First explorers came seeking passage, furs

Traders making a portage from one stream to another are subjects of this painting by Thorsen Lindberg. It is on display in Milwaukee Public Library. There were two very important portages in Northern Wisconsin, one from the St. Croix to the Brule and on to Lake Superior and the other from the Chippewa River near the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation to the Namekagon River and then north.

     Samuel de Champlain, founder of New France and an accomplished cartographer, had a remarkable map published in 1632 detailing his explorations for a route to China. It showed the connection between Lake Huron (Mer Douce) and Lake Superior (Grand Lac).
     His information was based on reports Etienne Brule and a younger companion, Grenoble, described when they returned from a fur trading expedition with Indians who mined copper in the Chequamegon Bay area.
     While recorded history of northern Wisconsin didn't begin until 1659 with the accounts of Groseillers and Radisson, they reported evidence of earlier French traders on a portage across Chequamegon Point.

Built near Ashland

     With a group of Ottawa Indians from the lower St. Lawrence River region, Medart Chouart, Sieur des Groseillers, and his younger brother-in-law, Pierre Esprit Radisson, built a temporary camp structure at the end of the bay, three miles west of Ashland.
     Using the Namekagon-Courte Oreilles Indian route, they wintered with Ottawa Indians on Lac Courte Oreilles. The Sioux had previously controlled this lake area with its abundant game, fish, berries and wild rice.
     Chippewa Indians moved in to make it their permanent home after 1745.
     The Ottawa were called Courte Oreilles (Short Ears) by the French. Indian, English and American explorers always referred to the lake as Ottawa Sagaigoning or Lac.
     Radisson reported the party traded two wooden and two ivory combs, red paint and six tin mirrors to the Indians. The combs and paint were "to make themselves beautiful, the looking glasses to admire themselves," he wrote.

Had breached rules

     Before setting out from Montreal, Groseillers and Radisson had breached rules of the French establishment by refusing to take Jesuit missionaries and agents of the governor with them. For this, more than 40 percent of the profits they acquired were confiscated when they returned with a flotilla of Indian canoes laden with prime pelts.
     This revenge of the greedy governor and merchants leagued in the fur trade monopoly initiated what would ultimately bring down the French regime in Canada 100 years later.
     When Louis XIV's court at Versailles refused to renumerate the explorers, the disgusted Groseillers and Radisson took their knowledge of Lake Superior area Indian tribes and its untapped wealth in potential trade to the English in London. They were instrumental in founding Hudson's Bay Company and its competition with the French for the great inland fur trade market.
     The same year Groseillers and Radisson's cargo of beaver pelts saved the French colony from insolvency, seven fur traders -- including Louis Joliet's elder brother, Adrian, and Nicholas Perrot -- went west with the Lac Courte Oreilles Ottawa flotilla.
     A 56-year-old Jesuit, Father Rene Menard, and his lay assistant, Jean Guerin, accompanied them. The missionaries had worked in Huronia and had no illusions about dangers and hardships they would face in Lake Superior country.
     In fact, before leaving the Jesuit asked a priest-friend to remember him in his "Memento for the Dead" in three or four months.

Writes of hardships

     Though he felt he was mistreated by Indians when the small group became separated from the other Frenchmen, Father Menard probably suffered no more discomfort, hardship or hunger than was usual for anyone on such an arduous trip in fragile birch bark canoes.
     As Menard and his three Indian companions skirted the shore of the Upper Michigan peninsula, their canoe was damaged by a falling tree. They were rescued from a gravel beach six days later and spent the winter with Chief LeBrochet's band of Indians at Keweenaw Bay.
     The priest named the bay Ste. Therese in honor of her feast day. He chided the chief for his polygamous union with four or five wives and had to spend the rest of the winter in his own fir-branched hut away from the camp.
     In the spring, Father Menard arrived at the Ottawa village on Chequamegon Bay which also had been renamed -- Bay of the Holy Ghost (Saint Esprit). In July, he and Pierre Lavasseur set out for Lac Courte Oreilles with Indian guides.
     The guides became impatient with the Frenchmen's slow progress and left them along the trail, promising to send other guides. They waited two weeks. Then Levasseur, also known as l'Esperance, found an abandoned canoe along a lake shore and the pair started paddling down the Chippewa River.

