"This Tablet designates the site of one of the gateways of Fort Detroit. The original stockade was known as Fort Pontchartrain and was erected when the city was founded in 1701.
"Through the gateway here located Pontiac, the Ottawa chief, with a band of Indians, passed on May seventh, intending to surprise and massacre the garrison.
"The exposure of his plot on the previous day caused the defeat of his plans and gave the English the supremacy in this region until the close of the Revolutionary War."
[5] The Post-office on Fort Street, which occupies a portion of the site of this fort, displays at its southerly entrance a tablet erected in 1896 which bears the following inscription:
"This Tablet designates the site of an English Fort erected in 1778 by Major R.B. Lernoult as a defense against the Americans. It was subsequently called Fort Shelby, in honor of Gov. Isaac Shelby of Kentucky, and was demolished in 1826.
The evacuation of this Fort by the British at 12 o'clock noon, July 11th, 1796, was the closing act of the War of Independence.
On that day the American Flag was for the first time raised over this soil, all of what was then known as the Western Territory becoming at that time part of the Federal Union."
[6] The deed for the Island, bought from its Indian owners in 1781 by George III. for £5000, was long in possession of Dr. John R. Bailey, Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel U.S.V., and author of a most interesting monograph on Mackinac. It is from its pages, and by his kind permission, that the Indian signatures to the document are here reproduced.
[7] For an admirable statement of the facts bearing upon this interesting problem, the reader is asked to turn to My Notebook of the French Revolution, by Mrs. Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer (A.C. McClurg & Co.). The book upon which Mrs. Latimer has chiefly based her account, The Lost Prince, by the Rev. Mr. Hanson, has long been out of print, and is almost inaccessible.
[8] La Salle, in drawing his maps, made the Ouabache to empty into the Mississippi at Cairo, According to him the Oyo (Ohio) was a tributary of the Ouabache. About 1702, one, M. Juchereau, sent to establish a post for the protection of the traders in peltries, reported that he had established a post about forty leagues above the mouth of the Ouabache. Some writers have taken that to mean Vincennes, and it is so recorded in some of the encyclopædias, but his post was on what is now called the Ohio, and not on the Wabash.
[9] Clark began at once to organize an expedition against Detroit, but it never started. Francis Vigo, who had let Clark have provisions and money for his expedition against Vincennes, aided in like manner in fitting out the new expedition, lending money to the amount of $8616, for which Clark gave him an order on Virginia. The order was never honored, and an appeal was made to Congress. Finally, in 1872, nearly a century after the debt was contracted, and nearly thirty-seven years after Vigo had died in extreme poverty, Congress referred the matter to the Court of Claims, which four years later allowed the claim, together with more than $41,000 in interest.
[10] Among the Sacs, "Checagau" was the name of one of their valiant warriors and colonizers, and meant "He that stands by the tree." Among the several tribes of the Algonquin group "Chekago," "Chicagong," etc., was pronounced in a variety of ways and had as many meanings.