A 25-story Wyndham hotel now stands where the white oak palisade once rose from a bluff above the Detroit River. In 1701, Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac arrived here with 100 settlers and soldiers after paddling up the Ottawa River, across Georgian Bay, and down through Lake Huron. He chose the narrowest point of the strait connecting Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie -- le detroit, the French called it -- and began hammering together the fort he named for his patron, Jerome Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain, the French Secretary of State of the Navy. The first building completed was a chapel dedicated to Saint Anne, patron saint of New France. Within months, Odawa and Wyandot peoples migrated from Michilimackinac and established their own palisaded villages nearby. The fort Cadillac built would change hands from French to British to American over the next 95 years, surviving wars, sieges, and inter-tribal conflicts before fire consumed its last remnants in 1805.
Cadillac had pitched the idea to Paris in 1698. A colony at Detroit would block English expansion into the Pays d'en Haut -- the Upper Country -- while deterring Iroquois aggression. French families would settle there. Indigenous nations near Michilimackinac would be encouraged to relocate. The plan succeeded, perhaps too well. By 1705, Cadillac reported an Indigenous population of 2,000 around Detroit. Odawa, Wyandot, Miami, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi all established communities near the fort, drawn by the fur trade and French goods. The fort itself was modest: white oak walls roughly enclosing a small area, with a bastion at each corner and the entire European population living within the palisade. In October 1703, fire destroyed the chapel and the residences of Cadillac and his lieutenant, Alphonse de Tonty. The settlement rebuilt and kept growing.
Detroit's strategic position made it a crossroads of competing interests, and violence followed. In 1706, a false rumor about a Miami attack triggered an Odawa assault that left Father Delhalle and a soldier dead outside the fort's walls, with about 30 Odawa, 50 Miami, and an unknown number of Wyandot killed in the ensuing raids. The Meskwaki arrived around 1710, declaring themselves the rightful masters of Detroit and boasting of plans to trade with the English. By 1712, after the Meskwaki invested the fort in retaliation for an attack on their Mascouten allies, the commander managed to summon Odawa and Wyandot warriors to lift the siege. This cycle -- alliances forming, fracturing, reforming around trade and territory -- defined Detroit for decades. The Wyandot leader Cheanonvouzon manipulated rivalries to secure his people's autonomy, establishing secret trade connections to British goods through the Iroquois.
Fort Pontchartrain surrendered to the British on November 29, 1760, after the fall of Montreal ended French power in North America. Three years later, the war chief Pontiac besieged the fort during his coordinated uprising against British rule. On July 31, 1763, Captain James Dalyell led about 250 reinforcements in a rash attack on Pontiac's encampment and was ambushed at the Battle of Bloody Run, losing approximately 20 dead and 41 wounded. The British held the fort but recognized its vulnerabilities. In 1779, they replaced the aging French fortification with Fort Lernoult, an earthwork redoubt on higher ground overlooking the town. During the American Revolution, roughly 4,000 Wyandot, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe -- the "Lakes' Nations" -- allied with the British at Detroit, fielding close to 1,200 warriors.
The 1783 Treaty of Paris placed Detroit in American territory, but the British had no intention of leaving. They ignored requests to hand over the fort, treated visiting American commissioners politely but made no commitments, and continued using Detroit as a base for Indigenous alliances and frontier raids. It took another war -- the Northwest Indian War, culminating in "Mad Anthony" Wayne's victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 -- plus diplomatic pressure through the Jay Treaty before Britain finally relinquished Detroit on July 11, 1796, a full 13 years after the peace treaty had supposedly ended hostilities.
The Great Fire of 1805 destroyed the remaining vestiges of Fort Pontchartrain. Only Fort Lernoult and a single warehouse on the river survived the conflagration. The Americans renamed Fort Lernoult as Fort Detroit, then Fort Shelby after the War of 1812, before demolishing it in 1827. Today, a Michigan Historical Commission marker at the southwest corner of Washington Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue marks where Cadillac's fort stood. The Hotel Pontchartrain, built on the site in the early 1960s, was dedicated on July 24, 1965 -- the 264th anniversary of Detroit's founding. The fort is gone, but the city Cadillac planted at the narrowest point of the strait endures, its name a permanent echo of the French word for the waterway that drew him here.
Located at 42.33°N, 83.05°W in downtown Detroit, Michigan, at the site now occupied by the Fort Pontchartrain a Wyndham Hotel near the intersection of Washington Boulevard and West Jefferson Avenue. The Detroit River is immediately south, with Windsor, Ontario visible across the international border. The narrows of the Detroit River -- the strait that gave the city its name -- are clearly visible from altitude. Nearest airports: Coleman A. Young International (KDET) 5 miles northeast, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (KDTW) 18 miles southwest. From above, the downtown grid sits on the bluff where Cadillac chose to build, the river flowing from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie below.