There is no difficulty in placing the approximate location of this fort, or blockhouse, today. Captain Thomas Hutchins, who was Bouquet’s geographer, places it accurately upon his map of 1764. He visited the place in 1762, as the military correspondence of Col. Henry Bouquet plainly states. Then, forty-five years after the fort was treacherously destroyed by Indians in 1763, Almon Ruggles, who made a survey of the bay shore in connection with his survey of the Firelands, located the posi- tion of the old fort in his field notes. These notes placed the fort at the site of modern Venice, Ohio. Thus the site of the old British Fort San- dusky is attested to by two very reliable surveyors. This fort was the first of a chain of frontier fortresses to fall at the beginning of the Pontiac War, which Francis Parkman calls the greatest ng in Indian history in the United States. and most far-reaching upris Between eight and ten thousand Indians from the Mis: Pennsylvania border rose, almost overnight, in a concerted action which fell like a thunderbolt upon six hundred miles of British and Colonial front line lying between Mackinac Island and Fort Pitt, now Pittsburgh. sippi river to the Twelve forts guarded this frontier and of these nine fell in the first few days of fighting. Only Niagara, Detroit and Fort Pitt held out, and it was upon this meager remnant that Colonel Henry Bouquet was forced to base his desperate defense before reinforcement could reach him. He defeated the Indians the year following ( 1764), but not until after numerous white settlers had been killed, their homes burned, and white migration brought to a standstill west of the Allegheny mountains. The building of Fort Sandusky, which Franklin had been so instru- mental in promoting, was among the grievances which caused the Indians to rise. The Wyandots, near the site of whose towns the fort was built, did not like the idea at all. Moreover, too many independent traders who made the fort their headquarters were accused of dealing unfairly with the Indians. Prior to the fall of New France, the French government in Canada had succeeded in keeping all independent traders, with the exception of George Croghan, whom the Indians liked, out of Ohio. Croghan’s men got on well with the Wyandots and Delawares, although now and then the French and Ottawas acting under the French captured or killed them. Then the French power in the New World was lost and the British took 85