Fort St. Jean Baptiste is a testament to the resourcefulness of French explorers who first settled the backcountry of Louisiana in the early 1700s. About a quarter of a century after LaSalle first traveled down the Mississippi River and claimed all of the lands it drained for France, a band of Natchitoches Indians guided a group of French soldiers up the Red River in search of trade outlets. Led by a French Canadian named Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, the French were on a mission to Mexico to establish trading ties. Nearly one hundred and forty leagues up the Red River, they encountered an impenetrable logjam that prevented further navigation. The French hastily built two crude huts, which grew to become Fort St. Jean Baptiste and the town of Natchitoches, the oldest permanent settlement in the entire Louisiana Purchase territory. Following the establishment of a fort in 1716, Fort St. Jean Baptiste evolved into an important frontier military outpost and a vital trade center between the French, Spanish, and Caddo Indians. St. Denis was named the commandant of the fort in 1722, and the colony thrived until his death in 1744. However, an attack of the Natchez Indians in 1731 exposed the vulnerabilities of the small French fort, prompting French officials to send engineer François Broutin to oversee the construction of a larger and stronger fortification. Although the construction of the larger fort on the west bank of the river caused Spanish officials to charge it was an invasion of Spanish territory, St. Denis politely ignored their protests. The fort continued to be garrisoned by French marines until 1762, when France’s defeat in the French and Indian War forced her to cede Louisiana to Spain. Spanish authorities continued to operate the fort as a military outpost and trading center, but since it no longer protected a territorial boundary, the fort’s strategic importance was diminished, and the Spanish eventually abandoned the fort. By the time the United States acquired the territory in 1803, the fort was in ruins and was no longer of any use. Thus, the Americans built Fort Claiborne in Natchitoches to protect the western frontier. Today, Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site is situated on the west bank of the Cane River a few hundred yards from the 1732 fort site. Built in 1979, this full-scale replica is based upon extensive archival research and Broutin’s plans of a similar fort that was never built. The fort includes a trading warehouse, a powder magazine, a church, slave quarters, the commandant’s house, barracks, a guardhouse, bastions, and assorted huts. Construction began on an interpretive center and administrative offices on Jefferson Street in 2003.