Fort Orleans (sometimes referred to Fort D'Orleans) was a French fort in colonial North America, the first fort built by any European forces on the Missouri River. It was built near the mouth of the Grand River near present-day Brunswick. Intended to be the linchpin in the vast New France empire stretching from Montreal to New Mexico, the fort was occupied from 1723–1726. It was the first multi-year European settlement in what is today the U.S. state of Missouri.
The fort was established in 1723 on the Missouri River by Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont. It was to be the Missouri River headquarters of the newly claimed Louisiana territory. Like the newly founded New Orleans, Louisiana, it was named for the Duke of Orléans.
De Bourgmont had commanded the French fort at Fort Detroit. In 1706 he and other soldiers deserted when criticized by Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac for his handling of a skirmish with attacking Ottawa (tribe) members. A French priest and soldier were killed by the Indians, and the French killed 30 Ottawa tribesmen.
While on the lam from French authorities, de Bourgmont lived with the Native Americans and explored the lower Missouri. He often traded in furs, although not authorized to do so. Catholic missionaries urged that he be arrested for indecency because of traveling with his Missouri wife and their children of mixed European and Native American ancestry. His base was the Missouri tribal village near where Fort Orleans was to be established.
In 1713 de Bourgmont wrote Exact Description of Louisiana, of Its Harbors, Lands and Rivers, and Names of the Indian Tribes That Occupy It, and the Commerce and Advantages to Be Derived Therefrom for the Establishment of a Colony. In 1714, he published an account following travels to the mouth of the Platte River, entitled The Route to Be Taken to Ascend the Missouri River. His descriptions and names of rivers, based on names of local tribes, were used by cartographer Guillaume Delisle for the first map of the region. Delisle used "Missouri" for the river rather than Pekitanoui, as the explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette had named it after they first viewed it in 1673.
In 1718 Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, founder of the Louisiana territory, said that instead of arresting Bourgmont, they should work with him. He recommended that Bourgmont receive the Cross of Saint Louis for service to France.
In 1720 Bourgmont and his son, along with a chief, traveled to France, where they were greeted as national heroes. His reputation was enhanced as news arrived that the Pawnee (who had been friendly with Bourgmont) had slaughtered the Villasur expedition near modern-day Columbus, Nebraska. This stopped the Spanish from establishing settlements in the Missouri River Valley.
Stock for the Mississippi Company rose in price based on forecasts of great riches in Louisiana. [1] Bourgmont was promised a title of nobility if he could build a fort and strike an alliance with the Native Americans to keep the Spanish out of the Missouri valley. Bourgmont stayed in Normandy for a time and married a woman in his hometown in 1721.
In 1722 he returned to New Orleans but was too sick to proceed on an expedition. In the meantime, funds in the Mississippi Company collapsed. He argued with his sponsors over whether a fort was necessary; he thought it more important to recruit Native Americans in alliances to unite to fight the Spanish, as he believed his mission had not changed. As ordered, he established the fort on November 9, 1723, to be garrisoned with 40 French soldiers. [2]
In 1724, Bourgmont traveled up the Missouri River to the Kaw village near Doniphan, Kansas with the objective of establishing friendly relations among the Indian tribes of the region and seeking a trade route to the Spanish colony in New Mexico. With a delegation of Indians from several tribes, he then ventured westward onto the Great Plains to visit their common enemy, the Padouca tribe, near Lyons, Kansas.
Bourgmont participated in a peace ceremony between the Padouca and the Missouri, Osage, Iowa, Pawnee, Oto, Kaw, and Omaha, wherein a ceremonial pipe was smoked to seal the agreement. The Indians whom Bourgmont called Padouca are believed by some to have been the people later known as Comanche but were more likely Apache. This was the first recorded French visit to them. [3]
In celebration, in 1725 Bourgmont escorted the chiefs of the tribes to Paris to show them the "glory of France", including Paris: the palaces at Château de Marly, Fontainebleau and Versailles; and to hunt on the royal preserve with Louis XV. Bourgmont returned to his home in Normandy and did not accompany the chiefs back to Missouri. He abandoned his Missouri wife and children.
The French abandoned Fort Orleans in 1726. One story says that when the garrison had been reduced to a contingent of eight soldiers, Native Americans attacked and burned it, killing all the troops. [4] Another story says it was merely abandoned.
1729 November 29. Natchez Indians attacked French settlements near present-day Natchez, Mississippi, killing more than 200 French colonists. Less than one year later 1730 September 9, A French army of 1,400 soldiers and its Indian allies massacred about 500 Fox Indians (including 300 women and children) as they tried to flee their besieged camp. [5]
Archeologists have not found evidence of the fort despite some promising starts, particularly south of the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark visited the area in June 1804 to seek the fort, but reported they found no trace of it. [6]
Three possible locations for the fort are: [7]
The Missouria or Missouri are a Native American tribe that originated in the Great Lakes region of what is now the United States before European contact. The tribe belongs to the Chiwere division of the Siouan language family, together with the Iowa and Otoe.
The Kaw Nation, Oklahoma is a federally recognized Native American tribe in Oklahoma and parts of Kansas. It comes from the central Midwestern United States. It has also been called the "People of the South wind", "People of water", Kansa, Kaza, Konza, Conza, Quans, Kosa, and Kasa. Their tribal language is Kansa, classified as a Siouan language.
The Kaskaskia were one of the indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands. They were one of about a dozen cognate tribes that made up the Illiniwek Confederation, also called the Illinois Confederation. Their longstanding homeland was in the Great Lakes region. Their first contact with Europeans reportedly occurred near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1667 at a Jesuit mission station.
