Fort La Baye and the Fur Trade Gateway
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
At the mouth of the Fox River, where it spills into the bay, French soldiers and traders established a permanent post by seventeen seventeen. Fort La Baye, also called Fort St. François at various points, sat at one of the most strategically valuable junctions in all of North America.
To the north lay Lake Michigan and the entire Great Lakes network. To the south, the Fox River climbed inland toward a short overland portage, and beyond that portage, the Wisconsin River ran all the way to the Mississippi. In practical terms, this bay was the front door to the continent's interior.
Fur traders paddled north from Green Bay laden with beaver and mink, bound for Montreal. They paddled south from Montreal with iron kettles, cloth, and firearms. Green Bay was where those two directions met.
The French held La Baye for decades, fighting repeated conflicts with the Fox Nation, the Meskwaki, who controlled the river route and repeatedly tried to cut off French access to interior tribes. The British took over after the French and Indian War in the early seventeen sixties. The Americans arrived in August of eighteen sixteen, when soldiers sailed into the bay and built Fort Howard on the ruins of the older fortifications, establishing what would become the nucleus of the city.
By the time the fur trade collapsed in the mid-eighteen hundreds, Green Bay had been continuously occupied by Euro-Americans for nearly a century and a half, a long run that few settlements in the interior could match. Its age as a city is one of the most under-told facts in the Midwest.
