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| Commandant | Command |
|---|---|
| Capt. Thomas Pasteur | Arrived 1802; served about a year. |
| Maj. Zebulon Pike | June 1803 – late September 1803. Pike's was a brief senior command; the garrison orderly books that run in his name belong to this short tenure, not to a longer competing one. |
| Capt. John Whipple | Late September 1803 – January 1807, when he resigned. |
| Lt. (later Capt.) Nathan Heald | 1807 – May 16, 1810. |
| Capt. James Rhea | 1810–1812; commanded during the siege of Fort Wayne. |
| Ostrander | Brief command after the siege, autumn 1812; he was later arrested by Capt. Moore and died in captivity on July 13, 1813. |
| Capt. Hugh Moore | Took command in late November 1812; served until summer 1813. |
| Maj. Joseph Jenkinson | 1813, about six months. Jenkinson reached Fort Wayne commanding a flotilla of supply boats and then ran the post — the tenure that fills the gap between Moore and Whistler. |
| Brevet Maj. John Whistler | May 1814–1817; built the third Fort Wayne in 1815–16. |
| Lt. Daniel Curtis | 1817, about three months, temporary. |
| Maj. Josiah N. Vose | 1817 – April 19, 1819; the last commandant — the garrison abandoned the fort on April 19, 1819. |
One loose thread: a secondary commanders list also names a Col. Henry Burbeck for 1803. No source consulted reconciles that entry with the Pasteur–Pike–Whipple sequence above, so it is flagged here rather than built on.
Sources: Ball State University, The Forts of Fort Wayne project, "Under Fire (or the Influence): Fort Wayne's Officer Corps, 1800–1815," citing Bert J. Griswold, Fort Wayne: Gateway of the West, 1802–1813, pp. 87, 159, and the Fort Wayne Garrison Orderly Books; Wallace A. Brice, History of Fort Wayne (1868), ch. XXIV; "Fort Wayne (Indiana fort)," commanders list.
The federal presence: the Indian agency and the land office
For the first quarter-century of American rule, the federal government at Fort Wayne was two offices: the Indian agency, which conducted diplomacy and trade with the Miami and their neighbors, and after 1822 the land office, which sold the land the treaties had ceded. Between them they did most of the governing that reached the ground.
The agency began as a government trading house. John Johnston (1775–1861), an Irish-born former wagoner in Wayne's Legion, was appointed factor — keeper of the government store — at Fort Wayne on 1 July 1802, and in 1809 was made Indian agent as well, serving in the dual role until his resignation on 30 June 1811. His interpreter and rival for the Miami's trust was William Wells (Apekonit), Little Turtle's son-in-law, who had been raised Miami; Wells was killed on 15 August 1812 escorting the evacuation of Fort Dearborn. During the War of 1812 the Fort Wayne agency was held by Benjamin F. Stickney, whose feud with the garrison's officers runs through the siege-era correspondence. In March 1823 President Monroe appointed John Tipton — militia general, former sheriff of Harrison County, and a veteran of Tippecanoe — as Indian agent at Fort Wayne. Tipton negotiated the Treaty of Paradise Springs in the fall of 1826, serving as a commissioner alongside Lewis Cass and Governor James B. Ray, and in the spring of 1828 he removed the agency from Fort Wayne to Logansport, on the Wabash. He is also credited, in The History Center's telling, with suggesting the name of Allen County. Tipton went on to the United States Senate (1832–1839); the agency era at Fort Wayne closed with his departure, and the annuity payments and treaty business that had been transacted at the fort moved down the Wabash with him.
The land office was created by an act of Congress approved 8 May 1822, which laid out a Fort Wayne land district from the lands ceded at the Treaty of St. Mary's in 1818. Because the district was not yet surveyed, the offices stood vacant until 1823, when President Monroe appointed Samuel C. Vance of Dearborn County as register and Joseph Holman of Wayne County as receiver of public moneys. The office opened — in a room of the old fort — on 22 October 1823, the day of the first land sale at Fort Wayne. The succession of the two offices, as printed in the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee history, runs:
| Office | Holder | From |
|---|---|---|
| Register | Samuel C. Vance | 1823 |
| Register | Capt. Robert Brackenridge | 1829, on President Jackson's inauguration |
| Register | James W. Borden | 1837 |
| Register | William Polke | 1841; died in office 26 April 1843 |
| Register | William S. Edsall | 1843 |
| Receiver | Joseph Holman | 1823 |
| Receiver | Gen. Jonathan McCarty | 1829; left on his election to Congress |
| Receiver | Col. John Spencer | succeeding McCarty, to 1837 |
| Receiver | Daniel Reid | 1837 |
| Receiver | Samuel Lewis | 1841 |
| Receiver | I. D. G. Nelson | 1841 |
The land office mattered to government because it created the town: the lands around the fort enclosure were sold to John T. Barr of Baltimore and John McCorkle of Piqua, whose donation lots seeded the county treasury; the original plat — 118 lots on Calhoun, Clinton and Barr streets, surveyed by Robert Young of Piqua (the 1889 history dates his survey to August 1822) — was recorded first in Randolph County at Winchester and then in Allen County's own records, with a public square reserved on it for a courthouse. Within a year of the first sale, the settlers the land office attracted were organizing a county of their own.
Sources: Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889), vols. I–II, via ldsgenealogy.com; en.wikipedia.org (John Johnston (Indian agent)); The History Center, "General John Tipton's Fort Wayne Connection" (2016); Griswold, Fort Wayne: Gateway of the West (1927).