Fort de Buade
Michigan
Twelve years after Marquette's mission at St. Ignace took root, the settlement had grown into a genuine community: a French village of a dozen cabins, a walled Huron town, and an adjacent Ottawa town. In sixteen eighty-three, the governor of New France ordered a military garrison built to protect it all and to hold the British back from the rich fur country of the Great Lakes.
The resulting fort was named Fort de Buade, for Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, who served as governor of New France. It stood for eighteen years, controlling the chokepoint where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron pour together at the Straits of Mackinac. When a new, more defensible fort was needed, the French moved across the straits to the southern shore in seventeen fifteen, establishing what became Fort Michilimackinac, in present-day Mackinaw City.
