Stories of the Badger State Part 5

THE RULE OF JUDGE ReAUME

By the treaty of peace with Great Britain, in 1783, the country northwest of the Ohio River was declared to be a part of the territory of the United States; but it was many years before the Americans had anything more than a nominal control of Wisconsin, which was a part of this Northwestern region. The United States was at first unable to meet all of its obligations under this treaty; hence Great Britain kept possession of the old fur trade posts on the Upper Lakes, including Mackinac, of which Wisconsin was a "dependency." A British garrison was kept at Mackinac, thus controlling the fur trade of this district, but no troops were deemed necessary within Wisconsin itself.

To the few white inhabitants of the small fur trade villages of Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, there was slight evidence of any of these various changes in political ownership. Beyond the brief stay among them of Lieutenant Gorrell and his little band of redcoats, in the years 1761-63, the French and half-breeds of Wisconsin led much the same life as of old.

In 1780, an English fur trader, John Long, pa.s.sed up the Fox River and down the Wisconsin, and bought up a great many furs in this region. Some years later he wrote a book about his travels, and from this we get a very good idea of life among the French and Indians of the Northwest.

Long was at Green Bay for several days, and tells us that the houses there were covered with birch bark, and the rooms were decorated with bows and arrows, guns, and spears. There were in the village not over fifty whites, divided into six or seven families. The men were for the most part engaged as a.s.sistants to the two or three leading traders; they spent their winters in the woods, picking up furs at the Indian camps, and in summer cultivated their narrow strips of gardens which ran down to the river's edge. It mattered little to them who was their political master, so long as they were left to enjoy their simple lives in their own fashion.

To this primitive community there came one day, in 1803, a portly, pompous, bald headed little Frenchman, named Charles Reaume. Wisconsin was then a part of Indiana Territory, of which William Henry Harrison was governor. It was for the most part a wilderness; dense woods and tenantless prairies extended all the way from the narrow clearing at Green Bay to the little settlement at Prairie du Chien. There were small clearings at Portage, Milwaukee, and one or two other fur trading posts.

There was no civil government here, and the few white people in all this vast stretch of country practically made their own laws, each man being judge and jury for himself, so long as he did not interfere with other people's rights.

Reaume bore a commission from Governor Harrison, appointing him justice of the peace at Green Bay, which meant nearly all of the country west of Lake Michigan. Thus "Judge Reaume," as he was called, was the only civil officer in Wisconsin, and although apparently never reappointed, he retained this distinction by popular consent until after the War of 1812-15; indeed, for several years after that, he was the princ.i.p.al officer of justice in these parts.

The judge was a good-hearted man, when one penetrated beneath the crust of official pomposity with which he was generally enveloped. He appears to have owned a volume of Blackstone, but the only law he understood or practiced was the old "Law of Paris," which had governed Canada from the earliest time, and which still rules in the Province of Quebec, and it is related that he knew little of that. His decisions were arbitrary, but were generally based on the right as he saw it, quite regardless of the technicalities of the law.

A great many queer stories are told of old Judge Reaume. He loved display after his simple fashion, and invented for himself an official uniform, which he wore on all public occasions. This consisted of a scarlet frock coat faced with white silk, and gay with spangled b.u.t.tons; it can still be seen in the museum of the State Historical Society. He issued few warrants or subpoenas; it is told of him that whenever he wanted a person to appear before him, either as witness or princ.i.p.al, he sent to that person the constable, bearing his honor's well-known large jackknife, which was quite as effectual as the king's signet ring of olden days.

Quite often did he adjudge guilty both complainant and defendant, obliging them both to pay a fine, or to work so many days in his garden; and sometimes both were acquitted, the constable being ordered to pay the costs. It is even said that the present of a bottle of whisky to the judge was sufficient to insure a favorable decision. The story is told that once, when the judge had actually rendered a decision in a certain case, the person decided against presented the court with a new coffee-pot, whereupon the judgment was reversed.

There may be some exaggeration in these tales of the earliest judge in Wisconsin, but they appear to be in the main substantiated.

Nevertheless, although there doubtless was some grumbling, it speaks well for the old justice of the peace, and for the orderly good nature of this little French community without a jail, that no one appears ever to have questioned the legality of Reaume's decisions. These were strictly abided by, and although he was never reappointed, he held office under both American and British sway, simply because no one was sent to succeed him.

Not only was Reaume Wisconsin's judge and jury during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, but as there was, during much of his time, no priest hereabouts, he drew up marriage contracts, and married and divorced people at will, issued baptismal certificates, and kept a registry of births and deaths. He certified alike to British and American military commissions; drew up contracts between the fur traders and their employees; wrote letters for the _habitants_; and performed for the settlers all those functions of Church and state for which we now require a long list of officials and professional men. He was a picturesque and important functionary, ill.u.s.trating in his person the simple fashions and modest desires of the French who first settled this State. We are now a wealthier people, but certainly there have never been happier times in Wisconsin, all things considered, than in the primitive days of old Judge Reaume and his official jackknife.

