La Salle at the portage, 1679 and 1681

DECEMBER 1679 · 1681

The first European name in the record is a traveller passing through: In December 1679 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, came up the St. Joseph River from its mouth — where he had built a small fort at the lake — with a party in eight canoes, looking for the portage the Native peoples of the river had described to him. Howard's county history sets the ascent at December 3, 1679, and preserves La Salle's own name for the stream: the river of the Miamis. His men overshot the landing in the winter river and had to come back to it. The tablet the city's park board later set at the landing place, in what is now La Salle Memorial Park on Portage Avenue, fixes the crossing of the portage ground to December 5, 1679; a second marker, at the ravine where the trail left the river, says he began his first portage from the St. Joseph to the Kankakee on December 6, 1679. From the Kankakee his route ran down the Illinois toward the Mississippi, the errand of his life. He passed this way again in 1681, and the tradition carried by the encyclopedias has him treating that year, under a great oak the settlers later called the Council Oak, with chiefs of the Miami and Illinois confederations — the tree stood on the portage ground into the modern era as the city's oldest living landmark of the encounter.

One claim on the ground wants correcting in the record's own voice. A state marker put up in 1950 at La Salle's camp site declares him "the first white man to enter Indiana." The Indiana Historical Bureau has since said plainly that the claim is uncertain: French traders may have been in Indiana earlier in the 1670s — there is evidence of coureurs de bois at the village of Tassinong, in what is now Porter County, as early as 1673 — and the Bureau's director told the state's bicentennial reviewers that which white man stepped first on Hoosier soil "may not ever be answered without qualification," though he was French, and he likely came in the 1670s. What is certain is narrower and better: the portage at the bend was already an important place when Europeans first wrote about it, and La Salle's December 1679 crossing is the first passage of it that the written record names.

Sources:

1. Historical Marker Database — the Council Oak / La Salle tablet transcription ("crossed this land December 5, 1679," erected by the South Bend Board of Park Commissioners) and the "La Salle's Camp" marker (erected 1950 by the National Society of the Colonial Dames with the Indiana Historical Bureau).
2. Indiana Policy Review, "Indiana at 200: First White Man in Indiana?" — Pamela Bennett, director of the Indiana Historical Bureau, on the uncertainty of the 1950 marker's claim and the earlier-1670s French presence.
3. Indiana Bicentennial Commission, Starke County legacy materials — the Tassinong evidence for traders in Indiana as early as 1673.
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "South Bend" — La Salle's visits of 1679 and the 1681 parley under the Council Oak with Miami and Illinois chiefs.
5. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) — the December 1679 ascent of the river, the missed and recovered portage landing.