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Kekionga · Miami
On the record
Chief and treaty negotiator across five decades; built the 1827 treaty house on Bluffton Road; reputed the richest man in Indiana at his death (see “Richardville was the richest man in Indiana”). His family's exemption spared them the 1846 Removal, for a generation.
Jean Baptiste de Richardville — Pinšiwa, "the Wildcat" — was born about 1761 at Kekionga, the son of the French trader Antoine-Joseph Drouet de Richerville and Tacumwah, a Miami woman of the ruling family (a sister of the chief Pacanne; some accounts make her a sister of Little Turtle). No man in the Maumee valley was better placed between the two worlds, and he made the portage between the St. Marys and the Little River — the carrying place that controlled trade between the Great Lakes and the Wabash — the seat of his own fur-trade business.
On Pacanne's death in 1816, Richardville succeeded him as principal civil chief of the Miami, and for twenty-five years he was the man the United States had to treat with. His signature runs through the treaty line: Greenville (1795), Fort Wayne (1803 and 1809), St. Mary's (1818), Mississinewas (1826), the Forks of the Wabash (1838), and the Wabash (1840). Across those treaties he secured grants totaling some 28,320 acres and $31,800, and by the reckoning of the time he was among the wealthiest men in Indiana. About 1800 he married Natoequah; their daughter Catherine (Pocongoquah) married Francis La Fontaine, who succeeded him as chief. In 1827 he built the house that still stands at 5705 Bluffton Road — part-funded by a $600 treaty provision, with roughly $1,600 more of his own money — the first Greek Revival house in northeastern Indiana, designated a National Historic Landmark in 2012. In 1831 he moved the tribal headquarters and his trading post to the Forks of the Wabash, near present Huntington. He died 13 August 1841 at his home on the St. Marys southeast of the city and was buried in the Cathedral Square ground in Fort Wayne (the burial was later moved). The removal exemptions he and others had written into the treaties allowed 126 Miami to remain in Indiana in 1846, 43 of them Richardville's own family.
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- § 06 — people of the record
From § 06, People of the record, and the sources cited there; Wikipedia, "Jean Baptiste Richardville"; History Center, Fort Wayne; Visit Fort Wayne; Allen County Genealogical Society.