Change course on river

     They changed course at either Jump or Yellow Rivers in Taylor County where the canoe was caught in a rapids and whirled downstream. The priest stepped ashore to make it easier for l'Esperance to maneuver through the white water.
     Below the rapids, l'Esperance waited for the Jesuit to make his way through the dense forest. he became alarmed at the delay and fired a fusee and shouted, trying to guide the priest to him. Only echoes answered.
     The Frenchman ran back upstream through the forest searching for the priest. He became alarmed for his won safety as he fought his way through the tangle of trees and underbrush.
     Lost himself in the forest for two days, l'Esperance finally reached the Lac Courte Oreilles village and pleaded for help in searching for the priest.

One agrees to assist

     One Indian finally agreed. A short time later he rushed back to the village, claiming he had seen an Iroquois war party. The despondent Frenchman returned to Chequamegon with sad tidings the priest had vanished and a son of LeBrochet carried the news to Quebec.
     A monument, surrounded with a thousand pine seedlings, was erected to Father Menard's memory near Grandfather Falls on the Wisconsin River north of Merrill in 1928.
     Trouble with Sioux prevented the seven traders from returning to Quebec the following year and, in 1662, the Iroquois did reach the Lake Superior country, intending to attack the fur flotilla as it headed back toward the St. Lawrence.
     A band of Chippewa, Ottawa, Nipissing and Beaver Indians defeated the Iroquois war party at a place on the south shore still identified as Iroquois Point.

Return west again

     After trading and feasting at the Trois Rivieres Fair, the 400 Lake Superior Ottawas returned west in August 1665, accompanied by six more French traders and another Jesuit, Father Claude Jean Allouez.
     They arrived at Chequamegon Bay in October and the priest built a bark chapel and hut, re-establishing the St. Esprit Mission at the Huron village.
     The number of Ottawa living around Fish Creek had been greatly increased by relatives displaced further east by continued Iroquois raids. Other Algonquin tribes, displaced by similar raids in lower Michigan territory, arrived to trade for French goods with the Ottawa and set up temporary villages near the bay.

Describes the Indians

     Father Allouez described these Potawatomi, Illinois, Sauk, Fox, Chippewa and Cree tribes. He also noted the Illini told him they had taken refuge far to the southwest near a great river called "Messipi."
     In spring of 1667, Father Allouez and two Indian guides explored the lake shore on a visit to the Nipissina, north of Lake Nipigon. From these notes, he and another Jesuit, Father Jacques Marquette, drew another remarkable map of the Lake Superior area.
     Marquette had established a mission at Sault Ste. Marie and replaced Father Allouez at St. Esprit Mission in 1669. While at the Sault, Marquette met Louis Joliet, a soldier form the Quebec garrison and, using the Fox-Wisconsin River route, they discovered the Illini's "Messipi" at Prairie du Chien June 17, 1673.

French influence declines

     The French fur trade was beginning to suffer as a result of Radisson's and Groseilliers' defection to the British. To forestall encirclement by the British from Hudson Bay in the north and English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, France claimed the vast hinterland in a unique ceremony a thousand miles west of Quebec on the south side of Sault Ste. Marie June 14, 1671.
     Colbert, the French king's prime minister, dispatched a young nobleman-soldier, Sieur de Saint Lusson, to preside at the ceremony and then explore the south shore of Lake Superior for copper mines and other minerals.

Perrot comes on scene

This is how a drawing by Mrs. Hettie M. Pierce depicted the old French fort at Trempealeau. The site was selected by Nicholas Perrot in 1685 as his winter quarters but the fort was not constructed by Godefroy de Linctot until 46 years later. Its ruins were uncovered in 1881. The site had attracted explorers and settlers for years. Perrot State Park is near the fort site.

     Earlier, he had dispatched Nicholas Perrot to gather delegations and proxies from the "Far Nations." Through Perrot's efforts, 15 tribes were represented -- including the Crees from north of Lake Nipigon, Assiniboins from Lake Winnipeg, Illinois from the Iowa-Illinois region, and Chippewa, Ottawa, Huron, Fox, Menomonee, Mascoutens and Potawatomi from the Wisconsin region.
     The 27-year old Perrot introduced the Mascoutens to flint and steel when he struck fire into his tinderbox. He served as interpreter for Indians at the ceremony, conveying Lusson's words that the Great Father beyond the sea was now their father.

