WAYNE, FORT

WAYNE, FORT, located at the joining of the St. Marys and St. Joseph Rivers to form the Maumee River in northeastern Indiana, was an important trade center for the Miami Indians from the 1600s on; they called it Kekionga. The French developed this strategic site into a military post called Fort Miami as early as the late 1680s, and it was occupied briefly by the British in the 1760s. American forces under General Anthony Wayne established Fort Wayne under the command of Colonel John F. Hamtramck on 22 October 1794. The Fort Wayne Indian Factory, a public trading post established at the site in 1802, increased its importance as a center of commerce between Indian fur trappers and American traders. The Treaty of Fort Wayne, signed at the post on 30 September 1809 by the United States and several Indian tribes, ceded about 2.5 million acres of present-day southern Indiana and Illinois to the United States in exchange for goods and annuities. Combined British and Indian forces besieged Fort Wayne during the War of 1812, and fighting continued through late 1813; after the war, Fort Wayne was decommissioned on 19 April 1819. A trading post and grist mill were built later that year, and on 22 October 1823 the U.S. Land Office sold off the rest of the land around the fort.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cayton, Andrew R. L. Frontier Indiana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Madison, James H. The Indiana Way: A State History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Rafert, Stewart. The Miami Indians of Indiana: A Persistent People, 1654–1994. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996.