A period of thirty years intervened between the arrival of Colonel Leavenworth’s battalion at Fort Snelling in 1819, and the establishment of the Territory of Minnesota. The events of the period are too slightly related to the subsequent history of the state to call for minute narration in the way of annals, and may preferably be grouped under a few heads for compendious treatment.
When Colonel Leavenworth was starting from Detroit, Michigan, he was intrusted by the governor of the Territory of Michigan with blank commissions for appointive county officers for Crawford County, included in that territory. This duty was performed at Prairie du Chien, and justice was established in Minnesota East. That region had previously been successively within the jurisdiction of the Northwest, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois territories. Minnesota West at the same time was part of Missouri Territory, and previous to 1812 had been in the Territory of Louisiana. There was, however, slight occasion for the exercise of civil or judicial functions in the upper Mississippi country.
The American Fur Company had succeeded not merely to the business of the “old Northwest Company,” but to its quasi-political control. The chief factor at Mendota, and his subordinate traders at the more important trading places, exercised a control over the Indians and half-breeds which government officials, civil and military, vainly endeavored to win from them. The few whites in the region, aside from the garrison of the fort, were at the first traders’ employees; later a handful of missionaries acceded, and still later an advance guard of settlers, mostly lumbermen and Selkirk refugees. The dominance of the fur company and its principal agents was in great part due, as already suggested, to a policy inherited from the Northwest Company of retaining in service the old French and half-breed voyageurs, and filling the clerical and managing places with young Americans of ability and enterprise. Such men would have been leaders anywhere. The chief factor at Mendota was the great man of the Sioux country; his colleague at Fond du Lac held a like relation in the country of the Chippeways. They furnished their licensed traders with their outfits, assigned them their respective districts, served as their bankers, and exercised over them an interested supervision. The fidelity of these subordinates was such as to form them into an effective combination, which after a few futile attempts at competition gave the American Fur Company a complete monopoly.