Highlights Archives
Doty's Diary of the 1820 Cass Expedition
Every summer the Society shares an original hand-written journal through its Historic Diaries pages, posting a new entry each day. This summer we've been publishing the journal of the first U.S. expedition to explore our Lake Superior shoreline, kept by young James Duane Doty (1799-1865) from May to August of 1820.
Although Wisconsin became legally part of the United States in 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, in practice it remained a Canadian outpost for another generation because British companies controlled the Wisconsin fur trade. British domination ended with the War of 1812, and after the war the U.S. sent an expedition across the northern lakes to make sure that Indian nations understood that their homelands were being colonized by Washington rather than London.
Future Wisconsin territorial governor, James Doty, hardly out of his teens at the time, was appointed secretary of the expedition. It was headed by Michigan territorial Governor Lewis Cass (1782-1866) and ordered to hold councils with the Lake Superior Ojibwe bands, investigate the natural history of the western Great Lakes and, if possible, locate the source of the Mississippi River. The party traveled more than 1,000 miles in canoes and on foot, going around Michigan into Lake Superior, across the Upper Penninsula past Chequamegon Bay, and deep into the forest to Sandy Lake, Minnesota. They returned down the Mississippi, crossed Wisconsin via Portage and Green Bay, and went back through Mackinac to Detroit (map).
Doty's official diary often comments on his fellow travelers, who included not only Cass but also geologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), West Point professor David Bates Douglass, 10 soldiers, 10 French-Canadian voyageurs, and 10 Ojibwe, Shawnee and Ottawa hunters. Schoolcraft also kept a journal of the trip, and we have included many of his observations in addition to Doty's.
Between them, Doty and Schoolcraft recorded interesting anecdotes such as these:
- On June 9, Schoolcraft told the history of Mackinac as he heard it from residents.
- On June 15 at Sault St. Marie, he met his future wife, an Ojibwe woman whose name meant in English, "The Sound That Stars Make Rushing through the Sky."
- The next day a dramatic confrontation occured when Governor Cass tried to single-handedly impose American authority on local Ojibwe leaders. Only the intervention of an Ojibwe matriarch saved the lives of Doty, Cass and the other American envoys.
- On June 28 the party hiked miles through torrid heat into the mountains of the Upper Peninsula to view an enormous boulder of copper whose legend had been passed down for decades.
In entries to be published in July, they will cruise the Wisconsin shore, including the Apostle Islands, before ascending the St. Louis River at Duluth-Superior. During the month they will also meet an African-American fur trade family, get lost for days in the swamps, mistakenly conclude they discovered the Mississippi's source, describe Fort Snelling as it was being built, and make a temporary peace between the Eastern Dakota (Sioux) and the Lake Superior Ojibwe bands.
Each day we provide the text of Doty's diary, often supplemented by Schoolcraft's, with links to a map showing their location on that date and to the original manuscript journal. You can have each day's installment delivered to you through an RSS feed, or just add the Historic Diaries site to your list of favorites and come back on your own.
For hundreds of other original documents from Wisconsin's past, visit Turning Points in Wisconsin History. To see eyewitness accounts from other voyages of exploration all across North America, from the Vikings in Newfoundland to Mountain Men in 19th-century California, visit our American Journeys site.
:: Posted July 18, 2008
|
