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On the east bank of the St. Joseph River, in what is now the Lakeside neighborhood, stood Kekionga, the principal town of the Miami nation and, in the eighteenth century, one of the most important Native places in the Old Northwest. From Kekionga the Miami controlled the portage between the Maumee and the Wabash, collected the traffic that passed through it, and dealt in turn with the French, the British and the Americans. The town was the objective of American campaigns in 1790 and 1791 and the reason Anthony Wayne built his fort at the confluence in 1794. Its full political and military record is in the Tribes chapter and the chapters on the land before the city; here it is fixed as a location.
The site is marked, though nothing of the town survives above ground. An Indiana state historical marker on Edgewater Avenue, near 740 Edgewater Avenue, records the site of Kekionga — "site of settlement of Native Americans for as much as 10,000 years," the marker text reads, and the center of the Miami nation; the marker was erected by the Journal-Gazette Foundation. A second marker, at Edgewater Avenue and Dearborn Street, marks the Battle of Kekionga of October 1790, when the town's warriors defeated the first American expedition sent against it. The streets around the markers are residential: modest houses on the river bluff where the Miami capital stood.
Kekionga is also the subject of the city's best-known place-name claim. The town is often called the "Glorious Gate" — the gateway of the west. Research published in 2025 by the historian Charlie Savage traced the phrase to a single poetic use by Little Turtle at the Greenville negotiations in 1795, and to the Daughters of the American Revolution marker erected on the original fort site in 1934, which carried the phrase into wide circulation. On that showing, "Glorious Gate" was not a standing Miami name for the place but a line of oratory that a twentieth-century marker made famous. The claim is carried here as Savage's research presents it.
Sources: Indiana Historical Bureau marker records and the Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org), Kekionga site and Battle of Kekionga markers, Edgewater Avenue; Charlie Savage, 2025 research on the "Glorious Gate" phrase; the Tribes chapter of this history for the town's political record.