The Treaty of Greenville referred to was concluded by General Anthony Wayne with the tribes in 1795, after they had been disastrously defeated at the battle of Fallen Timbers in the previous year. A part of the description of the tract ceded was that it was "where a fort formerly stood." There was no trace of such a fort, however, when the builders of Fort Dearborn arrived upon the scene. The Miami Indian chief, Little Turtle, well known to the whites at that period and a man familiar with this region, said in later years when questioned about it that he remembered nothing of any fort that had ever stood on the spot before the building of Fort Dearborn. There is evidence, however, that a fort, perhaps several of them at different periods, had been erected in this vicinity and occupied by the French; but having been built in a temporary fashion they utterly disappeared after the French had ceased to occupy the country. The tract "six miles square" mentioned in the Treaty of Greenville was never surveyed, and as the treaties of later years included the locality within other descriptions of ceded lands, it did not become necessary to make a survey. For that reason the exact boundaries of the six-mile-square tract were never determined and are not shown on official maps now recognized in title abstracts, though on some maps an outline of the tract is shown as an illustration, but without any authority as to the precise position occupied. It has been stated that commissioners from Washington had selected as the site of a proposed fort on Lake Michigan a location at the mouth of the St. Joseph River where the city of St. Joseph now stands, but as the Indian tribes would not give their consent for its construction at that point, the commissioners had been obliged to decide on a site at the mouth of the Chicago River. In commenting on this statement a writer in the _Michigan Pioneer Collection of Historical Publications_ says: "We conclude that had the fort been built at St. Joseph there would have been no Chicago." Mr. Edward G. Mason, a writer of acknowledged authority on subjects pertaining to western history, refers to this statement, and rather humorously observes: "This matter of a fort seems to have been peculiarly disastrous to the St. Joseph country. When it had one it constantly invited capture, and caused the inhabitants to spend more or less of their lives as prisoners of war, and when it did not have one it thereby lost the opportunity of becoming the commercial metropolis of the Northwest. I know of no such tract of land in all this section which has been so singularly unfortunate as the St. Joseph region."