19 (page [page 18]).—Joseph Rolette was a prominent fur trader of Prairie du Chien, and one of the most marked characters among the French Canadians of Wisconsin during the first third of the nineteenth century. In the War of 1812-15, he held a commission in the British Indian department, and piloted the British troops in their attack on Prairie du Chien in 1814.
20 (page [page 20]).—Rev. Richard Fish Cadle organized the Episcopalian parish of St. Paul’s, in Detroit, November 22, 1824. In 1828, his health failing, he went to Green Bay in company with his sister Sarah, and established an Indian mission school at the now abandoned barracks of Camp Smith (see [Note 15]). During the winter of 1828-29, the United States government granted a small tract of land for the purpose, and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of his church erected suitable buildings thereon. In 1838 the Cadles withdrew from the work, which had not met with great success. The Indians were either indifferent to the scheme or bitterly opposed to it, objecting to rigid discipline being applied to their children. The French also disliked the enterprise, both because it was a Protestant mission and because it did not accord with their notions of the fitness of things. Solomon Juneau, the founder of Milwaukee, once wrote: “As to the little savages whom you ask about for Mr. Cadle, I have spoken to several, and they tell me with satisfaction that they are much happier in their present situation than in learning geography.” Mr. Cadle suffered greatly in health because of the ceaseless worry of his untenable position; but no doubt many of his troubles were the result of his own highly nervous temperament. The mission was carried on by others until 1840, and then succumbed.
21 (page [page 21]).—Reference is here made to Ursula M. Grignon, daughter of Louis Grignon, a Green Bay fur-trader, and grandson of Charles de Langlade, the first permanent white settler in Wisconsin. Later, Miss Grignon returned to her family at Green Bay, where she died February 22, 1887.
22 (page [page 22]).—Elizabeth Thérèse Baird was born at Prairie du Chien, April 24, 1810, a daughter of Henry Munro Fisher, a prominent Scotch fur-trader in the employ of the American Fur Company. On her mother’s side she was a descendant of an Ottawa chief, Kewaniquot (Returning Cloud), and related to Madame Laframboise (see [Note 7]). Marrying Henry S. Baird, a young lawyer of Mackinac Island, in 1824, when but fourteen years of age, the couple at once took up their residence at Green Bay. Baird was the first regularly trained legal practitioner in Wisconsin, and attained considerable prominence in the political life of the new territory. He died in 1875. Mrs. Baird was one of the most remarkable pioneer women of the Northwest; she was of charming personality and excellent education, proud of her trace of Indian blood, and had a wide acquaintance with the principal men and women of early Wisconsin. Her reminiscences, published in vols. xiv and xv of the Wisconsin Historical Collections, are as interesting and valuable of their kind as Wau-Bun itself. She died at Green Bay, November 5, 1890.
23 (page [page 23]).—Mrs. Samuel W. Beall. Her husband was a lawyer from Virginia, and she a niece of Fenimore Cooper, the novelist. In 1835, the Bealls, who were prominent in the social life of Green Bay, became rich through land speculation, but subsequently lost the greater part of their fortune. Beall was shot dead, in the Far West, in some border disturbance, and his wife devoted the remainder of her life to charitable work.
24 (page [page 25])—Major David Emanuel Twiggs was born in Georgia, and entered the army as captain of infantry in 1812. He became major of the Twenty-eighth Infantry in 1814; lieutenant-colonel of the Fourth Infantry in 1831; colonel of the Second Dragoons in 1836; brigadier-general in June, 1846; and for gallant and meritorious conduct at Monterey was brevetted major-general in September of the same year. Twiggs was dismissed the service in March, 1861, having while on command in the South surrendered army stores to the Confederates. He served as major-general in the Confederate army from 1861-65.
25 (page [page 27]).—Wife of Lewis Cass, then governor of Michigan.
26 (page [page 27]).—Charles Réaume was born of good family about 1752, at La Prairie, opposite Montreal. In 1778 we find him at Detroit as a captain in the British Indian department, in which capacity he accompanied Lieutenant-Governor Henry Hamilton in the expedition against Vincennes in December of that year. When George Rogers Clark captured Vincennes in the following February, Réaume was among the prisoners, but was allowed to return to Detroit upon parole. He appears to have settled at Green Bay about 1790, and it is thought received his first commission as justice of the peace from the British authorities at Detroit. About 1801 he received a similar appointment from William Henry Harrison, then governor of Indiana Territory, of which what is now Wisconsin was then a part. In 1818, Governor Cass, of Michigan Territory, appointed him one of the associate justices for Brown County, of which Green Bay was the seat. In the same year he removed to Little Kaukaulin, ten miles up Fox River from Green Bay, and there engaged in trade with the Indians, in the course of which he fell into drunken habits. In the spring of 1822 he was found dead in his lonely cabin. He was unmarried. Réaume, as stated by Mrs. Kinzie, administered justice in a primitive fashion. During much of his career as a petty magistrate, he was the only civil officer west of Lake Michigan. Ungoverned by statutes or by supervision, he married, divorced, even baptized, his people at will, and was notary and general clerical functionary for the entire population, white and red. He is one of the picturesque characters in Wisconsin history.
27 (page [page 28]).—The father of Nicholas Boilvin was a resident of Quebec during the American Revolution. Upon the declaration of peace, Nicholas went to the Northwest, and engaged in the Indian trade. He obtained from the United States government the position of Indian agent, and in 1810 went to Prairie du Chien. In 1814, when the British attacked that post, Boilvin and his family, with other Americans, retired to a gunboat in the Mississippi River and fled to St. Louis. In addition to his Indian agency, Boilvin was a justice of the peace, his first commission being issued by the authorities of Illinois Territory in 1809. He died in the summer of 1827 on a Mississippi River keel-boat, while en route for St. Louis. At one time he furnished the war department with a Winnebago vocabulary.