Kekionga

Over their respective decades of influence from colonial times to after the American Revolution, French and Indian Wars, and the Northwest Indian Wars, the French, British and Americans all established trading posts and forts at the large village, originally known as Fort Miami, due to its key location on the portage connecting Lake Erie to the Wabash and Mississippi rivers.

Under Jean Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, the Canadiens established a trading post and fort, first at the St. Joseph River, and later at Kekionga.

[10] In a speech at the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Little Turtle called Kekionga "that glorious gate ... through which all the good words of our chiefs had to pass from the north to the south, and from the east to the west.

[11] There is strong tradition and evidence to support that a secret society of prominent Miami warriors periodically met at the Miamitown to burn a captive and eat their flesh.

British merchants, seeking to expand their economic base, convinced some Miami to travel East for trade, in violation of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

The following year, Pacanne emerged as the village chief when he spared the life of the captive Captain Thomas Morris and returned him to Detroit.

[15]In 1780 during the American Revolutionary War, Kekionga was sacked by a force of French colonials led by Colonel Augustin de La Balme, who planned to take Detroit from the British.

The Miami and the European-American traders of Kekionga remained economically tied to the British-held Fort Detroit, even after the British ceded all claims of the Northwest Territory to the new United States following the war in the Treaty of Paris (1783).

In 1790, the Canadian Governor Guy Carleton warned the government in London that the loss of Kekionga would result in grave economic hardships to Detroit.

They frequently talked with the chiefs Pacanne, Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Le Gris, as well as brothers James, George, and Simon Girty, who lived only three miles away.

[17] The new President of the United States George Washington, as early as 1784, had told Henry Knox that a strong U.S. post should be established at Kekionga.

The large Native American city was important to the British trade economy,[16] and protected a strategic portage between the Great Lakes Basin and Mississippi watershed.

[21] Major Ebenezer Denny, an officer with the US, drew a map of Kekionga in 1790, which showed a collection of eight distinct villages, surrounded by 500 acres of cornfields.

Several tolerable good log houses, said to have been occupied by British traders; a few pretty good gardens with some fruit trees and vast fields of corn in almost every direction.” The United States army burned some villages and food stores, but was forced to retreat after suffering high casualties in a series of battles with forces led by Little Turtle.

[20] In 1794, the American General Anthony Wayne led his well-trained Legion of the United States toward Kekionga, but turned and marched toward the British-held Fort Miami near modern-day Toledo, Ohio.