THE ENGLISH DOMINION
If the French failed to establish any permanent settlement in
Minnesota, it was not wholly because their passion for trade
discouraged home-building and cultivation; they had interests elsewhere
in America more important than those of the northwest. La Salle’s
proclamation of 1682 asserted dominion of the whole region drained by
the Mississippi and its tributaries. For a time the Ohio was regarded
as the main river and the upper Mississippi as an affluent. Before the
close of the seventeenth century both French and English were awake to
the beauty and richness of the Ohio valley and the Illinois country.
The building of a fort by Cadillac at Detroit in 1701 revealed the firm
purpose of the French to maintain their claim of sovereignty. In the
treaty of Utrecht, 1713, the English, with a long look ahead, secured
the concession that the Iroquois were the “subjects” of England. In a
series of negotiations culminating in a treaty at Lancaster, Pa., the
Iroquois ceded to the English all their lands west of the Alleghanies
and south of the great lakes. On this cession the English put the
liberal construction that the Iroquois were owners of all territory
over which they had extended their victorious forays, and these they
had good right to convey. In 1748 the Ohio Company, formed in Virginia,
sent Christopher Gist to explore the Ohio valley. The next year a
governor of Canada sent an expedition down the Ohio to conciliate the
Indians and to bury leaden plates at chosen points, asserting the
dominion of France. A line of fortified posts was stretched by the
French from Quebec to Fort Charles below St. Louis, on the Mississippi.
When in 1754 a French battalion drove off the party of English
backwoodsmen who had begun the erection of a fort at the forks of the
Ohio, and proceeded to build Fort Duquesne, the French and Indian War
began. The course of this struggle, exceeding by far in point of
magnitude the war of the Revolution, cannot here be followed. At the
close of the campaign of 1757 the French seemed triumphant. In the year
following they lost Fort Duquesne, in 1759 Quebec, and in 1760
Montreal. The power of the French in North America was broken.
Historians of Canada still name the epoch that of “the Conquest.”
The diplomatic settlement of this contest awaited the outcome of a
great war raging in Europe, the so-called Seven Years’ War of Frederick
the Great against Austria, Russia, and France. England was early drawn
into the support of the Prussian monarch, and supplied his military
chest and sent an army to the continent. France presumptuously aspired
to wrest the empire of the seas from Britain, with the result that her
navies were sunk or battered to useless wrecks. In a separate treaty
signed at Paris, February 10, 1763, France surrendered to England all
her possessions and claims east of the Mississippi except the city of
New Orleans and the island embracing it. The British government,
however, was none too desirous to accept this cession. It was a matter
of lively debate in the ministry whether it would not be the better
policy to leave Canada to the French and strip her of her West Indian
possessions. That course might have been adopted, but for the influence
exerted by Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Canada Pamphlet,” which is still
“interesting reading.” Franklin was in England while the question was
pending, and published his views in answer to “Remarks” ascribed to
Edmund Burke.
It may be well to note here that in the year preceding the treaty of
Paris (1762) France had taken the precaution to assign to Spain, by a
secret treaty, all her North American possessions west of the
Mississippi, in order to put them out of the reach of England.
It was the 8th of September, 1760, when the capitulation of Montreal
was signed, turning all Canada over to the British. Five days later
Amherst, the victorious commander, dispatched Major Robert Hayes with
two hundred rangers to take possession of the western posts. Expected
opposition at Detroit was not offered, and that important strategic
point was occupied on November 29. The season was then too late for
further movements, and more than a year passed before garrisons were
established at Mackinaw and Green Bay. The British were none too
welcome among the savages, long accustomed to French dealings and
alliances. But French influence was not what it had formerly been.
During the long struggle for the mastery of the continent the Indian
trade had languished, and in remoter regions the savages had reverted
to their ancient ways and standards of living. The trade revived,
however, under British rule, which brought peace and protection. In
1762 the British commandant gave a permit to a Frenchman named Pinchon
to trade on the Minnesota River, then in Spanish territory. Four years
later the old post on Pigeon River was revived and trade was reopened
in northern Minnesota. Prairie du Chien became in the course of a
decade a village of some three hundred families, mostly French
half-breeds, and remained a supply station for the Indian trade of
southern and central Minnesota till far into the nineteenth century.
The British authorities in Canada indulged no romantic passion to
discover the south or western sea, and were indifferent for a time to
the development and protection of trade in the northwest. This fact
lends brilliance to the adventures of a single American born subject
who in 1766 set out alone for the wilderness, resolved to cross the
Rocky Mountains, descend to the western ocean, and cross the Straits of
Anion to Cathay. Such was the bold enterprise of Jonathan Carver of
Canterbury, Connecticut, at thirty-four years of age. He was not
unlettered, for he had studied medicine; and he was not inexperienced,
for he had served with some distinction as a line officer in a colonial
regiment in the French and Indian War. Departing from Boston in June
(1766), he traveled the usual way by the lakes to Mackinaw, where he
found that versatile Irish gentleman, Major Robert Rogers, his comrade
in arms, in command. There is a tradition, needing confirmation, that
this officer “grub-staked” Carver for trade with the Sioux and possible
operations in land. However, he left Mackinaw in September supplied
with credits on traders for the goods serving for money with Indians,
and taking the Fox-Wisconsin route, found himself at the Falls of St.
Anthony on the 17th of November. Although he estimated the descent of
the cataract at thirty feet, it impressed him only as the striking
feature of a beautiful landscape. “On the whole,” says he, “when the
Falls are included, ... a more pleasing and picturesque view, I
believe, cannot be found throughout the universe.” After a short
excursion above the falls, Carver took his way up the Minnesota, as he
estimated, two hundred miles. He passed the winter with a band of Sioux
Indians which he fails to name, and in a place he does not describe,
and in the spring came down to St. Paul with a party of three hundred,
bringing the remains of their dead to be deposited in the well-known
“Indian mounds” on Dayton’s Bluff. The cave in the white sand rock
entered by him on his upward journey, and which bore his name till
obliterated by railroad cuttings, was nearly beneath the Indian mounds.
