John Lawe (December 6, 1779 - February 11, 1846) was a pioneer fur trader, merchant, land speculator, sawmill owner and judge in Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory. He served in the brief "Rump Council" which may be regarded as the first legislature of what was to become Wisconsin.
Although the family history is fragmentary and contradictory, Lawe seems to have been born December 6, 1779, in Montreal, son of Captain William Lawe (a native of York) and Rachel or Midd Franks, a member of the prominent Jewish Franks family of Quebec and British North America. (David Salisbury Franks was John's great-uncle.) His father died a few years later, and he and his mother joined her brother Jacob Franks, a fur trade clerk in Montreal. Young Lawe became a classmate of Jean Joseph Rolette. In 1790, Lawe's mother went to the East Indies to join another of her brothers, and neither John nor Jacob ever learned what happened to her.
In 1792, Franks' employer sent him to run their trading post in Green Bay. In 1796, Lawe went to work for his uncle on Mackinac Island, and the next year both of them moved to Green Bay permanently; Franks set up his own business, and Lawe clerked for him. For years, Lawe would be sent out to serve as his uncle's agent, wintering at various posts along the Mississippi, Fox and Wisconsin rivers.
In 1805, Franks, Robert Dickson and other traders formed a trading partnership, allocating territories and pooling profits or losses. Lawe went to work for another of the partners, James Aird, whose assigned territory was the Missouri River Valley. In the fall of 1805, Aird led an expedition to spend three years exploring upriver as far as the region later to be known as The Dakotas. This included four flatboats of trade goods, voyageurs and Aird's clerks. In addition to Lawe, these clerks included young Ramsay Crooks. The two became friends on the trip from Green Bay to St. Louis.
When the party came to St. Louis, it was discovered that U.S. president James Madison had recently forbidden British subjects to trade in the Louisiana Purchase. Aird and Crooks were able to come to accommodation with the American authorities, but the emphatically anti-American Lawe was refused, as a British citizen, permission to trade, and returned to Green Bay the next spring, angry and embittered. In 1810, Lawe would encounter Crooks at Mackinac Island, who was part of the Astor Expedition on their way to the Columbia River country. It was only with great difficulty that he was dissuaded from joining the expedition, and as consolation he was made a full partner.
In 1808, Lawe married Thérèse Rankin Grignon (Neckickoqua or "Otter Woman"), daughter of a British trader and Weauwining, a daughter of chief Ashauwbemy of the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwa; and adopted her two children by her prior marriage. They would stay married until Thérèse's death in 1836, and would have eight more children together.
Pro-British traders like Franks and Lawe evaded the Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts, smuggling goods from Montreal into Green Bay and beyond. With the outbreak of the War of 1812, this became more difficult, and the customers dependent on them began to suffer. Despite the shortness of supply, Lawe spent 1812-13 trading somewhere on the Trempealeau River, and came down with something he called "common sickness". As a result, Lawe (by then a lieutenant in the British Indian Department) was unable to join his fellows from Green Bay in the British attack on Detroit. His uncle, who had gone back to Montreal (taking most of their money with him) insisted that Lawe return to Green Bay to trade. He traded, collected money from tenants in his various land holdings, and worked on supplying the Indian Department and the British garrison at Mackinac Island. His commander wrote, toward the end of the war, "Lawe has shown great zeal, in the service of Government during the winter, and is worthy of being promoted, and appointed to conduct the duties of his department at this place. He is, indeed one of the few belonging to the department who are of any service." [1] Lawe and Franks quarreled bitterly over money, and were never reconciled before Franks' 1841 death.
Unlike some of his old partners who left for places like the Red River Colony after the end of the war, Lawe remained in Green Bay (now under increasingly firm American control, especially after the construction of Fort Howard). Policies were unabashedly favorable towards new "Yankee" traders out of the U.S. over the established Green Bay traders like Lawe who were regarded as foreign nationals. And the biggest of these was the arrival of John Jacob Astors American Fur Company (for whom Lawe's old friend Ramsey Crooks was now working), intent on control of the fur trade across the United States.
In 1821, Lawe and some partners organized the Green Bay Company, an "outfit" (as they were called) with an exclusive agreement to trade with and for the AFC; this and similar arrangements would continue for the next two decades. Lawe's assigned territory was the watersheds of the Green Bay and the Wolf River. But the old-style traders chafed under the restrictions imposed by the arrangement with AFC (they'd been accustomed to seek trade wherever they would), and Lawe found himself in a bitter rivalry with old classmate Jean Joseph Rolette, head of the Western Outfit based in Prairie du Chien, who eventually succeeded in restricting the old Green Bay traders to a narrow compass (with tacit support from the company, which was not happy with the "indolence" of the casual, easygoing style they represented, as opposed to the AFC policy of strict economy, deadlines and budgets).
