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Before the city — the Miami towns at the three rivers
The first Fort Wayne was fed by women's work: when Harmar's officers counted the Miami towns at Kekionga in 1790 they found a cluster of villages ringed by some five hundred acres of cornfields, with "vast fields of corn in almost every direction," as the Tribes chapter records. In the Miami division of labor that the Myaamia Project scholarship describes, those fields were women's: Miami women raised the corn, beans and squash that were the towns' stored wealth and trade surplus, while the town's diplomacy ran through women's kinship lines as well. The succession that governed Kekionga ran through a woman. Tacumwah was the sister of the civil chief Pacanne; her son by the French trader Antoine-Joseph Drouet de Richerville, Jean Baptiste de Richardville, succeeded Pacanne as principal civil chief in 1816 and held the office until 1841 — a chief whose claim and standing came through his mother's family. When Pacanne stayed home from Greenville in 1795, it was Tacumwah's son he sent to make the peace in his place. The full record of the towns, the chiefs and the removal is in the Tribes chapter, and Richardville's biography is in the People record; what belongs here is the frame: the city's ground was a place where women's agriculture underwrote the town and women's kinship carried its government, two generations before the first American plat was drawn over it.
Sources: the Tribes chapter of this record (the 1790 village count and cornfields, Denny's map, the Richardville succession); the People record (Richardville and Pacanne biographies); Myaamia Project scholarship on the Miami division of labor, as carried in the Tribes chapter's sources.