Along the line of lakes and rivers in course of years French forts were placed. Fort Frontenac, first founded in 1673 by the great French governor whose name it bore, guarded, on the site of the present city of Kingston, the outlet of the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario. Fort Niagara, begun by La Salle in the winter of 1678-9, on the eastern bank of the Niagara river, near its entrance into Lake Ontario, covered the portage from that lake to Lake Erie. Fort Detroit, dating from the first years of the eighteenth century, stood by the river which carries the waters of Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair into Lake Erie. Its founder was La Mothe Cadillac. The post at Michillimackinac was at the entrance of Lake Michigan. From Lake Erie to the Ohio were two lines of forts. The main line began with Presque Isle on the southern shore of the lake, and ended with Fort Duquesne, afterwards renamed Pittsburg, the intermediate posts being Fort Le Bœuf at the head of French Creek, and Venango where that stream joins the Alleghany. Further west, past the intermediate fort of Sandusky, which stood on the southern shore of Lake Erie, there was a second series of outposts, of which we hear little in the course of the Seven Years’ War. The Maumee river flows into the south-western end of Lake Erie, and on it, at a point where there was a portage to the Wabash river, was constructed Fort Miami, on or near the site of the later American Fort Wayne. On the Wabash, which joins the Ohio not very far above the confluence of the latter river with the Mississippi, were two French posts, Fort Ouatanon and, lower down its course, Fort Vincennes. On the central Mississippi the chief nucleus of French trade and influence was Fort Chartres. It stood on the eastern bank of the river, eighty to ninety miles above the confluence of the Ohio, and but a few miles north of the point where the Kaskaskia river flows into the Mississippi. On the Kaskaskia, among the Illinois Indians, there was a French outpost, and settlement fringed the eastern side of the Mississippi northwards to Fort Chartres. Above that fort there was a road running north on the same side to Cahokia, a little below and on the opposite side to the confluence of the Missouri; and in 1763 a French settler crossed the Mississippi, and opened a store on the site of the present city of St. Louis. The posts on the Mississippi were, both for trading and for political purposes, connected with Louisiana rather than with Canada; and, though the Peace of Paris had ceded to Great Britain the soil on which they stood, the French had not been disturbed by any assertion of British sovereignty prior to the war which is associated with the name of the Indian chief Pontiac. [Sidenote: The rising of Pontiac.] [Sidenote: Its special characteristics.]