Minnesota. Folwell William Watts
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