Hat tip to Paul Sewick for this great map find!
You’ve really got to zoom into the original from the Burton Historical Collection to realize that Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac wasn’t just drawing Lake St. Clair, but Fort Pontchartrain and the three nearby Native American village settlement.
I sure appreciate these map. I infer that Cadillac called one settlement Village Hurons after the Native American tribe. A second seems to be Village Loups. I iwonder why he called it Wolf village. I can’t read the name of the third village on Cadillac’s map. This is a great map.
3rd village are Miami, but there was a 4th village of Ottawa on Belle Island, not labeled on this map.
The “wolf’s” were a subgroup of the Sac (Sauk) from Lake Michigan, where LaSalle had set up a trading post in the later 1600’s. Also there (St. Joseph river mouth area) were the Miami. Both tribes were run out of Michigan during the “Beaver Wars” by the Seneca/Iroquois who in the 1640’s got 400 muskets from Dutch Traders on the Hudson River in New York, and then launched a genocidal/slaving invasion of the Lake Erie and Lake Huron areas, depopulating both to expand their beaver trapping grounds. After the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, these tribes gradually became moving back to their old haunts. When word reached them that Cadillac was going to build a fort at Detroit, they took a chance to move there (at first mostly just young men to scout out the opportunities). A large Ottawa village was set up on Belle Isle (not labeled on this map) and the Miami settled near Grosse Point (the 3rd village on this map). The French called the Miami’s “Twightwees”/”Wea”. The Miami eventually resettled along the Maumee River (Miami River) upriver from Toledo because the corn farming was much better. The beaver trapping around Detroit wasn’t great, but the muskrat trapping was (Lake St. Clair marshes), and the fishing made the villages possible.
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