SOLOMON JUNEAU, AGED 60.
Unfortunately for the smooth functioning of this operation, the Indians did not care to leave the land on which they and their ancestors had hunted for so long a time, and travel to new hunting grounds. In many instances they were not removed without a show of force, sometimes with considerable blood being shed by both whites and Indians.
In 1825, Lewis Cass and William Clark held a conference of Wisconsin tribes at Prairie du Chien. They hoped to establish definite boundaries for the holdings of the different tribes in order to eliminate friction between them. This would also facilitate future land purchases from the Indians. Roughly these boundaries were recognized: the southwest and southeast corners of Wisconsin were allotted to the southern Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi; the Winnebago held the remainder of southern Wisconsin; the Menomini kept the northeast part of the state from the Milwaukee River up; and the Chippewa held all of northern Wisconsin west of the Menomini. These Indian territories were not to be respected for very long by white squatters, however, and the Winnebago were to be among the first to encounter trouble from this source.
The fact that southwestern Wisconsin was very rich in lead was discovered quite early in the French regime, and it is probable that the French taught the Indians how to mine and smelt the ore. By 1811, the Sauk and Fox are reported to have devoted almost all their attention to lead mining, only hunting to supply themselves with meat. They exchanged the metal with Canadian traders for the goods they needed. Some early American traders who attempted to get in on this trade were killed by the Indians, who feared that once the Americans learned of the value of the lead deposits their cupidity would be aroused and the Indians would lose their land. Later events were to prove the excellence of this reasoning.
Aroused by the rich deposits, Cornish miners, particularly, began to arrive in force by 1827. The Indians were rudely expelled from their diggings and their mines appropriated by armed whites. In the same year, Red Bird, a young Winnebago chief, killed two settlers and scalped a baby who, interestingly enough, survived to become the mother of a large family and live to a ripe old age. Following this attack Red Bird and his warriors, about forty in number, celebrated the scalp taking with a drunken carousal at the mouth of the Bad Axe River, about forty miles north of Prairie du Chien. Two keelboats on their way from Fort Snelling to St. Louis were fired upon by the drunken Winnebago braves, and after a battle of about three hours, the keelboats escaped with a loss of four men dead and several wounded. The Indians were reported to have suffered losses of seven dead and fourteen wounded.
JUNEAU’S TRADING POST, MILWAUKEE (PAINTING BY A. O. TIEMANN).
MENOMINI INDIANS OF THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY (PORTRAIT BY S. M. BROOKS).
