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Miami principal chief · Topeah, "frost on the bushes"
On the record
Francis La Fontaine — Topeah — was born about 1810 near Fort Wayne, of a French father and a Miami mother (his monument's inscription implies 15 April 1809). About 1830 he married Catherine (Pocongoqua), the youngest daughter of Jean Baptiste de Richardville, and on Richardville's death in 1841 he was elected principal civil chief of the Miami. He lived at the Forks of the Wabash, in the house Richardville had built, which served as tribal headquarters, and near Huntington. Though his own family was exempt from removal, he accompanied the removed Miami west to Kansas in the fall of 1846 and wintered with them. He died on the return journey, at Lafayette, on 13 April 1847, aged thirty-seven, and was buried at Huntington, in what is now Mount Calvary Cemetery.
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- § 06 — people of the record
Sources: Anson, "Chief Francis Lafontaine and the Miami Emigration from Indiana," Indiana Magazine of History; Huntington County Honors; Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889).