Mighty claim

     Using an old feudal custom, Lusson bent and broke off a bit of sod. Holding it aloft, he proclaimed three times:
     "In the name of the Most High, Most Mighty and most Redoubtable Monarch Louis the XIV, Most Christian King of France and Navarre, we take possession of said place Sainte Marie du Sault, and also of Lake Huron and Superior, the island of Manitoulin and all other countries, rivers, lakes and their tributaries contiguous and adjacent thereto, those discovered and to be discovered, bounded on one side by the Northern and Western seas, and on the other by the South Sea, this land in all its length and breadth."
     During the summer, the Hurons and Ottawa picked a quarrel with formidable neighbors to the west, the Sioux, and had to flee the wrath of these "Iroquois of the West" to Mackinac. Thus ended Father Marquette's mission on Chequamegon Bay.

Chippewa Indians come west

     The Chippewa Indians at the Sault moved westward and filled the territory vacated by fleeing Hurons and Ottawa. They usurped Sioux territory in western Wisconsin and initiated a 180-year enmity between the tribes.
     Daniel Greysolon, Sieur de Lhut, and a band of hardy voyagers mediated a temporary truce between tribes at the foot of Lake Superior in 1679, near the site of his namesake, Duluth. Lake Pepin was probably named for one of the two Pepin brothers who accompanied Greysolon.
     The explorer then accompanied Sioux representatives to their village on Lake Mille Lac and bound the tribe to the French with a re-enactment of Lusson's ceremony.
     After wintering at Chequamegon Bay, du Lhut ascended the Bois Brule, cutting away more than a hundred beaver dams, portaged over the watershed and descended the rapids-filled St. Croix River to its junction with the Mississippi.
     In the meantime, Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, dispatched two voyagers and a Belgian Franciscan, Father Louis Hennepin, from his Ft. Crevecouler headquarters on the Illinois River to explore the upper Mississippi region.

Captured by band of Sioux

     They were captured by a band of Sioux from the village du Lhut had visited the previous summer. Father Hennepin had enough freedom of movement while a captive to explore the Minnesota River and named St. Anthony Falls, site of Minneapolis.
     De Lhut heard about their capture while traveling down the St. Croix. He located them near the mouth of the Wisconsin River, called a council of the Sioux and berated them for this breech of faith. He escorted the priest and Frenchmen up the Wisconsin-Fox river route to winter at Mackinac.
     During his absence, western tribes had again become embroiled, endangering Lake Superior trade routes. Du :hut returned and once more won the Sioux in a new French allegiance.
     He built a wintering trading post he called Fort St. Croix either at the portage on Upper St. Croix Lake or near the present site of Solon Springs.

Perrot wins confidence

     Of all the French explorers who traveled back and forth promoting allegiance and trade with Indian tribes of Wisconsin, none had greater success than Nicholas Perrot, called Mataminens (Little Maize) by the Indians.
     In the summer of 1685, he and his small squad of men built Fort St. Nicholas as a trading center at Prairie du Chien. Moving north, they built a log hut and wintered "at the foot of the mountain behind which was a great prairie abounding in wild beasts - buffalo, elk, deer, bear, cougar and lynx," he reported.
     A hundred Sioux warriors, painted for war against the Fox Indians, found the Frenchmen there and threatened to kill them and pillage their trade goods.

Act convinces Sioux

     Perrot filled a cup with brandy and, while haranguing the Indians, sent one of his men to the river with it to bring him a drink of water. He paused, seemed about to drink, and then thrust into the cup and ember from the fire.
     The sudden magic flames cowed the Sioux and Perrot warned them that if they should lay a finger on him or his goods, he would burn lakes they fished and marshes where they got their wild rice.
     Forty-six years later, Godefroy de Linctot built a small fort among the Sioux at the same location at the mountain whose foot is bathed by water, "La Montagne qui Trempe a Leau." The ruins of this post were uncovered in 1887 and below them was found a hearth stone, probably a remnant of Perrot's cabin.

Continue up river

Rough water made travel difficult for voyagers, particularly on lakes. Wind did not affect them as much on rivers, although going against the current in high water forced them to remain close to shore. They became so skillful they were able to "read" the water by looking, learning to determine channels and trouble spots.