THE BRITISH CAPTURE PRAIRIE DU CHIEN

Although the Northwest was obtained for the United States by the treaty with Great Britain in 1783, the fur trade posts on the Upper Great Lakes were openly held by the mother country until the new republic could fully meet its financial obligations to her. After thirteen years, a new treaty (1796) officially recognized American supremacy. Nevertheless, for another thirteen years English fur traders were practically in possession of Wisconsin, operating through French Canadian and half-breed agents, clerks, and _voyageurs_, until John Jacob Astor (1809) organized the American Fur Company, and English fur traders were forbidden to operate here.

The military officers in Canada were firmly convinced that the Americans could not long hold the Northwest. They believed that some day there would be another war, and the country would once more become the property of Great Britain. Therefore they sought to keep on good terms with our Indians and French, giving them presents and employment.

Thus, when our second war with Great Britain did break out, in 1812, nearly all the people living in Wisconsin, and elsewhere in the wild northern parts of the Northwest, were strong friends of the British cause. To them the issue was very clear. British victory meant the perpetuation of old times and old methods, so dear to them and to their ancestors before them. American victory meant the cutting down of the forests, the death knell of the fur trade, and the coming of a swarm of strange people, heretofore almost unknown to Wisconsin. These people had been described to them as an uneasy, selfish, land grabbing folk, who knew not how to enjoy themselves, and were for turning the world upside down with their Yankee notions. Naturally, the easy-going, comfort loving Wisconsin French looked upon their coming with great alarm.

The princ.i.p.al event of the war in Wisconsin was the capture of Prairie du Chien by the British, in 1814. Wisconsin was then a part of Illinois Territory, and west of the Mississippi River lay the enormous Missouri Territory. General William Clark, a younger brother of George Rogers Clark, was governor of Missouri Territory, and had in charge the conduct of military operations along the Upper Mississippi River.

Governor Clark had heard that the British, by this time strongly intrenched on Mackinac Island, intended to send an expedition up the Fox River and down the Wisconsin, to seize upon Prairie du Chien, which had not been fortified since the old French days. Clark recognized that the power that held Prairie du Chien practically held the entire Upper Mississippi River, and controlled the Indians and the fur trade of a vast region. Accordingly, early in June (1814) he ascended the river from his headquarters at St. Louis, with three hundred men in six or eight large boats, including a bullet-proof keel boat, and erected a stockade on the summit of a large Indian mound which lay on the bank of the Mississippi a mile or two above the mouth of the Wisconsin. The name given to this stockade was Fort Shelby. Lieutenant Joseph Perkins was left in charge of the garrison, which was divided between the fort and the keel boat, the latter being anch.o.r.ed out in the Mississippi.

The British expedition from Mackinac had been greatly delayed. During the preceding autumn, Robert d.i.c.kson, an English fur trader, had been engaged in recruiting a large band of Indians in the neighborhood of Green Bay, and with them intended to occupy Prairie du Chien. But the Indians were evidently afraid to fight the Americans, and delayed d.i.c.kson so that the canoes of his party were caught in the ice on Lake Winnebago (December, 1813), and he was obliged to go into winter quarters on Island Park (known to the white pioneers as Garlic Island).

Poor d.i.c.kson had a sorry time with his war party. As soon as it was learned that provisions were being freely given out at this island camp, Indians from long distances came to visit him, under pretense of enlisting under the banner of the British chief. Councils innumerable were held, presents and food had to be given the visitors continually, and d.i.c.kson was put to sore straits to keep them satisfied. He found it impossible to get sufficient supplies from British headquarters on Mackinac Island, and was being severely criticised by the officers there, for his exorbitant demands upon them. Nevertheless, unless he kept his Indians good-natured, they would promptly desert him. He was, therefore, forced to rely upon the French of Green Bay for what food he needed. This came grudgingly, and at so high prices that d.i.c.kson roundly scolded the Green Bay people, and promised to report them for punishment to the British king, for daring to take advantage of his Majesty's necessities.

While d.i.c.kson was thus engaged in Lake Winnebago, a British captain was drilling a number of young Frenchmen at Green Bay, and trying to make soldiers of them; at Mackinac, a similar work was being done among the _voyageurs_ by the two leading fur traders of Prairie du Chien, Brisbois and Rolette. On the other hand, at Prairie du Chien, the American Indian agent, Boilvin, was issuing circulars calling on the people to claim American protection before it was too late.

