of the most successful established by the Jesuits in the West, gathered a group of traders who formed a settlement that for many years existed as a transient post and store-house for trappers.
Father Marquette, forced in 1671 by Indian wars to abandon his post on Chequamegon Bay, settled with the Huron at the Straits of Mackinac, whence in May 1673 accompanied by Louis Joliet he set out for the Mississippi river. They halted at De Pere, set off down the Fox-Wisconsin route, followed the Wisconsin to its mouth and came out upon the Mississippi near the site of the present city of Prairie du Chien, on July 17th, exactly two months after they left St Ignace mission on Mackinac Island. After descending the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas they returned by way of the Des Plaines portage, paddled along the western shore of Lake Michigan, and arrived at De Pere. In September 1679 Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, and Henri de Tonty entered the mouth of the Fox river in the “Griffon,” the first ship to sail the Great Lakes. In the same year Daniel Greysolon Du Luth, a coureur de bois, explored the upper Mississippi and the Wisconsin and Black rivers. In 1680 Father Louis Hennepin, a Recollet Franciscan who had accompanied La Salle, followed the Mississippi northward from the mouth of the Illinois along the western border of Wisconsin to the site of the present city of St Paul. The same course was followed by the fur-trader, Pierre Charles Le Sueur, in 1683.
In 1671 Simon François Daumont Saint-Lusson at Sault Ste Marie had taken formal possession of the region in the name of the king of France; in 1685 Nicolas Perrot (1644-c. 1700), a trader who had first visited the wilds of Wisconsin probably as early as 1665, was appointed “commandant of the West,” and this event closes the period of exploration and begins that of actual occupation. Traders had begun to swarm into the country in increasing numbers, and to protect them from the Indians and to control properly the licensed fur-trade a military force was necessary. Perrot built a chain of forts along the Mississippi and a post (the present Galena, Illinois) near the southern boundary of the state, where he discovered and worked a lead mine. In 1712 the slaughter of a band of Foxes near Detroit was the signal for hostilities which lasted almost continuously until 1740,[1] and in which every tribe in the Wisconsin country was sooner or later involved either in alliance with the Foxes or with the French; the Chippewa, always hostile to the Foxes, the Potawatomi and the Menominee sided with the French. This war seriously interfered with the French plans of trade development and exploitation, and by rendering difficult the maintenance of a chain of settlements which might have connected Canada and Louisiana was a contributing cause of the final overthrow of French dominion. In this period permanent military posts were established at Green Bay and Chequamegon (1718); in 1718 it was reported that traders had settled at Green Bay and De Pere; in 1727 a post was established on Lake Pepin.
Wisconsin was little disturbed by the Seven Years' War. Yet the French and Indians of Wisconsin contributed their quota to the French armies—a force of half-breeds and Indians under a half-breed, Charles Michel de Langlade (1729-1800). After the fall of Montreal (Sept. 1760) Robert Rogers, who had been sent to Detroit to occupy the French posts in the West, dispatched Captain Henry Balfour with a force of British and Colonial troops to garrison Mackinac and the Wisconsin posts which had been dismantled and were almost deserted. He arrived at La Baye (Green Bay) in October 1761, and left there a garrison under Lieut. James Gorrell of the 60th (Royal American Foot) Regiment. The traders who accompanied them were the nucleus of the first English-speaking colony on Wisconsin soil. The French fort was rechristened Fort Edward Augustus. The period of British occupation was brief. On the outbreak of the conspiracy of Pontiac Lieut. Gorrell was compelled (in July 1763) to evacuate the fort, and make his way to Montreal.[2] When the conspiracy was crushed in 1765, Wisconsin was reopened for traders, and not only French but American merchants and travellers flocked into the region. Among these were Alexander Henry (1739-1824), who as early as 1760 had visited the site of Milwaukee, and who now obtained a monopoly of the Lake Superior trade, and Jonathan Carver (q.v.), who in 1766 reached Green Bay on his way to the Mississippi.
In 1774 was passed the Quebec Act for the government of the Province of Quebec into which the Wisconsin region was incorporated by this act, but it had little effect on the French settlements west of Lake Michigan, which remained throughout the entire British period a group of detached and periodically self-governing communities. Little as they cared for their British rulers the Wisconsin voyageurs and habitans, influenced probably by their cupidity and by actual money payments, for the most part adhered to the British cause during the War of Independence. De Langlade led his French and Indian forces against the American frontier communities west of the Alleghanies. This pro-British spirit, however, did not dominate the whole Wisconsin region, and while De Langlade was harassing the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier, Godefrey de Linctot, a trader of Prairie du Chien, acting as agent for George Rogers Clark, detached several western tribes from the British adherence, and personally led a band of French settlers to his aid. The close of the war, although it conveyed the region to the sovereignty of the United States, was not followed by American occupation. In this period, however, the fur-trade assumed proportions of greater importance, and trading posts were established by the North-west Company (Canadian). In 1786 a more systematic attempt was made to work the lead mines by Julien Dubuque, who obtained the privilege from the Indians. In 1787 Wisconsin became part of the North-west Territory, but it was not until after the ratification of Jay's treaty that in 1796 the western posts were evacuated by the British. Before the actual military occupation (1816) by the United States, American traders had begun to enter into a sharp rivalry for the Indian trade. In 1800 Wisconsin was included in the newly organized Indiana Territory; and in 1809 on the admission of Indiana as a state it was attached to Illinois. During the second war with Great Britain, the Wisconsin Indians and French settlers generally sided with the British, and in 1814 many of them participated in Major William McKay's expedition against Fort Shelby at Prairie du Chien. In 1816 Fort Howard was built at Green Bay, and Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien. In the same year was confirmed the treaty negotiated in 1804 by William Henry Harrison, by the terms of which the Indian title to the lead region was extinguished. In 1810 the product of lead had been about 400,000 ℔, largely mined and smelted by Indians, but the output was now increased enormously by the American miners who introduced new machinery and new methods, and by 1820 there were several thousand miners in the region, including negro slaves who had been brought north by Southern prospectors from Kentucky and Missouri. In 1818 Illinois was admitted to the Union and Wisconsin was incorporated in Michigan Territory, and at that time American civil government in the Wisconsin region was first established on an orderly and permanent basis. Wisconsin then comprised two counties, Brown (east) and Crawford (west), with county seats at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Until 1830 the fur-trade, controlled largely by John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, continued to be the predominating interest in the Wisconsin region, but then the growing lead mining industry began to overshadow the fur-trade, and in the mining region towns and smelting furnaces were rapidly built. Indian miners were soon driven out of business and were nearly crowded out of their homes. Friction between the settlers and the Indians could not long be avoided, and in 1827 Red Bird and his band of Winnebago attacked the whites, but after some bloodshed they were defeated by Major William Whistler (1780-1863) of Fort Howard. Five years later occurred a more serious revolt, the Black Hawk War (see Black Hawk), which also grew out of the dispute over the mineral lands.