     In spring, Perrot and his men continued up the Mississippi to Lake Pepin. On the Wisconsin shore, they built Fort St. Antoine.
     On May 8, Perrot re-enacted Lusson's ceremony at the Sault 15 years earlier. He claimed for France all interior North America, including country of the Nadouesioux and Riviere de Sainte Croix.
     One of the soldier-voyagers who signed Perrot's territorial manifesto was Pierre Charles le Sueur who was named to succeed du Lhut in governing and protecting the French fur trade interest in the Lake Superior region.
     With orders to keep the Brule-St. Croix water route open tot he French, le Sueur established a trading post on Madeline Island and a fort on an island in the Mississippi near Prescott.

Describes Chippewa trip

     He also explored for ores in Minnesota and western Wisconsin. In autumn of 1700, he described a trip he made up the Bon Lecours (Chippewa River) where he found a lead mine about 13 miles above its confluence with the Mississippi.
     About 30 miles upstream, near a tributary of the Chippewa, possibly the Red Cedar, he reportedly extracted a 60-pound lump of copper.
     French colonists along the St. Lawrence River enjoyed comparative immunity to a succession of European wars in which Louis XIV exhausted resources of France without attaining major objectives.
     However, France lost Newfoundland, Arcadia (Nova Scotia), and the Hudson Bay trade territory to the British in the Treaty of Utrecht.
     The European fur market was glutted and prices sank ruinously. The French king revoked all fur trade licenses and prohibited colonists from taking any goods to the western Indian tribes.

Offends French-Canadiens

     Versailles had ceased to be vitally interested in its Canadian colony and slowly but inevitably, French Canadiens came to believe they were a separate people.
     Methods and customs of the fur traders along water routes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota changes little when the territory came under the English flag after the French and Indian War and later the American flag after the War of Independence.
     It made little difference to the Indians, traders, coureurs de bois, or carefree voyagers whether they traded with or worked for French, English or American companies.
     Hundreds of trading posts and forts were built at strategic points to fortify territorial claims, control the fur trade, and attempt to maintain peace among the Indian tribes.
     Their manes and military personnel would change, depending on which nation controlled the territory.
     Alexander Henry was placed in charge of the Lake Superior trade region when the English took over the territory, In 1766, Jonathan Carver, a colonial mapmaker, helped explore water routes from Prairie du Chien to Lake Superior -- the Chippewa, St. Croix, Namekagon and Brule Rivers.
     While exploring Mississippi headwaters in 1805, Lt. Zubulon M. Pike of the U.S. Army negotiated with the Sioux to obtain land at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers for a future military post. Ft. Snelling was located there 14 years later.

Claims lead to fighting

     Territorial claims of Sioux, Chippewa and Winnebago tribes reached a state of almost continuous hostility. The federal government authorized settling these claims in this section of the Michigan Territory with a treaty between tribes at Prairie du Chien in 1825.
     Boundaries placed on the Chippewa north, Sioux south, and Winnebago est of a common juncture point either where Mud Creek flows into the Chippewa River near Meridean in Dunn County or the mouth of Little Niagara on the university campus here.
     The treaty, signed by representatives of the tribes and the U.S. Gens> William Clark and Lewis Cass, also prohibited unlicensed traders and white settlers in these Indian territories.

Came looking for timber

     But the treaty was hardly ratified before military personnel and fur traders at Prairie du Chien's Fort Crawford initiated a new source of commerce in the territory to the north -- timber products of its vast forests.
     James H. Lockwood, a fur trader and the fort's Indian agent received permission from Sioux and Chippewa chiefs to cut pine on the Chippewa and Red Cedar Rivers and build a sawmill at the site of Menomonie.
     Also as a part of the Prairie du Chien treaty, a trading post was located near the falls on the Chippewa River. Lyman M. Warren was dispatched from the La Pointe post on Madeline Island and was joined at the falls by Jean Brunet, a trader from Prairie du Chien, in 1828.

