Fort Wayne
In December 1760 the officer holding Detroit explained why a lieutenant had gone to keep the post at the head of the Maumee through the winter. He gave three reasons in one sentence. In 1917 a Fort Wayne historian quoted it and changed the only part about this ground.
Michigan Historical Collections volume 19, page 47, scan leaf n60, via the Internet Archive.
Beyond Allen County
In August 1773 the Miami answered Sir William Johnson, and told his deputy that the mischief in the country came from the Six Nations, whom Johnson trusted most. Then they said what ten years of English possession had been worth to them.
Fort Wayne
A British force crossed the nine mile carrying place at the head of the Maumee in October 1778 and found the water beyond it too low to float the boats. What carried them down was a beaver dam, and the officer who cut it wrote down why nobody there touched the beaver.
Fort Wayne
A French colonel rode out of Ouiatanon in 1780 for one storehouse at the Miami town. Two men wrote down what happened to him within a month, one at Vincennes and one at Detroit. The county's four histories used neither, and worked from what old men remembered.
Fort Wayne
An English captain at the Miami town in 1781 could not read the accounts he was signing or follow the councils he was reporting, and leaned on one trader for both. That trader is why a French colonel rode four days across country to rob a single building at the forks.
Fort Wayne
Messengers came up to the Miami town in February 1781 with a speech on white wampum, inviting the Miami to change sides. A chief answered with four objects and every one of them was painted red, and then he stopped speaking and sang.
Fort Wayne
An old soldier who marched with Harmar wrote that a Miami chief was in the river that morning. Twenty-five years later the county's first historian put the same man on the bank, a boy of ten or twelve.
Fort Wayne
A private pleaded guilty to rioting in the public cornfield. Three men were then sworn, and what they said was not about the riot. The commanding officer punished the other man too, without charging him.
Fort Wayne
John Johnston named every man who owed the United States factory at Fort Wayne, down to a labourer owing $2.70½. The Indian debtors are one line with no name on it, owing nearly twice what the sixteen named men owed together.
Fort Wayne
In November 1806 the officer commanding at Chicago routed himself through Fort Wayne to see the contractor's agent about meat. He came away with nineteen poor beeves, and on his way back with nothing at all.
Fort Wayne
Three weeks after the siege was lifted, three officers were told to price the merchandise carried out of Fort Wayne against what it would have fetched in Lexington. It was then divided by regiment and issued to the men against their pay.
Fort Wayne
Word came to John Chapman that cattle had broken into one of his nurseries on the St. Joseph River. He went at once, lay down that night and did not get up again. By 5 April 1845 a notice in Fort Wayne called him late of Allen county, deceased.
Fort Wayne
On Christmas morning 1789 Henry Hay played his flute at mass in the Miami town. Through the same winter he wrote down the captives brought in across the river, among them John Witherington, whose wife and seven children were held by other parties.
Fort Wayne
On 22 October 1794 Hamtramck marched six companies into the new fort, fired fifteen rounds and named it. Two officers who were there wrote that down. In 1880 a county history quoted one of them to the day before, then wrote its own 22 October.
Fort Wayne
Four days after the fort was named, an order gave it to a man to keep. The same order offered twenty five dollars for information on soldiers robbing the country around it, and when Michigan printed it in 1904 its editor put the fort at Detroit.
Beyond Allen County
A Detroit trader's bill for two cows, ten bushels of corn and a hundred pounds of tobacco, furnished to Miami chiefs and dated 1 July 1791. The clerk's line at the foot says who settled it, and it was not the Crown.
Fort Wayne
At Greenville in July 1795 Anthony Wayne told the council that the ground where the St. Joseph meets the St. Mary's had been ceded to the French long ago. A Miami chief stood up and answered that nobody had ever sold it, and that one of the forts Wayne had traced was his own.
Fort Wayne
In December 1855 Daniel W. Burroughs caught his hand in his steam press. Six weeks later the paper across town reported that his Standard had stopped because of it. The county histories remembered a sale instead.
Fort Wayne
A woman buried outside consecrated ground in 1879, with no priest, and an old lady saying the Latin at the graveside. Her husband had killed her and himself. What the paper printed most of was the week two medical colleges spent acquiring three bodies.
Beyond Allen County
A railroad put a charge on every bushel a Lagro grain buyer loaded, then refused to set him cars. He raised a sunken canal boat out of the mud instead, and its captain moved wheat all summer on a canal that had stopped running.
Fort Wayne
Eight people came before the mayor of Fort Wayne on a Saturday morning in 1880. One of them lost ten dollars in a single sentence. The man charged with associating with her was tried for four days, and the paper reported that his friends congratulated him.
Fort Wayne
One Saturday morning in 1894 the Fort Wayne Sentinel printed five deaths under a standing heading, with funeral notices and the city undertakers' list of the week's dead. Three of the names appear twice in the column, with different ages and different causes.
Fort Wayne
A second telephone company opened in Fort Wayne in 1896 with six hundred subscribers and no franchise. Within two years the two were quarrelling in print, and for twenty years a business that wanted to be reachable printed two numbers.
Fort Wayne
Twenty-six years after the last boat, the towpath of the Wabash and Erie canal was in demand. Three Fort Wayne men owned a stretch of it, an interurban was being built on it, and the man who had held an option was appealing to the supreme court.
Fort Wayne
Fifteen men met in a hall in 1912 and named a club after an aqueduct that was no longer there. They found a hundred more of themselves and banqueted yearly, and in 1916 a contractor cutting a sewer through the old canal bed handed them pieces of it.
Fort Wayne
In 1913 two boyhood friends came back to Fort Wayne and asked William McMullen to show them the canal they had swum in. They walked Columbia street for two days and found nothing, and the Sentinel printed it as a joke with a cartoon.
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