Fort Orleans

The friend of the Indian on the plaque came up the Missouri as a deserter. Bourgmont and other soldiers left Fort Detroit in 1706 under Cadillac's criticism, and on the run he lived among the Missouria, today part of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, trading furs without leave. Missionaries wanted him arrested for traveling with his Missouria wife and children. He went to France in 1720 with his son and a chief, built this fort on the promise of a noble title, and in 1725 went home to Normandy, leaving his Missouria family. No trace of the fort has been found.

What the plaque says

Fort Orleans Fort Orleans, first European post in the Missouri Valley, was built by the French explorer Etienne Véniard De Bourgmond on the Missouri River close by, a few miles above the mouth of the Grand, 1723-24. The exact location of the fort is not known. De Bourgmond, friend of the Indian and author of the first navigation report on the Missouri River, 1714, was chosen to build the fort by a French trading concern, the Company of the Indies. The fort was to serve as a check to any advance by the Spanish from the southwest and as a base for New Mexican and Indian trade. Some 40 men came with De Bourgmond on the fort building mission. Made Commandant on the Missouri, he was also in charge of making peace with the Comanche Indians. A village of Missouri Indians was across the river from the fort. These Indians, of Souian stock, at one time called themselves Niutachis. They were probably first called Missouris, Algonquin for "he of the big canoe" by the Illinois Indians. The last of the Missouris died on the Oto Reservation in Oklahoma, 1907. (See other side) Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1953 Fort Orleans (Continued from other side) Westernmost outpost of France in what is now Missouri, the establishment at Fort Orleans included a chapel, first Catholic church in the Missouri Valley. The first resident priest was Abbé Mercier. When the fort was built, De Bourgmond traveled into what is now central Kansas, 1724, where he fulfilled his commission to make peace with the Comanches. In 1725 he returned to France taking several Indian chiefs and a young Missouri maiden along for a visit. The whole party delighted the French who called the girl "Princess of the Missouri," saw her baptized in Notre Dame, and married to a sergeant. De Bourgmond was made a noble and had for his coat of arms an Indian against a silver mountain. De Bourgmond stayed in France, and in 1728 the fort was closed. Fort Orleans was built in territory claimed for France, 1682, and named Louisiana after Louis XIV by La Salle. France held the greater part of this claim 80 years, then ceded it, 1762, to Spain which held it 38 years, returning it to France, 1800, which sold it to the United States, 1803. Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1953

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Annie and Abel Van Meter State Park — 8.9 mi
  The homeland of the Missouria, the Nutachi, on the loess ridges at the Great Bend, where Marquette's 1673 map placed their town and a cultural center tells their history.
• Arrow Rock State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A Boonslick river town of more than 1,000 that the river and railroads left behind, built and worked by enslaved people, now a village of fifty and a National Historic Landmark.
• Walt Disney Hometown Museum — 27 mi
  A museum in Marceline's old Santa Fe depot, built on the collection of Walt Disney's sister Ruth, about the five years the Disney family farmed outside this railroad town.
• Boone's Lick State Historic Site — 28 mi
  The salt spring in the Howard County woods that Daniel Boone's sons worked from 1805, whose name spread to a road, a country and the first American settlement of central Missouri.

More markers nearby

• Keytesville — 15 mi
• Glasgow — 23 mi
• Arrow Rock — 26 mi