To head delegation

     Lewis Cass, territorial governor, had become Andrew Jackson's secretary of war. In 1820, he and a 27-year old New York mineralogist, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, led an expedition seeking the source of the Mississippi River. In the interim, Schoolcraft had been appointed Indian agent with headquarters at Sault Ste. Marie.
     Cass now called on Schoolcraft for a special mission -- maintain peace between the Sioux and Chippewa, compile statistics about the Indians, innoculate them against smallpox and investigate fur trade.
     In 1831 and 1832, Schoolcraft, accompanied by Douglas Houghton, physician-botanist-geologist, retraced Carver's route over the Namekagon portage to Lac Courte Orielles and down the Chippewa to the Mississippi. Return trip was by way of the St. Croix and Brule.

Warren accompanies Nicollet agent

     Five years later, Lyman Warren accompanied Joseph N. Nicollet, explorer-scientist, on his expedition to map the region and the Upper Mississippi's hydrographical basin.
     Another Prairie du Chien trader, Louis Demarie, brought his family up the Chippewa River in 1832 and built a trading post on the west bank near the mouth of the Eau Claire River. One account states the Sioux forced him to pay them $300 for the privilege of trading with them. Another source states he made that amount in a profitable winter's trade with the Indian's.
     The family returned to Prairie du Chien the following spring. Demarie, his wife and his family of five sons and three daughters returned to the Chippewa City area when Brunet enlisted old voyagers, trappers and hunters to construct and manage a sawmill erected at the falls after the Treaty of Ft. Snelling in 1837.

Noted for medical folklore

     Mrs. Demarie, a half-breed, was noted for her culture and medical folklore. Their daughters reputedly created great interest among eligible bachelors between Prairie du Chien and the falls.
     Four of Brunet's partners in the sawmill enterprise -- Henry S. Sibley, Hercules L. Dousman, a Col. Aitkens and Warren -- witnessed the Ft. Snelling treaty ceremony presided over by U.S. Commissioner Henry Dodge, governor of the year-old Wisconsin territory.
     Mounting pressure had been exerted in Washington to remove the Indians and open the territory for white settlers and logging commerce.

Gather at Fort Snelling

     A thousand Indians, representing the Chippewa Nation in Wisconsin and Minnesota, pitched tepees outside the walls of Ft. Snelling that July 20. Some 400 curious Sioux pitched an encampment nearby.
     Shielded by a canopy of green boughs laid over a high framework, Dodge opened deliberations with the Chippewa chiefs.
     "This country, as I am informed, is not valuable to you for its game, and not suited to the culture of corn and other agricultural purposes," he said. "Your great Father (in Washington) wishes to purchase your country on the Chippewa and St. Croix Rivers for the advantage of its pine timber, with which it is said to abound."
     Chief Buffalo, venerable and respected head of the Snake River Chippewa, said the Indians were surprised by this proposal and would wait until chiefs and representatives of the Lac Courte Oreilles and Lake Superior Chippewa bands arrived.

Talks resume in five days

     Talks resumed five days later. Ma-ghe-ga-bo of the Leech Lake Pillager band spoke for the Chippewa Nation. Pointing to a map in his hand, he told Gov. Dodge: "My Father, this is the country which is the home of your children. I have covered it with a paper and so soon as I remove the paper the land will be yours.
     "My father, in all the country we sell you, we wish to hold on to that which gives us life -- streams and lakes where we fish and the trees from which we make sugar."
     The governor agreed. Ma-ghe-ga-bo ceremoniously lifted the paper from the map and grasped the commissioner's hand.
     For a vast tract of land stretching from Minnesota's Mille Lacs region to Crandon, Wis., the federal government agreed to pay the Chippewa Nation $870,000 over a 20 year period -- $190,000 in cash, $380,000 in goods, $60,000 for blacksmith shops, $20,000 for farmers, $40,000 in provisions, $10,000 in tobacco, and allotted $100,000 for half-breeds and $70,000 to pay Indian debts claimed by the fur traders.

Chiefs go to Washington

     In August, 26 chiefs of the Wisconsin-Minnesota Sioux Nation were taken to Washington, D.C., where they met President Martin Van Buren and signed a treaty with the secretary of war, ceding about a third of the amount of land purchased from the Chippewa, for almost $1 million.
     Not until 1849 when they were forced off this land in the new State of Wisconsin did the Sioux and Chippewa realize they had also bartered away their earthly heritage.

-- Bill Kelly

Extracted from the Eau Claire Leader Telegram
Special Publication, Our Story 'The Chippewa Valley and Beyond', published 1976
Used with permission.