Late in June the leaders of the expedition started from Mackinac, under the command of Major William McKay, and at Green Bay, Lake Winnebago, and Portage picked up various parties of French and Indians. These bands were much reduced from those who had been so liberally maintained during the winter, for most of the Indians were anxious to keep away from the fighting until it should be evident which side would win, and many of the French were of the same mind. By the time Fox River had been ascended by the fleet of canoes, and the descent of the Wisconsin begun, the allied forces consisted of but a hundred twenty whites and four hundred fifty Indians. All of the latter, according to McKay's report, proved "perfectly useless."

On the 17th of July, the British war party landed at Prairie du Chien, to find the Americans, some sixty or seventy strong, protected by a stockade and two blockhouses, on which were mounted six small cannon. In the river, the keel boat contained perhaps seventy-five men and fourteen cannon. The British had, besides their muskets, only a three-pounder, and the situation did not look promising.

Perkins was summoned to surrender, but he declared that he would "defend to the last man." For two days there was a rather lively discharge of firearms on both sides. Apparently, the British were the better gunners; their cannonading soon forced the men on the keel boat to desert their comrades on sh.o.r.e, and McKay then centered his attention on the fort.

The Indians were unruly, being princ.i.p.ally engaged in plundering the Frenchmen's houses in the village. The British supply of ammunition had quite run out by the evening of the 9th, and McKay was seriously contemplating a retreat, when he was surprised to see a white flag put out by the garrison.

It appears that the stock of food had become exhausted in the fort, and Perkins had formed an exaggerated idea of the strength of the invaders.

The British guaranteed that the Americans should march out of Fort Shelby at eight o'clock in the morning of the 20th, with colors flying and with the honors of war, and that the Indians should be prevented from maltreating them. This last agreement McKay found it very difficult to carry out, for the savages wished, as usual, to ma.s.sacre the prisoners. To the honor of the British, it should be recorded that they exercised great vigilance, and spared neither supplications nor threats, to insure the safety of their prisoners, whom they soon sent down the river to the American post at St. Louis.

When the British flag was run up on the stockade, the name was changed to Fort McKay, in honor of the British leader. During the long autumn and succeeding winter, the British experienced their old difficulties with the Indian allies. The warriors sacked the houses of the French settlers, all over the prairie, and destroyed crops and supplies.

Council after council was held at Fort McKay, and large bands of lazy, quarrelsome savages, encamped about the fort, were fed and were loaded with presents; altogether, the occupation of Wisconsin proved an expensive luxury. It was no doubt with some relief that the British garrison at last learned, late in May 1815, of the treaty of peace signed on the previous 24th of December, and made arrangements to withdraw up the Wisconsin and down the Fox, and across the great lake to Mackinac.

In point of fact, the withdrawal of Captain Bulger, at that time in charge of Fort McKay, was in reality a hasty and undignified retreat from his own allies. The Indians had learned with amazement that the British palefaces were going to surrender to the American palefaces, without showing fight, and simply because somewhere, far away in another part of the world, some other palefaces, whom these Englishmen had never even seen, had held a peace council and buried the hatchet. This sort of thing could not be understood by the savages encamped outside the walls of Fort McKay, save as an evidence of rank cowardice. They called the redcoats a lot of "old women," became insolent, and even threatened them.

Captain Bulger saw that it would not do to await the arrival of the American troops from St. Louis, so he sent an Indian messenger with a letter to the American commander, telling him to help himself to everything in Fort McKay. Then, only forty-eight hours after the arrival of the peace news, he pulled down his flag and hurried home as fast as he could, fearful all the way that an Indian war party might be at his heels. Thus ignominiously ended the last British occupation of Wisconsin.

THE STORY OF THE WISCONSIN LEAD MINES

It was the fur trade that first brought white men to Wisconsin. The daring Nicolet pushed his way through the wilderness, a thousand miles west of the little French settlement at Quebec, solely to introduce the traffic in furs to our savages, and others were not long in following him. Soon it was learned that there were lead mines in what is now southwest Wisconsin.

It is not probable that the aborigines, before the coming of white men, made any other use of lead than from it to fashion a few rude ornaments.

But the French at once recognized the great value of this mineral, in connection with the fur trade. They taught the Indians how to mine it in a crude fashion, and to make it into bullets for the guns which they introduced among them.

The French traders themselves mined a good deal of it for their own use, and shipped it in their canoes to other parts of the West, where there were no lead mines, but where both white men and Indians needed bullets.

For in a remarkably short period nearly all the Indians had turned from their old pursuits of raising maize and pumpkins, and killing just enough game with slings and arrows to supply themselves with skins for their clothing and flesh for their food. They had now become persistent hunters for skins, which they might exchange with white men for European-made guns, ammunition, kettles, spears, cloths, and ornaments.