Lawe himself maintained an excellent reputation with those around him, being known for shrewd trading, integrity and generosity towards all manner of neighbors. Entire tribes were said to insist on taking their furs solely to Lawe, and his home in Green Bay maintained a tradition of hospitality, including serving as a smallpox vaccination venue for neighbors. By 1828, federal confirmation of title to lands whose claims he had bought from Franks and other traders made him the largest property owner of the lower Fox River (even though the AFC sometimes managed to foreclose on him to collect particular debts). Almost everybody in the growing area had borrowed money from him, and he donated to local institutions and occasionally paid delinquent taxes for neighbors.
In 1831, Lawe, despite his lack of legal training, was appointed associate justice for Brown County, Michigan Territory, and would retain the sobriquet of "Judge Lawe" from then on. He was elected in 1835 to the so-called "Rump Council", the 7th and last Territorial Council of Michigan, which actually only represented the portions of the old Michigan Territory which were not about to become the new state of Michigan. While he attended the brief session (unlike four of his thirteen colleagues), he mostly voted in the majority, and made no remarks which made it into the council's records (although he did get his son George designated "Assistant Messenger" for the Council).
Increasingly, Lawe would be able to collect his trading debts from the various tribes by levy upon the many annuities payable annually in return for land cessions and peace treaties to which they had agreed. Again, Lawe and his allies felt that Rolette always got favorable treatment. Lawe even made one trip himself to Washington, D.C., in 1837, seeking to collect on claims against the Winnebago tribe. It was his first venture outside the frontier in thirty years. He was described as physically imposing, weighing over 300 pounds, but felt shabby in the face of all the "luxury and superfluity... in great abundance" and became homesick, gratefully returning to Green Bay (without collecting). In addition to land speculation in that portion of Green Bay which American Fur had not seized from him in foreclosure in 1824, Lawe speculated in land in Milwaukee and Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and owned a sawmill in the latter town.
Lawe suffered a heart attack in late 1845 from which he never fully recovered, and died February 11, 1846. Lawe, who was of Jewish background, was baptised a Protestant, and had served as vestryman and treasurer of Wisconsin's first Episcopalian church, was reported to have made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, and was buried in a Catholic cemetery next to Thérèse. Local speculation was that the purpose of his conversion was to allow this burial. [2]
Henry Hastings Sibley was a fur trader with the American Fur Company, the first U.S. Congressional representative for Minnesota Territory, the first governor of the state of Minnesota, and a U.S. military leader in the Dakota War of 1862 and a subsequent expedition into Dakota Territory in 1863.
Jean Nicolet (Nicollet), Sieur de Belleborne was a French coureur des bois noted for exploring Lake Michigan, Mackinac Island, Green Bay, and being the first European to set foot in what is now the U.S. state of Wisconsin.
Hercules Louis Dousman was a fur trader and real-estate speculator who played a large role in the economic development of frontier Wisconsin. He is often called Wisconsin's first millionaire.
Norman Wolfred Kittson was one of early Minnesota's most prominent citizens. He was a fur trader, then a steamboat-line operator and finally a railway entrepreneur and owner of thoroughbred racehorses. He was part of the original syndicate that created the Canadian Pacific Railway. Kittson County, Minnesota is named for him. Norman County, Minnesota also was named for him.
Ramsay Crooks was an American fur trader who immigrated to Canada from Greenock, Scotland. He was the father of American Civil War Colonel William Crooks who served in the 6th Minnesota Regiment. In 1803 Ramsay worked in a trading post on the Great Lakes. He helped W. Price Hunt to organize and lead an overland trip to Astoria in the Oregon Country for John Jacob Astor in 1809 through 1813, as a partner in the Pacific Fur Company. He became general manager of the American Fur Company in 1817 and was president of the company from 1834 to 1839. While traveling for the fur trade company he dealt with many Native American tribes. He married Abanokue, the daughter of an Ojibwa Chieftain. They had a daughter together, Hester Crooks. Abanokue died around 1825. Crooks then married Emilie Pratte and had nine children. He spent his final days in New York.
Fort de Buade was a French fort in the present U.S. state of Michigan's Upper Peninsula across the Straits of Mackinac from the northern tip of lower Michigan's "mitten". It was garrisoned between 1683 and 1701. The city of St. Ignace developed at the site, which also had the historic St. Ignace Mission founded by Jesuits. The fort was named after New France's governor at the time, Louis de Buade de Frontenac.
