Readers of Irving’s “Astoria” know how a young German, coming to America in the last year of the Revolution, by accident learned of the possible profits to be won in the fur-trade, and how he presently embarked in it. In the course of twenty-five years he made a million dollars, a colossal private fortune for that day. In 1809 he obtained from the New York legislature a charter, and organized the American Fur Company. The war suspended the development of its plans. In 1816 Mr. John Jacob Astor had little difficulty in securing an act of Congress restricting Indian trade to American citizens. This patriotic statute was intended to put the Northwest Company out of business on American territory. It did, and that company sold out to Mr. Astor all its posts and outfits south of the Canadian boundary at prices satisfactory to the purchaser. In 1821 the Northwest Company was merged into the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The American Fur Company adopted the policy of filling its leading positions with young Americans of good education and enterprise, and taking over the old engagés and voyageurs, inured to the service and useless for any other. These old campaigners easily won over the Indians to the new company and taught them to look to a Great Father at Washington. The chief western stations for the trade of the upper Mississippi were Mackinaw and Prairie du Chien. There was now an “interest” which desired the development of the upper country; and it lost no time in moving on the government. In the year last mentioned (1816) four companies of United States infantry were sent to Prairie du Chien, where they at once built Fort Crawford. In the next year, Pike’s reports having apparently been forgotten, Major Stephen H. Long of the Engineers traveled to Fort Snelling and in his report gave a conditional approval to Pike’s selection of a site for a fort; but it was not till the winter of 1819 that the government was moved to establish a military post at the junction of the St. Peter’s with the Mississippi. Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Leavenworth was ordered February 10 to proceed from Detroit, Michigan, to that point with a detachment of the Fifth Infantry.
Taking the Fox-Wisconsin route, his party of eighty-two persons reached Prairie du Chien July 1. “Scarcely an hour” after his arrival this number was increased by the birth of Charlotte Ouisconsin (Clarke) Van Cleve, long known to all Minnesotians, whose life was not ended till 1907.