Fort Crevecœur was the fourth in La Salle’s comprehensive scheme of a chain of fortifications to extend from Quebec, the centre of French power, up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes, across the portage country which lay between the western lakes and the headwaters of the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi and then down the Mississippi to its mouth, thus hemming in the English to their coast possessions east of the Appalachian range, and ensuring the vast major part of the American continent to the French. The other three of La Salle’s fortifications at this date were Fort Frontenac, now Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Fort Niagara, commanding the passage from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, and Detroit, commanding the passage from Erie to Michigan.
The foundation of the city of Detroit thus needs no further pointing out. Where La Salle’s tentative fortifications were the city now presents a busy water-front, with steamers and factories and great buildings where Indian canoes and the palisades of the French once were.
Developments of this plan of La Salle’s, which was adhered to tenaciously by the French for almost a century, until they fell before the slow-growing mass of the English, were Michillimackinac and a chain of posts along the Ohio River. Of this Ohio series the most important element was the much fought over Fort Duquesne--the objective of Braddock’s fateful march--later Fort Pitt, and now the city of Pittsburgh.
Where Indian canoes and the palisades of the French were]
The visitor to Pittsburgh to-day will find on Fourth street, midway between the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, a little block-house, more correctly a redoubt, sixteen by fifteen feet in lateral dimensions and twenty-two feet high. The structure is constructed of brick covered with clapboards and with a layer of double logs, and contains thirty-six port-holes in two layers. This little block-house is all that remains to-day of Fort Pitt. It was built by Colonel Boquet in 1764 and was purchased by private parties in the early days of Pittsburgh. In 1894 the property was deeded by its owner of that generation, Mrs. Mary E. Schenley, of London, to the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and is maintained by this organization to-day for the benefit of the public.
