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 ment is never unanimously estimated to have been less than about sixty miles from the mouth of the St. Joseph River; Father Marest wrote Father German from "Cascaskias" November 9, 1712: " we ascended the river Saint Joseph, in order to make a portage at 30 [20?] leagues from its mouth."

This important route from Illinois to Detroit was first fortified by the building of the earliest "Fort Miami," near the mouth of the St. Josephs of Lake Michigan, by La Salle in 1679. "But this fort," Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites writes, "was destroyed by La Salle's men in 1680. Father Jean Mermet, then at the river [St. Joseph] mouth, writes La Mathe Cadillac, April 19, 1702, that he proposes to establish a mission 'three journeys,' or about sixty miles up river, 'near a stream [Illinois] which is the source of the Ouabache,' where there is a portage of half a league (Margry, v, p. 219). In 1711, Father Chardon had his mission sixty miles above the mouth. By 1712, there appears to have been a French