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View of Prairie du Chien, 1836

Drawing of Prairie du Chien in 1836. "From an old cut." View the original source document: WHI 41976

Rev. Samuel Peters (1735-1825) named his hypothetical 10,000-square-mile empire in northern Wisconsin "Petersylvania." Like most dreams, it didn't come true. But it's an amazing story.

Jonathan Carver

It all began with Jonathan Carver (1710-1780), the first English-speaking traveler to journey through Wisconsin. Carver crossed from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien in 1766-1767 on reconnaissance for a military expedition. He then went up the Mississippi to the site of modern St. Paul, where he was supposed to meet supporters with enough supplies for a trip overland to the Pacific. When the supplies didn't show up, he went home by skirting Lake Superior's southern shore and voyaging down the Great Lakes to the East. He continued on to England where he hoped to be reimbursed for his expenses by the government. By then, however, the American colonies had rebelled and the government had bigger problems than the far western wilderness. Carver died in poverty in 1780, but not before writing a bestseller called "Travels through the Interior Parts of North America."

A Good Deed

In the introduction to the third (1781) edition of Carver's book, which came out shortly after his death, Carver's editor claimed to have seen a deed supposedly dated at the "Great Cave, May the 1st, 1767" in which Sioux chiefs gave Carver and his family "the whole of a certain tract or territory of land." On a modern map, the territory described in the deed stretches from Minneapolis southeast to Pepin, then due east to near Stevens Point, and from there northwest roughly through Eau Claire and back to Minneapolis. Unfortunately the deed vanished after the death of Carver's widow, whom the editor confessed he had seldom seen when she was not drunk.

Carver's heirs were excited to learn that they possessed 10,000 square miles of North American real estate, and they hired a London agent to search for the deed. They engaged Rev. Samuel Peters (1735-1825), a Connecticut Loyalist who had fled to England during the Revolution. In exchange for large amounts of territory and cash advances, he became the principal advocate for the legitimacy of the so-called Carver Grant. He couldn't find the deed in England, but he returned home to the U.S. anyway and in 1804 began to besiege the U.S. Congress with requests to honor the Carver claim.

Petersylvania

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Plan of Captain Carver's Travels in the Interior Parts of North America, 1778.

Hand-colored map, made in London. View the original source document: WHI 73106

Rev. Peters also advertised the vast potential of the region, which he christened Petersylvania, in order to attract investors. He claimed he was starting a religious colony, complete with missions, vocational schools to teach Indians how to farm and a college to educate them in Christian ways. With Carver's heirs and other investors, Rev. Peters badgered lawmakers in vain to legitimize the title to Petersylvania. After the War of 1812, Congress decided that the petitioners needed Sioux leaders to verify the deed's existence and agree to its terms.

So in the summer of 1817 two groups set out independently to consult the Sioux. The first group, led by two of Carver's grandsons, made it to modern St. Paul where Sioux elders told them that no chiefs with the names on the supposed deed had ever existed. Rev. Peters, then 83 years old, headed west separately by steamship, wagon and canoe hoping to find Indian elders who would remember Carver and prove his claim. He took with him a young Vermonter named Willard Keyes, who kept a diary of the trip (now online in our "Wisconsin Magazine of History"). They made it as far as Prairie du Chien, where the commander of Fort Crawford refused to allow them to go up the Mississippi during tense times on the frontier.

Disappointment

After lingering a few months in Prairie du Chien, Rev. Peters returned east, where Congress finally concluded on January 29, 1823, that he and Carver's heirs had no legitimate rights to any lands in Wisconsin or Minnesota. They argued that English law at the time of Carver's visit prohibited any land grants to private individuals, so even if a deed had existed it would be invalid. They further pointed out that Carver himself had never made any mention of such a grant in his book or afterwards, and that no Indians could be found who had any knowledge of such a transaction having been made. There was simply no legal evidence to support Rev. Peters' claims for Petersylvania.

However, the decision didn't prevent unscrupulous real estate speculators from offering parts of Carver's Grant for sale to unsuspecting investors for another half-century.

[Sources: Parker, Robert, ed. The Journals of Jonathan Carver (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1976): 47-51; Middlebrook, Samuel. "Samuel Peters: A Yankee Munchausen." The New England Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Mar., 1947), pp. 75-87; Quaife, Milo M. "Jonathan Carver and the Carver Grant." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Jun., 1920), pp. 3-25.]

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Jonathan Carver

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