Jean Joseph Rolette, often known as Joseph Rolette, was a prominent fur trader and member of the Mackinac Company who operated a trading post in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
Joseph Bailly was a fur trader and a member of an important French Canadian family that included his uncle, Charles-François Bailly de Messein.
Magdelaine La Framboise (1780–1846), born Marguerite-Magdelaine Marcot, was one of the most successful fur traders in the Northwest Territory of the United States, in the area of present-day western Michigan. Of mixed Odawa and French descent, she was fluent in the Odawa, French, English and Ojibwe languages of the region, and partnered with her husband. After he was fatally stabbed in the fall of 1806 by a member of the Potawatomi tribe, she successfully managed her fur trade business for more than a decade, even against the competition of John Jacob Astor. After retiring from the trade, she built a fine home on Mackinac Island.
Robert Stuart was a Scottish-born, Canadian and American fur trader, best known as a member of the first European-American party to cross South Pass during an overland expedition from Fort Astoria to Saint Louis in 1811. He was a member of the North West Company (NWC) until recruited by John Jacob Astor to develop the new Pacific Fur Company, which was based at Fort Astoria, on the coast of present-day Oregon. Astor intended the venture to develop a continent-wide commercial empire in fur trading.
Michel Brisbois was a French-Canadian voyageur who was active in the upper Mississippi River valley as early as 1781. Originally a fur trader for the Hudson's Bay Company, he eventually settled in Prairie du Chien, in what became Wisconsin. He had two families, including three children with a Ho-Chunk woman of mixed-race ancestry.
Pierre Chimakadewiiash Bonga was a black trapper and interpreter for the North West Company, based in Canada near Mackinac Island. He later worked for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, primarily along the Red River of the North and near Lake Superior in present-day Wisconsin and Minnesota.
George Bonga was a fur trader, entrepreneur and interpreter for the U.S. government, who was of Ojibwe and African descent, fluent in French, Ojibwemowin and English. At the age of eighteen, he served as an interpreter for Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan Territory during a treaty council with the Ojibwe at Fond du Lac near present-day Duluth, Minnesota. Bonga worked for the American Fur Company from 1820 to 1839, progressing to the role of clerk or sub-trader working under the head trader William Alexander Aitken. In 1837, he was involved in the first criminal trial held in Minnesota when he tracked down and successfully apprehended Che-ga-wa-skung, an Ojibwe man who was wanted for murder, transporting him 250 miles (400 km) back to Fort Snelling.
Henry Samuel Baird Jr. was an Irish American immigrant, Wisconsin pioneer, lawyer, and politician. He was the first Attorney General of the Wisconsin Territory, appointed by territorial governor Henry Dodge. He is known as "Father of the Wisconsin Bar," and was said to be the first practicing lawyer in the Wisconsin Territory.
James Henry Lockwood was an American merchant, lawyer, and Wisconsin pioneer. He was the first permanent resident to practice law within what is now the state of Wisconsin.
Daniel Whitney was an early entrepreneur in territorial Wisconsin, whose businesses were responsible for much of the early development of that state in the period between the War of 1812 and statehood. He was the first "Yankee" to settle in Green Bay. He was the first to start many of the type of business ventures that the state became known for, such as the first lead shot tower and the first saw mill on the Wisconsin River. He was the private founder of the town of Navarino, a direct forerunner to the municipality of Green Bay. He died in 1862 in the home he lived in for over 30 years in Green Bay.
Elizabeth Thérèse Baird was an early resident of Wisconsin and one of the first writers to describe pioneer life in the state.
Alexis Bailly was an American politician and fur trader.
John Francis Meade was a farmer, land speculator and politician from Green Bay, Wisconsin who served a single one-year term as a Democratic member of the Wisconsin State Assembly from Brown County during the 1849 session and held various other public offices in the Territory and State of Wisconsin.
Grey Cloud Woman was the woman for whom Grey Cloud Island in Washington County, Minnesota was named. She was born around 1793 at the village of Prairie du Chien to a Dakota mother, also named Grey Cloud Woman, and a Scottish fur-trading father, James Aird. Grey Cloud lived through the final years when the fur trading economy was dominant in the region around the northern Mississippi River. She married her first husband, English-Canadian fur trader Thomas Gummersall Anderson, while just a young girl of 15. Together, they lived and traveled between several trading posts, including those at Patterson's Rapids and Pike Island. The couple had two children who survived infancy, Angus and Jane. Grey Cloud Woman was directly affected by the War of 1812, when her husband, who fought on behalf of the British, chose to return to Canada rather than live under American rule. Rather than follow him, Grey Cloud Woman separated from him and returned to her parents' home.