[cross-posted from the Facebook group True Fort Wayne History, from January 2024]
On the portage and “Glorious Gate”–
I’d like to pull something out of a friendly conversation I had with Steve Oberlin deep in the comments under his post about the watershed, because maybe it will be interesting to a wider audience. It is commonly said — including on the historical marker downtown on the site of the original Fort Wayne, which the Daughters of the American Revolution installed in 1934 — that the Miami called the portage “Glorious Gate.”
But that seems to be misleading to the point of being false.
There’s no historical evidence I am aware of that the tribe had any general habit of referring to the portage by that phrase. Rather we have a record of that phrase being used once: when Little Turtle was waxing a bit poetic about Kekionga, the longtime Miami capital village that had controlled the portage until 1791, when the US military destroyed it during the Northwest Indian War. The town was not on the portage itself, but rather downstream from it in what is now the city of Fort Wayne’s Lakeside neighborhood. The occasion of Little Turtle’s remark was during the 1795 “negotiations” for the Treaty of Greenville after Anthony Wayne’s conquest brought the war to an end.
In that treaty, Wayne forced the Algonquin tribes to cede most of what is now Ohio and various strategic points west of there for white control/settlement. The minutes record how Little Turtle fruitlessly implored Wayne not to force his tribe to cede a particular swath of land around the fort that Wayne had just built; the area Wayne wanted the US to formally takeover included the site of Kekionga, just across the river confluence from the new military outpost. Little Turtle told Wayne that the village had long been an important tribal crossroads — a “glorious gate” — as part of pointing out that when the French had earlier erected their own short-lived fort near the river confluence, the French didn’t ask the Miami to sell that land.
Wayne was unmoved and the final treaty included the Miami giving up ownership of the spot. As a phrase with historical roots, “glorious gate” is so evocative that people have clearly wanted to use it in positive settings — like a historical marker crafted with an agenda of promoting civic pride — but the actual circumstances in which it was uttered were obviously kind of ugly, so people have taken it out of context it to obfuscate those overtones.