Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, MFR and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Outpost in the Wilderness: Fort Wayne, 1706-1828
Allen County, Fort Wayne Historical Society 1976
CHAPTER I The French and British Period Page 1
CHAPTER II The Establishment of Fort Wayne—Government Outpost of Defense, Diplomacy, and Trade Page 27
CHAPTER III The Impending Conflict Page 50
CHAPTER IV The Siege of Fort Wayne Page 63
CHAPTER V Evacuation of the Fort and the Increased Indian Trade Page 79
CHAPTER VI Platting of Fort Wayne and the First Local Government Page 94
CHAPTER VII The Treaty of 1826 and the Removal of the Indian Agency Page 99
APPENDIX Bibliography Page 106 Index Page 111
There was a time when the writer of local history and the academic professional were two different people; indeed, one is almost tempted to say, they were two different species. Fortunately for both, this is no longer true. Many academic historians now recognize local units as the fundamental units of historical study, presenting hard data in manageable quantities for precise conclusions. Charles R. Poinsatte was among the first to recognize this and merge the academic and local traditions of historical writing, the one supplying rigor and judgments based on cosmopolitan learning, and the other supplying the vividness and appeal of the familiar and relevant.
On the academic side, Charles R. Poinsatte got his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. Thomas T. McAvoy schooled him to precision in judgment and exhaustiveness in research. Poinsatte also had the good fortune to study under Aaron I. Abell, a student of Arthur Schlesinger, Senior, whose 1933 book, _The Rise of the City, 1878-1898_, initiated a new kind of American history. Professor Abell first got Poinsatte interested in what is now called urban history. In fact, however, Poinsatte’s career embodies still another great tradition in American historiography, that of frontier history as inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner. _Frontier Outpost_ describes the _site_ of an urban area to be, but it is not truly urban history, as Dr. Poinsatte’s book, _Fort Wayne during the Canal Era, 1828-1855_ (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1969), was. Thus Dr. Poinsatte writes in this book of Fort Wayne as an aspect principally of the history of the Old Northwest.