in Wisconsin History
Early U.S. Settlement
After the War of 1812, the U.S. government concluded it had to do more to protect its resources in the Northwest, especially routes used by American fur traders. Garrisons were therefore posted and forts built at Detroit, Mackinac, Chicago, and elsewhere in the West, including at three crucial locations along the Fox-Wisconsin waterway.
Shortly after the British withdrew from Prairie du Chien's Fort McKay in 1815, three permanent military outposts were established in Wisconsin: Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien (1816), Fort Howard at Green Bay (1816), and Fort Winnebago at the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers (1828). Besides offering protection to settlers, these early military posts sponsored much civilian activity. Many enlisted men found themselves building roads, constructing bridges, farming produce, cutting lumber, surveying town lots, or escorting travelers. The forts also served as political and judicial centers, and the presence of the military, particularly the officers and their families, helped set the social tone of the early settlements by promoting education and religion and by hosting social gatherings.
To Native Americans, the U.S. forts represented both commercial opportunity and military oppression. To the frontier French, some of whom had been here for several generations, the posts were unwelcome intrusions, bringing military commanders and American settlers hostile to French land claims and customs. To the English-speaking Yankees and Southerners relocating on the Wisconsin frontier, the forts were cherished bastions of civilization in an unfamiliar wilderness.
The first important U.S. exploring expedition through Wisconsin was Major Zebulon Pike's 1805 trip to find the source of the Mississippi (linked here from our American Journeys digital collection). Fifteen years later Michigan's territorial governor Lewis Cass set out with scientist Henry Schoolcraft, with young James Doty acting as secretary, to travel to the same destination by way of Detroit, hugging Lake Superior's shore. They also intended to assess the condition of the Ojibwe Indians and investigate the reported mineral deposits on the Keweenaw Peninsula of upper Michigan.
One of the most interesting developments in early Wisconsin settlement was the emigration of several Indian communities here during the 1820s. The Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohicans, part of the Oneida nation, and the Brothertown community (a group of Pequot, Niantic, Montauk, and other coastal peoples who'd been given refuge by the Oneida in New York) all came to Wisconsin to escape exploitation in the East. They secured various lands in northeastern Wisconsin from the Menominee and Ho-Chunk and established new communities here on the frontier.
By the time Wisconsin became a territory in 1836, exploitation of the lead region and the commercial potential of harbors on Lake Michigan's shoreline had spawned many new settlements and industries that would transform the region.
[Sources: Wyman, Mark. The Wisconsin Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c1998). Kellogg, Louise Phelps. The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (Madison : State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1925). The History of Wisconsin: volume 1, From Exploration to Statehood by Alice E. Smith. (Madison, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1973)]