His report of a funeral oration delivered here by one of the chiefs so
impressed the German poet Schiller that he wrote his “Song of the
Nadowessee Chief,” which Goethe praised as one of his best. Two very
distinguished Englishmen, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton and Sir John
Herschel, made metrical translations of this poem in the fashion of
their time.
This journey was but a preliminary one to find and explore the
Minnesota valley and acquaint Carver with the tribes dwelling there and
their languages. He had conceived that a short march from the head of
that river would take him to the Missouri. This he would ascend to its
sources in the mountains, and crossing over these he would float down
the Oregon to the ocean. Major Rogers, as he relates, had engaged to
send him supplies to the Falls of St. Anthony. Receiving none, Carver
hastened down to Prairie du Chien, to be again disappointed.
Resolved on prosecuting his great adventure, he decided to apply to the
traders at Pigeon River for the necessary merchandise. Paddling back up
the Mississippi, he took the St. Croix route to Lake Superior, and
coasted along the north shore to that post, only to find, after many
hundred miles of laborious travel, that the traders had no goods to
spare him. He could do nothing but return to his home. In 1768 he went
to England, hoping to interest the government in his project, and in
the following year published his book of travels. It is now known that
little if any of it was his own composition. His account of the customs
of the Indians was pieced together from Charlevoix and Lahontan. But
the work of his editor, a certain Dr. Littsom, was so well done that
“Carver’s Travels” have been more widely read than the original works
drawn upon.
There is very doubtful testimony to the effect that in 1774 the king
made Carver a present of £1373 13s. 8d., and ordered the dispatch of a
public vessel to carry him and a party of one hundred and fifty men by
way of New Orleans to the upper Mississippi, to take possession of
certain lands. The Revolutionary War breaking out, the expedition was
abandoned.
Carver died in poverty in England in 1780, and might be dismissed but
for a sequel which lingers in Minnesota to the present time. After his
death there was brought to day a deed purporting to have been signed by
two Indian chiefs, “at the great cave,” May 1, 1767, conveying to their
“good brother Jonathan” a tract of land lying on the east side of the
Mississippi one hundred miles wide, running from the Falls of St.
Anthony down to the mouth of the Chippeway, embracing nearly two
million acres. A married daughter, by his English wife, and her husband
bargained their alleged interest to a London company for ten per cent.
of the realized profits, but that company soon abandoned their venture.
Carver left behind him an American family, a widow, two sons, and five
daughters. In 1806 one Samuel Peters, an Episcopal clergyman of
Vermont, represented in a petition to Congress that he had acquired the
rights of these heirs to the Carver purchase, and prayed to have it
confirmed to him. This Peters claim was kept before Congress for
seventeen years. In 1822 the Mississippi Land Company was organized in
New York to prosecute it. They seem to have been taken seriously, for
in the next year a Senate committee, in a report of January 23, advised
the rejection of the claim as utterly without merit. But it has been
repeatedly renewed, and doubtless at the present time there are worthy
people dreaming of pleasures and palaces when they come into their
rights.
For the first three years following the Conquest all Canada remained
under military rule. In 1763 George III by proclamation established
four provinces with separate governments, but the great northwest
region was included in none of these. That remained as crown land,
reserved for the use of the Indians under royal protection. All
squatters were ordered to depart and all persons were forbidden to
attempt purchases of land from the Indians. This prohibition alone was
fatal to Carver’s claim. The United States could not possibly confirm a
purchase impossible under English law. It was the express design of the
British government to prevent the thirteen colonies from gaining ground
to the west, and “leave the savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet.”
In 1774, about the time when Parliament was extending its novel sway
over the American colonies, the “Quebec act” was passed. This act
extended the Province of Quebec to the Mississippi and gave to
Minnesota East its first written constitution. This provided for a
government by a governor and an appointed legislative council, but it
was never actually effective west of Lake Michigan.
Under the definitive treaty of peace between Great Britain and the
United States, the dominion of the former over Minnesota East ceased,
but that of the United States government did not immediately supervene.
Virginia under her charter of 1609 had claimed the whole Northwest, and
her army, commanded by General George Rogers Clark, had in 1779
established her power in the Illinois country. Three years later the
county of Illinois was created and an executive appointed by Governor
Patrick Henry. The act of Congress of March 1, 1784, accepting the
cession of her northwestern lands, amounting to a concession of
colorable title, ended Virginia’s technical government in Minnesota
East. From that date to the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 (July 13)
this region remained unorganized Indian country. This great ordinance
made it part of “the Northwest Territory” and gave it a written
constitution. But this was nugatory for the reason that although Great
Britain had in form surrendered the territory in the treaty of 1783,
she continued her occupation for thirteen years longer. Her pretext for
maintaining her garrisons at Detroit, Mackinaw, Green Bay, and
elsewhere was the failure of the United States to prevent the states
from confiscating the estates of loyalists and hindering English
creditors from collecting their debts in full sterling value, as
provided in the treaty. The actual reason was an expectation, or hope,
that affairs would take such a turn that the whole or the greater part
of the Ohio-Illinois country might revert to England. A new British
fort was built on the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio in 1794. The
surrender of this to General Anthony Wayne after the battle of Fallen
Timbers, in August of that year, has been regarded as the last act in
the war of the Revolution. By the Jay treaty it was agreed that the
western posts should be given up to the United 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.