[87] Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, avec le journal historique d'un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l'Amérique septentrionale, letters of September 14 and 17, 1721.
There is abundant evidence in the sources pertaining to the operations of the French in the Northwest that they had no fort at Chicago after 1721. In connection with the Fox wars numerous campaigns were waged in which the Chicago garrison, if there had been such, would have participated. Yet no such force is ever mentioned, and some of the sources make it positively evident that there was neither garrison nor fort here. In 1727 the holding of a great conference with the Foxes the following year at Starved Rock or Chicago was proposed.[88] If this were done it was deemed necessary for the French to be first on the spot appointed for the rendezvous "to erect a fort" and otherwise prepare for the council. The project never materialized, however, and so the fort was not built. In 1730, when the French succeeded in trapping and destroying a large band of the Foxes in the vicinity of Starved Rock,[89] parties came to the scene of conflict from many directions—from Ouiatanon, St. Joseph, Fort Chartres, and elsewhere; but none came from Chicago, although it was nearer the scene than any of the places from which the French forces did come—obviously because there was no garrison at Chicago. In the early winter of 1731-32 a Huron-Iroquois war party passed from Detroit to St. Joseph and thence around the southern end of Lake Michigan and on into Wisconsin to attack the Foxes.[90] The party paused at Chicago long enough to build a fort in which to leave their sick. This "fort" was evidently a temporary Indian shelter, but it is also evident that if an ungarrisoned French fort had been standing here, the construction of such a shelter would have been unnecessary. An official list of the commanders of the various western posts a dozen years later is preserved in the French colonial archives.[91] The posts at Detroit, Mackinac, Green Bay, St. Joseph, Ouiatanon, and elsewhere are mentioned, but the name of Chicago is not included in the list. Finally an exhaustive memoir upon the posts and trade of the interior of the continent by Bougainville in 1757 includes no mention of a post at Chicago, although the neighboring posts which are known to have existed at this time receive careful attention.[92]
[88] Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 3-6.
[89] Ibid., 109-20.
[90] Ibid., 148-50.
[91] Ibid., 432-33.
[92] Ibid., XVIII, 167 ff.
It is evident, then, that the French had no fort at Chicago during the eighteenth century. Did they have one here at any time during the seventeenth? Two exceptions to the proposition that La Salle and Tonty make no mention of such a fort have been noted. In a letter written from the Chicago Portage, June 4, 1683, La Salle[93] speaks of a "fort" here, built by two of his men the preceding winter. This structure Mason describes as a "little stockade with a log house within its enclosure,"[94] and declares it to have been the first known structure of anything like a permanent character at Chicago. But a log hut constructed by two men and never garrisoned by any regular force hardly merits the designation of a fort in the ordinary acceptation of this term, even though it was surrounded by a stockade. Those who speak of a French fort at Chicago in this period refer not to this structure but to the "Fort of Chicagou" commanded by M. de la Durantaye in the winter of 1685-86.
[93] Margry, II, 317.
[94] Mason, Chapters from Illinois History, 144.