Cadillac at the Straits, The French Founding of Detroit, Seventeen Oh One

On July twenty-fourth, seventeen oh one, a forty-three-year-old French officer named Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac stepped ashore on the north bank of a narrow river connecting Lake Erie to Lake Huron, drove a stake into the ground, and declared the spot Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit. Détroit was the French word for strait, the waterway. Cadillac had spent years lobbying Versailles for permission to build a permanent French settlement here, arguing that this chokepoint, where the entire flow of the upper Great Lakes squeezed through a passage barely half a mile wide, was the most strategically essential point on the continent.

He was not wrong. Cadillac brought with him roughly one hundred soldiers, artisans, and settlers, along with his wife, Marie-Thérèse, who was among the first European women in the interior of the continent. The garrison they built was modest, a wooden palisade fort with a church and a few dozen structures inside.

But its location was everything. For the previous sixty years, France had built a network of fur-trade relationships with the Anishinaabe and other Great Lakes peoples. Coureurs des bois, unlicensed French traders, had been ranging deep into the interior since the sixteen thirties, learning languages, intermarrying, building the reciprocal alliances that gave New France its character.

Detroit was meant to anchor this system, a fixed hub in an otherwise mobile continental trade. Cadillac actively invited Native nations to settle near the fort. At various times, Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Wyandot, and Miami villages stood within sight of the French palisade, making Detroit one of the most ethnically complex places in North America for the first century of its existence.

France held the straits for fifty-nine years. In seventeen sixty, a British force under Major Robert Rogers arrived at the fort as part of the transfer of New France to Britain following the Seven Years War. The French commandant handed over the keys without a fight.

The fur trade, the Anishinaabe alliances, and the Franco-Indigenous social world they had built would outlast the flag change by decades, but a new chapter had begun.