Before the ledger: the fur-trade inheritance

1700s — 1843

The first exports were furs: For a century before Fort Wayne kept books, goods moved out of this ground in one direction and trade goods moved in from the other. The Miami town at the head of the Maumee sat at the carrying place between the Wabash and Maumee waters, and the French, then the British, then the American traders who worked here shipped pelts — the 1848 canal ledger still lists 38,377 pounds of deer and coon skins, a residue of the older trade — down the Maumee to Lake Erie and on toward Montreal and the Atlantic, while cloth, iron and powder came back up. The fur record itself belongs to the Land and Tribes sections of this history and is not retold here. What the export record inherits from it is the shape of the place: a transfer point where a rich interior met a water road east, waiting only for a cargo bulkier than pelts. The canal supplied it.

Sources:

1. Land Treaties & Titles and The Miami & Native Nations — the portage and the fur trade in full, cross-referenced and not retold here.
2. The Wabash-Erie Canal (canal history, Allen County Public Library copy, Internet Archive) — the 1848 Fort Wayne station list, including the deer and coon skins of the older trade.
3. Charles Poinsatte, Outpost in the Wilderness — Fort Wayne, 1706–1828 (Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society, 1976) — Fort Wayne as "an important post in the defense of the Northwest Territory" that "also became a government outpost of diplomacy and trade."