Some of the Indians in the neighborhood of the lead mines found it more profitable to mine lead for other hunters, than to hunt; hence we find that, at an early date, the mines came to be regarded as the particular property of the Indians, a fact which had considerable influence upon the history of the region. With the French, most of our Wisconsin Indians were quite friendly. The French were kind and obliging, often married and settled among them, and had no thought of driving them away.

They throve upon the fur trade with the Indians, and in general did not care to become farmers. The English and the Americans, on the contrary, felt a contempt for the savages, and did not disguise it; the aim of the Americans, in particular, was gradually to clear the forest, to make farms, and to build villages. In the American scheme of civilization the Indian had no part. Therefore we find that Frenchmen were quite free to work the lead mines in company with the savages; but the Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived on the scene, were obliged to fight for this right. In the end they banished the Indians from the "diggings."

Marquette and Joliet had heard of the lead mines, and of the Frenchmen working at them, when they made their famous canoe trip through Wisconsin, in 1673. Through the rest of the seventeenth century, wherever we pick up any French books of travel in these regions, or any maps of the Upper Mississippi country, we are sure to find frequent, though rather vague, mention of the lead mines.

The first official exploration of them appears to have been made in 1693 by Le Sueur, the French military commandant at Chequamegon Bay, on Lake Superior. He was so impressed by the "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth" which he found all along the banks of the Upper Mississippi, that he went to France to tell the king about his great discoveries, and seek permission to work them. It was forbidden to do anything in New France without the consent of the great French king, although the free and independent fur traders did very much as they pleased out here in the wilderness. But Le Sueur was a soldier, and had to ask permission. Obtaining it, he returned at great expense with thirty miners, who proceeded up the Mississippi from New Orleans; but somehow nothing came of these extensive preparations.

Several French speculators, in succeeding years, thought to make money out of supposed mines of gold, silver, lead, and copper along the upper waters of the Mississippi. Some of them came over from France with bands of miners and little companies of soldiers to guard them; but, like Le Sueur, they spent most of their time and money in exploration, not content with those lead mines that were well known to exist, and invariably left the country in disgust, their money and patience exhausted. Now and then a more practical man came quietly upon the scene, and seemed well satisfied with lead when he could not find gold; most of such miners were French, but a few were Spanish, for Spain then owned all the country lying westward of the Mississippi River.

Occasionally the French commandant at Mackinac or Detroit would come to the mines, and with the aid of his soldiers and the Indians, get out a considerable quant.i.ty of the ore, and take it home with him in his fleet of canoes; or a fur trader would do the same, for the purposes of his own trade with the savages. The little French village of Ste. Genevieve, near St. Louis, had become, by the opening of our Revolutionary War, a considerable lead market, from which shipments were made in flatboats and bateaux down the Mississippi to New Orleans, or up the Ohio to Pittsburg. Lead was, next to peltries, the most important export of the Upper Mississippi region, and throughout the West served as currency.

During the Revolutionary War, the British were at first in command of the upper reaches of the great river, and guarded jealously the approach to the lead mines, for bullets were necessary to the success of the fast growing Kentucky settlements; American military operations against the little British garrisons at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Detroit would be powerless without lead. Gradually the influence of the American fur trade grew among the Indians, and it was not long before the Americans in the West were able to obtain through them all the lead they wanted.

Toward the close of the war, Julien Dubuque, a very energetic French miner, bought up large claims from the Spaniards, in Missouri and Iowa, and for about a quarter of a century was the princ.i.p.al man in the lead region. He was remarkably successful in dealing with the Indians, whom he employed to do the princ.i.p.al work. His mining and trading operations were not confined to the Spanish side of the river, but were carried on in American territory as well, and his influence with the savages for a time prevented American miners and fur traders from obtaining a foothold.

When at last (1804) the United States obtained possession of the lands west of the Mississippi, numerous enterprising Americans forced their way into the lead district. They managed to mine a good deal of the metal, here and there, but frequently met with armed opposition from the Indians. It was fifteen years before the Americans equaled the French Canadians in number. In 1819, the Indian claims to the mining country having at last been purchased by the federal government, there was a general inrush of Americans. Among the earliest and most prominent of these was James W. Shull, the founder of Shullsburg, in Iowa county.

Another man of note was Colonel James Johnson, of Kentucky, who brought negro slaves into the region, to do his heaviest labor, and maintained a fleet of flatboats to carry lead ore from Galena River to St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pittsburg.

At first the operations of Johnson, Shull, and others had to be carried on under military protection; for the Indians, although they had sold their claims, persisted in annoying the newcomers, being urged on by the French miners and traders who were still numerous in the mining country. But so soon as the news spread that a large trade in lead was fast springing up, other Americans began to pour in; mining claims were entered in great numbers, a federal land office was opened, and by 1826 two thousand men, including negro slaves brought in by Kentucky and Missouri operators, were engaged in and about the mines. The following year the town of Galena was founded, and in 1829 there was a stampede thither.