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Fort Wayne's first government was not American, French or British. It was Miami. Kekionga, at the meeting of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers, was the capital of the Miami people (Myaamia) and the seat of their council house, where the tribe's official councils met. In a speech at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, the war chief Little Turtle called Kekionga "that glorious gate … through which all the good words of our chiefs had to pass from the north to the south, and from the east to the west." The town sat at the head of the Maumee beside the short portage to the Little River and the Wabash — the carry between Lake Erie and the Mississippi watershed — and whoever governed Kekionga governed the tolls, the trade and the diplomacy of that crossing.
Miami government ran through chiefs and councils, not ballots or commissions. Civil chiefs (akima) handled diplomacy, trade and the daily life of the villages; war chiefs led in the field; decisions were worked out in council. In the middle of the eighteenth century the principal civil chief at Kekionga was Cold Foot, who died in a smallpox epidemic in 1752. He was succeeded in influence by his nephew Pacanne (P'Koum-Kwa, c. 1737–1816), the leading Miami civil chief of the Revolutionary era. Pacanne's family, through his sister Tacumwah, controlled the Long Portage between the Maumee and the Wabash, and with it one of the great trading fortunes of the Old Northwest. Tacumwah herself is described in Miami terms as an akimaahkwia, a women's chief, who managed the village and the portage trade while her brother travelled on diplomacy; when Pacanne was absent, Kekionga was run by Tacumwah and her son, alongside chiefs such as Little Turtle and Le Gris, the chief of another Kekionga band.
Little Turtle (Mihšihkinaahkwa — the older spelling is Michikinikwa — c. 1747–1812) was a war chief of the Eel River Miami who became the military leader of the Miami and Wabash confederacies in the Northwest Indian War — the victor over La Balme's expedition in 1780 and the strategist behind the defeats of Hardin, Harmar and St. Clair — before signing the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and spending his last years as an advocate of negotiation. He died in July 1812, weeks before the siege of the American fort, and was buried with military honors by the United States garrison.
On Pacanne's death in 1816, his nephew Jean Baptiste de Richardville (Peshewa, or Pinšiwa, c. 1761–1841), Tacumwah's son, succeeded as principal civil chief of the Miami. Richardville — half Miami, half French, wealthy from the portage trade — was a signer at Greenville in 1795 and became the tribe's chief treaty negotiator: at St. Mary's in 1818 he secured individual land reserves for Miami families, and he negotiated again at Paradise Springs in 1826 and at the Forks of the Wabash in the 1830s. His brick house, built in 1827 on the St. Marys (today a National Historic Landmark), was a seat of Miami government in the years when the city of Fort Wayne was being founded around it. Richardville died on 13 August 1841, the year after Fort Wayne incorporated as a city; the Miami removal west followed in 1846, five years after his death — a removal his diplomacy had delayed longer than any other Indiana tribe's.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org (Kekionga; Pacanne); The History Center, Fort Wayne (Richardville materials); Visit Fort Wayne, "The Voice of the Miami"; Winger, Little Turtle: The Great Chief of Eel River (1942).