Wisconsin Territory

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WISCONSIN TERRITORY

The Wisconsin Territory was not formed by act of Congress until 1836. It was a part of the Northwest Territory beginning in 1787, the Indiana Territory in 1800, the Illinois Territory in 1809, and the Michigan Territory in 1818. The Wisconsin Territory stretched north to the British-Canadian border and was originally bounded to the west by the Missouri River, although in 1838 an act of Congress made the Mississippi River the official western boundary.

Over twenty thousand American Indians resided in the Wisconsin region in 1768. They belonged to a number of tribes, the largest being the Ojibways, Winnebagos, Potawatomis, and the Sioux river bands in the West. Indians traded furs with British and Montreal-based French traders, who continued to dominate the fur trade even after the United States assumed sovereignty by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The United States did not begin establishing factories to regulate the fur trade in Wisconsin until one was built on Mackinac Island in 1809. The British quickly captured this factory during the War of 1812 but abandoned it after the Treaty of Ghent in 1814.

The fur trade economy relied on buffalo hunts and the importation of foodstuffs to support hunters and traders. White traders often married into Indian families and settled in villages where their mixed-race children were known as Métis. Indian and Métis women had key roles in negotiating accommodation in this society, were included in gift-giving ceremonies, and largely dominated the important process of maple sugar production.

The Fox Indians mined lead in southern Wisconsin in the eighteenth century and in 1788 permitted a French Canadian, Julien Dubuque, to mine there as well. In 1822 a U.S. Indian agent reported to the secretary of war that southern Wisconsin had large quantities of lead ore, and the report subsequently leaked. Over five hundred Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee miners came to southern Wisconsin between 1822 and 1825. By 1829, over four thousand European Americans and one hundred African Americans had arrived from the eastern states and Illinois. Lead miners intruded onto Indian lands secured by treaty, and the Winnebagos began scatter-shot raiding of white settlements. In 1827 a raid led by the Winnebago warrior Red Bird prompted the quick formation of a force numbering over one thousand infantry and cavalry. Red Bird surrendered and the Winnebagos distanced themselves from his raids. In 1829 the United States reached a treaty with the Ojibways, Ottawas, Potawatomis, and Winnebagos that resulted in their surrender of the mining region east of the Mississippi.

bibliography

Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. "To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760–1832." In Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi. Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Wyman, Mark. The Wisconsin Frontier. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

H. Robert Baker

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation