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born Detroit, 28 September 1795 · died South Bend, 1855
The founding act: Alexis Coquillard established his trading post at the south bend of the St. Joseph River in the early 1820s — the record carries the settling season as 1823 and as 1824, and both stand — and his station, Big St. Joseph Station, gave the settlement its first name. He had come out of the Detroit fur trade, and his policy, where the later traders merely traded, was town-building: a post needed a town around it, and the ferries, land gifts and encouragements to settlers that the guides credit jointly to him and Lathrop Taylor began as his. When the federal cessions made the townsite buyable, Coquillard and Taylor bought it together and platted the town in 1831.
The run: In the city he helped found he built mills, cut the Kankakee race, stood friend and host to Father Sorin at Notre Dame's founding in 1842 — Sorin's party came first to Coquillard's house — and gave the land for the city cemetery. His second career is the valley's wound: the removal contracting of 1840–43, under which the Potawatomi who had traded at his post were emigrated west, is told in the Before the City section, where it belongs. His fortune, which the Wealth section documents as a collapse — debts, pledges, land conveyed away — is that section's, pointed to here and not retold. He died in 1855, the settlement's leading trader for three decades, on both sides of its founding bargain.
Sources:
- Notable People — "The traders: the men the town grew on" (the 1823/1824 settling seasons printed both; Big St. Joseph Station; the townsite purchase and 1831 plat; the mills, the Kankakee race, the cemetery gift, Sorin's arrival).
- Great Fortunes — "Coquillard" (Part One) — the fortune documented as a collapse, cross-referenced and not retold.
- Before the City — the removal contracting of 1840–43, cross-referenced.