In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, a 43-year-old French army officer, established a French settlement at the waterway between lakes St. Claire and Erie.

Cadillac had convinced King Louis XIV's chief minister, Count Pontchartrain, that a permanent community at this strategic location would strengthen French control over the upper Great Lakes and repel British advances. So Cadillac built Fort Pontchartrain. It was not enough to keep the British away.

The French lost the fort in the French and Indian War. The British, who now occupied the region, kept the French names, even though they didn't understand them. That is why the city is called Detroit, meaning "the straits," and the waterway (which is, in fact, a strait) is curiously named the Detroit River.

Had the French been victorious, perhaps the future Motor City would have been named for Cadillac.

Instead, Cadillac is a small town in Northern Michigan known primarily as an exporter of Christmas trees.

Cadillac's association with Detroit did not end there, however. When Henry Martyn Leland founded an automobile company in 1904, he named it the Cadillac Motor Car Company in honor of the city's founder.