Peau de Chat

Joseph Peau de Chat
Joseph Peaudechat
Occupation	Ojibwe chief

Joseph Peau de Chat was a principal chief of the Fort William Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) and a leading signatory of the 1850 Robinson–Superior Treaty.

Leadership at Fort William

• Served as chief of the Fort William Ojibway and as spokesman for the bands below the Lake Superior watershed.
• The community he led made its living in traditional ways while trading at the nearby Hudson's Bay Company post at Fort William, selling furs and buying supplies.
• About ten families of the band worked in a commercial fishery, exporting barrels of salted fish to Detroit and points east.

Treaty negotiations

• In 1849 he met the fact-finding commission of Alexander Vidal and Thomas G. Anderson at Fort William, which had been sent to assess whether the Anishinaabe wished to make a treaty with the Crown.
• Initially suspicious of the commissioners, he was satisfied after two days of meetings that they were acting honourably.
• He led a delegation of the Fort William Ojibway, together with the chief Illinois, to the treaty council at Sault Ste. Marie.
• On 7 September 1850 he signed the Robinson–Superior Treaty, by which the Ojibway ceded land along the north shore of Lake Superior from Batchawana Bay to the Pigeon River and inland to the height of land.

Fort William reserve

• The treaty set aside a reserve for "Joseph Peau de Chat and his Tribe," beginning about two miles inland from Fort William on the right bank of the Kaministiquia River.
• The Fort William reserve assigned to him and his band was surveyed in 1854 by J. W. Bridgeland.