The Illinois Country —sometimes referred to as Upper Louisiana —was a vast region of New France claimed in the 1600s in what is now the Midwestern United States. While those names generally referred to the entire Upper Mississippi River watershed, French colonial settlement was concentrated along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers in what is now the U.S. states of Illinois and Missouri, with outposts on the Wabash River in Indiana. Explored in 1673 from Green Bay to the Arkansas River by the Canadien expedition of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, the area was claimed by France. It was settled primarily from the Pays d'en Haut in the context of the fur trade, and in the establishment of missions from Canada by French Catholic religious orders. Over time, the fur trade took some French to the far reaches of the Rocky Mountains, especially along the branches of the broad Missouri River valley. The French name, Pays des Ilinois, means "Land of the Illinois [plural]" and is a reference to the Illinois Confederation, a group of related Algonquian native peoples.
Louisiana or French Louisiana was an administrative district of New France. In 1682 French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle erected a cross near the mouth of the Mississippi River and claimed the whole of the drainage basin of the Mississippi River in the name of King Louis XIV, naming it "Louisiana". This land area stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. The area was under French control from 1682 to 1762 and 1801 (nominally) to 1803.
René-Auguste Chouteau, Jr., also known as Auguste Chouteau, was the founder of St. Louis, Missouri, a successful fur trader and a politician. He and his partner had a monopoly for many years of fur trade with the large Osage tribe on the Missouri River. In addition, he had numerous business interests in St. Louis and was well-connected with the various rulers: French, Spanish and American.
Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet y Bosoist, 5th Baron of Carondelet, was a Spanish administrator of partial Burgundian descent in the employ of the Spanish Empire. He was a Knight of Malta.
Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit or Fort Detroit (1701–1796) was a fort established on the north bank of the Detroit River by the French officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac and the Italian Alphonse de Tonty in 1701. In the 18th century, French colonial settlements developed on both sides of the river, based on the fur trade, missions, and farms.
Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont was a French explorer who documented his travels on the Missouri and Platte rivers in North America and made the first European maps of these areas in the early 18th century. He wrote two accounts of his travels, which included descriptions of the Native American tribes he encountered. In 1723, he established Fort Orleans, the first European fort on the Missouri River, near the mouth of the Grand River, and present-day Brunswick, Missouri. In 1724, he led an expedition to the Great Plains of Kansas to establish trading relations with the Padouca.
Louisiana, or the Province of Louisiana, was a province of New Spain from 1762 to 1801 primarily located in the center of North America encompassing the western basin of the Mississippi River plus New Orleans. The area had originally been claimed and controlled by France, which had named it La Louisiane in honor of King Louis XIV in 1682. Spain secretly acquired the territory from France near the end of the Seven Years' War by the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762). The actual transfer of authority was a slow process, and after Spain finally attempted to fully replace French authorities in New Orleans in 1767, French residents staged an uprising which the new Spanish colonial governor did not suppress until 1769. Spain also took possession of the trading post of St. Louis and all of Upper Louisiana in the late 1760s, though there was little Spanish presence in the wide expanses of what they called the "Illinois Country".
The timeline of Kansas details past events that happened in what is present day Kansas. Located on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, the U.S. state of Kansas was the home of sedentary agrarian and hunter-gatherer Native American societies, many of whom hunted American bison. The region first appears in western history in the 16th century at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, when Spanish conquistadors explored the unknown land now known as Kansas. It was later explored by French fur trappers who traded with the Native Americans. It became part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In the 19th century, the first American explorers designated the area as the "Great American Desert."
The Saline River is a 397-mile-long (639 km) tributary of the Smoky Hill River in the central Great Plains of North America. The entire length of the river lies in the U.S. state of Kansas in the northwest part of the state. Its name comes from the French translation of its Native name Ne Miskua, referring to its salty content.
Claude Charles du Tisné led the first official French expedition to visit the Osage and the Wichita Indians in 1719 in what became known as Kansas in the present-day United States.
Louis Groston de Saint-Ange de Bellerive (1700–1774), was an officer in the French marine troops in New France.
The Dismal River culture refers to a set of cultural attributes first seen in the Dismal River area of Nebraska in the 1930s by archaeologists William Duncan Strong, Waldo Rudolph Wedel and A. T. Hill. Also known as Dismal River aspect and Dismal River complex, dated between 1650 and 1750 A.D., is different from other prehistoric Central Plains and Woodland traditions of the western Plains. The Dismal River people are believed to have spoken an Athabascan language and to have been part of the people later known to Europeans as the Apache.
French people have been present in the U.S. state of Nebraska since before it achieved statehood in 1867. The area was originally claimed by France in 1682 as part of La Louisiane, the extent of which was largely defined by the watershed of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Over the following centuries, explorers of French ethnicity, many of them French-Canadian, trapped, hunted, and established settlements and trading posts across much of the northern Great Plains, including the territory that would eventually become Nebraska, even in the period after France formally ceded its North American claims to Spain. During the 19th century, fur trading gave way to settlements and farming across the state, and French colonists and French-American migrants continued to operate businesses and build towns in Nebraska. Many of their descendants continue to live in the state.
The Colonial history of Missouri covers the French and Spanish exploration and colonization: 1673–1803, and ends with the American takeover through the Louisiana Purchase
The Gumbo Point Site is a Native American archaeological site in Saline County, Missouri, located near the Missouri River north of the city of Malta Bend. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1969.
Robert Groston de Saint-Ange was a French military officer and commandant in the Illinois Country of New France.
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