Detroit means "the strait," and the original Indian names for the river mean "the place of the turned channel." The early visitors who reached it by boat at night or in dark weather, and were inattentive to the involved currents, always remarked, as the Indians did before them, that owing to these extraordinary involutions of the waters, when the sun appeared again it always seemed to rise in the wrong place. The French under La Salle were the first Europeans who passed through the river, and in 1701 the Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac, who received grants from Louis XIV., came and founded Fort Pontchartrain there, naming it after the French Minister of Marine, around which a settlement afterwards grew, to which the French sent colonists at intervals. The British got possession in 1760, and it successfully resisted the conspiracy and attacks of the Ojibway Indian chief Pontiac for over a year, the garrison narrowly escaping massacre. The United States, after the Revolution, sent out General St. Clair as Governor, and his name was given the lake to the northward. Detroit was a frontier post in the War of 1812, being alternately held by British and Americans. In 1824 it had about fifteen hundred people and became a city. It now has three hundred and fifty thousand population, and its commercial importance may be estimated from the fact that the whole enormous traffic of the Lakes passes in front of the city during the seven months that navigation is open, the procession of craft often reaching sixty thousand vessels in the season. Detroit also has extensive and varied manufactures. It has a gradually rising surface and broad and well-paved streets on a rectangular plan, with several avenues radiating from a centre, like the spokes of a wheel. The central square is the Campus Martius, an expansion, about a half-mile from the river, of Woodward Avenue, the chief street. Here is an elaborate City Hall, the principal public building, having in front a magnificent Soldiers' Monument. The suburbs are attractive, and there are various pleasant parks and rural cemeteries, the leading Park of Belle Isle, covering seven hundred acres, being to the northeastward, with a good view over Lake St. Clair. Fort Wayne, the elaborate defensive work of Detroit, is on the river just below the city, and has a small garrison of regular troops. It is yet incomplete, and is designed to be the most extensive fortification on the northern frontier, commanding the important passage between Lakes Huron and Erie and the railway routes east and west.