The French occupancy of the Mississippi Valley, lasting nearly a century, or from the time of the exploration of La Salle and Joliet till the French and Indian War, is for the most part, as a tale that is told, with little permanent sequence. This is true of the early invasion of the Wabash Valley, and while French life there, from the establishment of the first posts in the first half of the eighteenth century till the American invasion early in the nineteenth, affords a picturesque and romantic preliminary chapter to our history, it can scarcely be called an integral part of it, and its influence in modifying our development is scarcely appreciable. The isolated, straggling French life, little ethnological fragments, as it were, left stranded here far from their kind, was not strong enough to tincture the incoming population with that wonderful French race persistence that is notable in Canada, and in short time they were incontinently swallowed up.

It can be said, however, that the previous French settlement at Vincennes determined the starting point of the American occupancy, and the beginning place of Indiana politics. The Treaty of Greenville, and 1795, secured from the Indians, along with certain strategic points on the Wabash River and a large tract at the Falls of the Ohio, for George Rogers Clark and his soldiers, the lands adjacent to "the Post of St. Vincennes," to which the Indian title had already been extinguished. This reservation, which was rather indefinite as to boundaries, in turn determined the first of the series of Indian purchases that ultimately comprised the whole state. By a treaty consummated in 1803 William Henry Harrison secured an extension of the 1795 reservation, with defined boundaries, that reached some fifty miles westward from Vincennes. This tract was the first part of the new territory to be surveyed by the rectangular system adopted by the United States Government and the first center of American population.

One great preliminary service that the French did for their successors was in the first explorations of the country. First the professed explores and then the coureurs de bois, employed by the fur traders, traversed our streams, penetrating to the remoter parts of the virgin wilderness, and the maps left us by the old French cartographers are not only curious as revealing the growth of the geographic knowledge of our region, but are particularly informative as to the location of Indian tribes in those days.