[7]: 668  In historic times, prominent local Indian groups who drove these people out were the Shawnee, Wabash, and the Miami tribe.

[citation needed] The French-Canadian settlers left what they considered hostile territory for Mobile (in present-day Alabama), then the capital of Louisiana.

The oldest European town in Indiana, Vincennes was officially established in 1732 as a second French fur trading post in this area.

The Compagnie des Indes commissioned a French officer, François-Marie Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, to build a post along the Wabash River to discourage local nations from trading with the English.

[9] Vincennes founded the new trading post near the meeting points of the Wabash and White rivers, and the overland Buffalo Trace.

[11] Because the Wabash post was so remote, however, Vincennes had a hard time getting trade supplies from Louisiana for the native nations, who were also being courted by English traders.

The boundary between the French colonies of Louisiana and Canada, although inexact in the first years of the settlement, was decreed in 1745 to run between Fort Ouiatenon (below the site of modern-day Lafayette, Indiana) and Vincennes.

[12] In 1736, during the French war with the Chickasaw nation, Vincennes was captured and burned at the stake near the present-day town of Fulton, Mississippi.

)[citation needed] On February 10, 1763, when New France was ceded to the British at the conclusion of the French and Indian War, Vincennes fell under the authority of Great Britain.

The population grew quickly in the years that followed, resulting in a unique culture of interdependent Native Americans, Canadien settlers and British traders.

In 1770 and 1772, Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of Britain's North American forces, received warnings that the residents of Vincennes were agitating against the Crown, and were inciting native tribes along the river trade routes to attack British traders.

Gage demurred while the residents responded to the charges against them, claiming to be "peaceful settlers, cultivating the land which His Most Christian Majesty [meaning the King of France] granted us."

The issue was resolved by Hillsborough's successor, Lord Dartmouth, who insisted to Gage that the residents were not lawless vagabonds, but British subjects whose rights were protected by the Crown.

[14] In 1778, residents at Poste Vincennes received word of the French alliance with the American Second Continental Congress from Father Pierre Gibault and Dr. Jean Laffont.

[citation needed] Lieutenant Colonel George R. Clark, Captain Leonard Helm, and others created a plan to capture the French forts that the British occupied after Louisiana was ceded.

[citation needed] The Italian merchant and Patriot Francis Vigo found Clark and informed the British presence at the fort.

George Rogers Clark recaptured Fort Sackville in the Battle of Vincennes without losing a single soldier.

In 1786, Captain John Hardin led a mounted Kentucky militia across the Ohio River and destroyed a friendly Piankeshaw town near Vincennes.

Finally, on July 15, 1786, the Wabash landed in forty-seven war canoes at Vincennes to drive the Americans back to Kentucky.

In response, Virginia governor Patrick Henry authorized George Rogers Clark to raise the Kentucky militia and mount an expedition against the warring tribes.

[16] The militia spent ten days in Vincennes before marching north along the Wabash, but men deserted by the hundreds.

Secure transport to and from Vincennes meant travelling with a large, armed party, whether over land or via the Wabash River.

The claims based on French sovereignty or individual deeds issued under it were eventually rejected by congress, because if there were such grants, they passed to the United States by the Treaty of Paris 1783.

In 1826, "A party of Shawnee Indians ... in men, women, and children, to 500, passed through this place [Vincennes] ... from their reservation at Wapaghkonetta, moving to the Mississippi.

"[24] Those who were pro-slavery tried to perform an end run around the Indiana constitution by putting in place indentured servitude under which slaves, in theory, appeared to be able earn their freedom.

Slavery was practiced in the 16th century, when the present-day state of Indiana was part of New France (1534–1763), by the French and Native Americans.

She won her freedom on November 6, 1821, when the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that servitude violated the state's 1816 Constitution.

[29] This was a landmark contract law case for indentured servants and foretold the end of forced labor in Indiana.

[31] Vincennes has a humid subtropical climate with hot summers and cool winters with heavy rainfall at times throughout much of the year.

The fourth and most recent Vincennes was a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1985 which was decommissioned and scrapped in 2005.