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1680s–1822 — the valley's anchor stood in present Michigan
The post: The portage's French century was administered from upriver. On land at present Niles, Michigan — granted by Louis XIV to the Jesuits, about eleven miles north of the future city — Father Claude Allouez's generation planted the Mission of Saint Joseph among the valley's Miami and Potawatomi in the 1680s, and in 1691 the French built Fort St. Joseph beside it: mission, garrison and trading post in one palisade, which the Michigan marker record calls the post that "controlled southern Michigan's principal Indian trade routes." It is Michigan ground and another city's site, and it stands in this section at boundary size, because everything that happened on this river for a hundred and thirty years was run from that palisade or against it — the trade that crossed the portage was Fort St. Joseph's trade.
The successions, in brief, as the record gives them: the post passed to the British in 1761, a detachment of the 60th Regiment under Ensign Francis Schlosser; on 25 May 1763, in Pontiac's War, Potawatomi warriors took the fort, killed most of the fourteen- or fifteen-man garrison, and carried Schlosser and a few survivors to Detroit for ransom; the fort was never re-garrisoned. In the Revolution it figured once more, spectacularly and briefly: after an American attempt on it in 1780 was turned back, a Spanish expedition from St. Louis under Captain Eugenio Pouré — sixty-odd militiamen and Native allies, come up the Illinois and the Kankakee — crossed the ice on 12 February 1781, took the unguarded post, raised Spain's colors, claimed the fort and the St. Joseph River for Spain, plundered it for a day, and left. Spain argued the valley at the peace table on the strength of that day and got nothing by it; the valley became American with the Northwest Territory, and the fort site, flooded and lost, was not certainly relocated until Western Michigan University's archaeologists found it in 1998.
The missions' second act: The missionary establishments the 1828 treaty names as its venue are the French century's last echo on this river. Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, founded Carey Mission in 1822 on the river near the old fort — a school and mission to the valley's Potawatomi, Michigan ground again, printed here because the treaty that ceded the Indiana valley was negotiated at "the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph" six years later. The Catholic echo matters more to this ground: in August 1830 Father Stephen Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States, arrived to raise a Catholic mission among the valley's Catholic Potawatomi — the affiliation on which Leopold Pokagon built his people's survival, told in the Pokagon entry below. The missions would mostly fail as institutions; as facts of allegiance they decided who was still on this ground in 1840, and who was gone.
Sources: the Fort St. Joseph record as summarized in the Michigan historical marker texts (Historical Marker Database) — the 1691 building, the trade-routes description, the 1761 British succession, the 1763 seizure; the fort's modern scholarly record (Western Michigan University, Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project) — the 25 May 1763 capture, Schlosser's captivity, the 12 February 1781 Spanish expedition and one-day claim, the 1998 rediscovery; Treaty with the Potawatomi, 1828 — its venue, "the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph"; the Carey Mission marker record (founded 1822 by Isaac McCoy); the Badin arrival, August 1830, as carried in the Pokagon scholarship cited below.