders from New-York and Hudson's Bay to try to get a share of the business themselves. In response, French governeur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac established Fort Ponchartrain and the Détroit settlement in 1701. (The name Detroit comes from the French d'étroit, meaning "at the narrows.") The French and British fought four wars, primarily over the valuable fur trade in the Great Lakes regions, ending with the eventual withdrawal of the French from Forts Pontchartrain, St.-Joseph in western Michigan, and Mackinac in northern Michigan.

The British garrisoned these forts, but some Indians, many followers of Chief Pontiac, attacked in hopes of returning their friends, the French, to power in the region. After the Seven Years War ended with a peace treaty in 1763, the native people learned to accept the British, who in turn realized the value of protecting the fur trade from encroaching settlers, much as the French had. The British built Fort Sinclair near the entrance to the St. Clare River at the southern end of Lake Huron in 1765. During British rule, little changed culturally: fur trading, farming, religion and place names remained mostly of Indian or French origin, and those two cultures influence would continue to be felt in Michigan well after the American nation was established.

During the Revolutionary War, what is now Michigan, then part of the British province of Québec, remained loyal to King George III. Although the popular view of the war of American independence is that George Washington's army defeated the British, in fact it was a war of attrition that the much better equipped British could have prolonged indefinitely. In the Great Lakes region, the British were superior in numbers, in fortifications, in supplies and in knowledge of the terrain, plus they had the Indians as their allies. But the king's military advisors told him the facts: while the Americans probably couldn't win, neither could the British. Tiring of the expensive war, King George gave in and granted independence to the 13 former colonies, although the British resisted giving up their Great Lakes forts until 1796