Places: Fort Detroit

No vestige of this fort remains.  It's completely buried by the modern office complexes of Detroit, Michigan.  In its heyday, Fort Detroit covered the area between Larned Street, Griswold Street, and the Civic Center.  Even St. Anne's Church, the original Catholic parish of Detroit, is a building several generations removed from the structure that stood there in the 17th century.  But Fort Detroit played such a vital roll in frontier history that it deserves a post of its own.

The word Detroit is French for "strait" as in a naturally occurring canal connecting bodies of water between opposing land masses  The Detroit River, or Riviere du Detroit literally means the River of the Strait.  The Detroit River flows from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie.  It is one of the interconnecting rivers that form the Great Lakes system and, by extension the Missouri and Mississippi systems.  Like Fort William Henry and Fort Carillon/Ticonderoga, this location was prime for a strategic fort designed to guard this waterway, and facilitate trade both by water and overland. 

Enter Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac (yes, the car brand founded in Detroit bears his name), French explorer and future Governor of Louisiana.  He quickly realized the prime location of this area for both trade and defense, keeping the English from using the Great Lakes and Northwest Territories as a backdoor into Quebec, and to monopolize the trade with the Natives.  The full name of the outpost was Fort Ponchartrain du Detroit, in honor of a court official to Louis XIV.  Pontchartrain would later have a lake named for him in Louisiana, but that's another story.  The Fort's cumbersome French designation would be shortened to Fort Detroit and thus it would remain.  The original fort was a wooden stockade with bastions or towers for defense.  Soon after it was completed, Ottawa and Huron Natives moved nearby to take advantage of the ready supply of trade goods offered by French traders stopping off at the Fort.  The Fort became a hub in the lucrative beaver fur trade, and also played a role in the various inter-tribal wars as Natives competed for trading rights. 

Fort Detroit was too far from the main theatres of war in the Northeast during the French and Indian War (1755-1762) and did not see combat.  Nevertheless, it was claimed by the British and turned over to them in 1763.  British military officials (read Lord Jeffrey Amherst) did not believe in winning the Natives' loyalty with trade goods and clamped down on the fur trade, especially with regard to firearms, ammo and alcohol.  These and other repressive measures triggered Pontiac's Rebellion (1764), in which the Fort would see plenty of action as a forward military base.  Pontiac's forces laid siege to the fort, but ultimately failed to capture it. 

Fort Detroit would be far from the main battlefields of the Revolutionary War but would still have an active role to play in the frontier theatre.  British officials supplied arms and ammo to Native auxiliaries operating out of Fort Detroit, and men attached to the British Indian Department such as Simon Girty, Alexander McKee and Thomas Elliott would work closely with the tribes, sometimes leading war parties with the tacit permission, if not outright say-so, of the British garrison.  No wonder backcountry commanders wanted to take the fort for their own and put it out of business, but they would never get the chance.  Natives in the Ohio Valley and Northwest Territories jealously guarded their hunting ranges and thus approaches to the fort, which would have to be taken by a long siege.  The fort would not be taken by siege, but by treaty.  Both Jay's Treaty of 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville of 1795 specifically claim Fort Detroit for the United States. 

In 1805 the original Fort Detroit burned to the ground.  Rather than rebuild it, the Americans named another nearby fort after it.  The British briefly reoccupied this new fort during the War of 1812 but were forced to give it up soon enough.  The new Fort Detroit was abandoned after the War of 1812 and crumbled into ruin as the city built up, around and over it, blotting out all trace.