Minnesota. Folwell William Watts

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СКАЧАТЬ States, and on or about the 12th of July, 1796, the British commanders hauled down their flags and marched out their garrisons.

      There was a powerful interest which had encouraged the British authorities to hold their grip on the Northwest. The revival of the fur-trade after the Conquest was tardy, but soon after Carver’s time a notable development took place. Another Connecticut Yankee, Peter Pond by name, in 1774 established a trading post at Traverse des Sioux on the Minnesota. On a map left by him it is marked “Fort Pond.” The trade west of the lakes, however, early fell into the hands of adventurous Scotchmen of Montreal, among whom competition became so sharp as to lead to what would have been called, a hundred years later, a “trust” or “combine.” An informal agreement between the principal traders at Montreal ripened, in 1787, into “The Northwest Company,” with headquarters in that city. This company promptly and effectually organized the northwestern fur-trade. It established a hierarchy of posts and stations, and introduced a quasi-military administration of the employees. It wisely took into its service the old French and half-breed “engagés and voyageurs,” and rewarded them so liberally as to win them from illicit traffic. For forty years the Northwest Company was the ruling power west of the lakes, although it had not, as had the Hudson’s Bay Company, its model, any authorized political functions. Its policy and discipline served in place of laws and police.

      The greater distributing and collecting ports were Detroit, Mackinaw, and Fort William; and next in importance were such places as La Pointe, Fond du Lac, and Prairie du Chien, from which the trade of the upper Mississippi was managed. Fond du Lac, near the mouth of the St. Louis River, at the head of Lake Superior, was the gateway to an immense region abounding in the finest peltries and occupied by a large Chippeway population, eager to buy the white man’s guns and ammunition, knives, kettles, tobacco, and, most dearly prized of all, his deadly fire-water. From Fond du Lac there was a canoe route to the lakes which are the proximate sources of the great river. It led up the St. Louis River to the mouth of the East Savanna near the Floodwood railroad station. From the head of the East Savanna a short portage led to the West Savanna, an affluent of Prairie River which empties into Sandy Lake, near the southwest corner of Aitkin County. That water covers near half a township and discharges by a short outlet into the Mississippi, some twenty-five miles above the village and railroad station of Aitkin. Here in 1794 the Sandy Lake post of the Northwest Company was built. There was a stockade one hundred feet square, of hewn logs one foot square, and thirteen feet out of ground. Within were the necessary buildings, and without, fenced in, a considerable garden. From Sandy Lake radiated numerous “jackknife posts,” where the bushrangers wintered and swapped gewgaws for pelts. For many years Sandy Lake was the most important point in Minnesota, the chief factor there the big man of the Chippeway country.

      CHAPTER III

      MINNESOTA WEST ANNEXED

      The reader is asked to recall the cession by France, in 1762, of her American territory west of the Mississippi to Spain. The French population of Louisiana, resenting this arbitrary transfer, drove out the Spanish governor who came in 1766, and organized for a free state under French protection. In 1769 a Spanish fleet of twenty-four sail, bringing an army of twenty-six hundred men and fifty cannon, under the command of a forceful captain-general, securely established the power of Spain. The laws of Castile, derived from the civil code of Rome, were put in force, and they continue in force to the present day. By a line about on the latitude of Memphis a province of Upper Louisiana was set apart and placed under the control of a lieutenant-governor residing at St. Louis. Minnesota West was of course a part of this jurisdiction.

      In the last years of the eighteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte was absolute in France, although not yet crowned emperor. Among the schemes with which his imagination was busied was one to establish another new France on the western continent. Louisiana had been a costly dependency for Spain, and it was only by a reluctant but timely concession of the right of navigation and deposit that an armed descent of Americans from the Ohio valley on New Orleans had been averted. That would have put an end to Spanish rule. Spain willingly retroceded to France for a nominal consideration, by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso, March 13, 1801. Already Napoleon had formed a definite plan and begun preparations to send 25,000 veteran soldiers to Louisiana, under convoy of a powerful fleet. His secret could not be kept, and England made ready to attack the expedition at sea. Napoleon had reason to expect that she would descend on New Orleans herself, and take possession of the province. While he was in this frame of mind the American minister, under instructions, expressed the desire of his government to buy the city and island of New Orleans and thus make the Mississippi the international boundary to its mouth. To his surprise Napoleon offered to sell the whole province, spite of his agreement with Spain never to cede to any other power. The Louisiana purchase was consummated by treaty April 30, 1803. Meantime the province had remained in the possession of Spain, and it was not till November 30 that she turned New Orleans over to the French. Twenty days later the United States came into possession. The upper province of Louisiana was held but one day by a French commissary, who on March 10, 1804, at St. Louis, conveyed it to the United States. The cost to the government was three and six tenths cents per acre.

      The actual surrender of Upper Louisiana in 1804 added geographically Minnesota West, included in that province, to Minnesota East, then part of Crawford County, Indiana. The whole region was still occupied by aborigines, and a generation was to pass before any of it became white man’s country. Two great nations divided the territory: the Chippeways, of Algonquin stock, occupying the north and east; the Sioux or Dakotas the south and west. Both were immigrant from early eastern habitats, the Chippeways moving north of the lakes (Lake Superior split the stream), the Sioux south of the same. When first seen by white men, the latter held the country about the sources of the Mississippi, the head of Lake Superior, and to the St. Croix. The Chippeways were first to obtain guns from the white man, and began at once to push the Sioux before them. In Hennepin’s time (1680) the principal villages of the Sioux were in the Mille Lacs region. By the close of the Revolutionary War the Chippeways had driven them south of the Crow Wing and west of the Mississippi, leaving them only a precarious hold on the margin of their old hunting grounds. From their earliest encounters the two nations had been unremitting foes. But for occasional truces they were always at war; and this perennial feud did not cease till the government in 1863 moved the Sioux beyond the Missouri, out of the reach of the Chippeways. The two nations possessed in common the well-known characteristics of the red man, physical, mental, and social, but a difference of environment had established marked peculiarities. The Chippeways were men of the forest and stream; their women gathered wild rice, excellent for food. The Sioux, men of the prairie, were the taller and more agile, but the Chippeways outmatched them for strength and endurance.

      Both peoples had already been profoundly affected by contact with white men. If the missionary had not broken the power of the medicine-man and converted them to the true faith, the trader had revolutionized their whole manner of life. He had given the Indian the gun for his bow and arrows, axes and knives of steel for those of stone, and the iron kettle for the earthen pot. The Mackinaw blanket and the trader’s strouds had replaced garments made from skins, and ornaments of shell and feathers had given way to those of metal and glass.

      Before the trader the Indian had hunted for subsistence, content when he had supplied his family and dependents with food and clothing. The trader made him a pot-hunter, killing mostly for the skins alone. Game animals became scarce about the villages, and hunting expeditions had to be made to distant grounds, where the enemies’ parties would be met and fought. The Indian had become a vassal to the trader, who outfitted him for the hunt, and at its end took his furs in payment at rates little understood by the man who did not know that the white metal was worth more than the red. If anything remained from the Indian’s pack it was very likely to be forthwith spent for the highly diluted whiskey of the trader. The Indian’s fondness for spirits and their effects was at least equal to the white man’s, and he had not become immune from immemorial indulgence. The resulting crime and misery are beyond description, – conception, almost. And the trader’s excuse was that the Indians would not trade if whiskey was not furnished, and that it was absurd for one to refuse it when all СКАЧАТЬ