Colonel Hamtramck remained in command of Fort Wayne until June, 1796. In March of that year he had been ordered to move down the Maumee with a detachment from Fort Wayne in order to counteract a demonstration by the British which was possibly intended to arouse the Indians to revolt. While encamped on the Maumee, Hamtramck received a message from General Wilkinson, directing him to receive the transfer of the British Post Miami and then proceed to Detroit to take command of the former British post, Fort Lernoult. Colonel David Strong, Hamtramck’s successor at Fort Wayne, had, like Hamtramck, served in the Revolution and in Wayne’s army. Prior to coming to Fort Wayne he had been in command at Fort Greenville.[23] The twenty-six months of Colonel Strong’s administration witnessed the beginnings of the new Frenchtown at Fort Wayne. Located across the St. Joseph from the site of the old Frenchtown, this new village was situated where Kekionga or Kiskakon once stood in the present Lakeside area of Fort Wayne. Most of the inhabitants were either former occupants of Miamitown who returned to this new site after Wayne’s victory or French-Canadians of the Detroit-River Raisin region. Volney, a native of France who traveled in the United States during 1796, questioned the Americans concerning these French “habitants” of the northwest. He was told that they were a kind, hospitable, and sociable sort of people, “but in ignorance and idleness they beat the Indians. They know nothing of civil and domestic affairs; their women neither sew or spin or make butter but pass their time in gossiping and tattle. The men hunt, fish, roam in the woods, and bask in the sun.”[24] In weighing the value of this characterization of the French “habitants,” we must remember that Volney an intellectual coming from the Paris of the Enlightenment naturally thought of these people as crude and rustic, as indeed they must have appeared to him, but what is more important neither Volney or the Americans appreciated that these French Creoles way of life was different from theirs. The Creoles were not as interested in the middle-class virtue of respectability nor in the acquisition of much property. Evidently the English-American opinion of the French people living in the Northwest had not changed since the days of George Croghan and earlier. Nor in all likelihood had the French “habitants” and traders changed their manner of living to any great extent. Although they had suffered a great deal financially and were less prosperous since the American occupation of the territory, there is no reason to doubt that these people lived as they did during Henry Hay’s sojourn at Miamitown, independent and satisfied with life.