The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991

Apprentice Trader: Henry H. Sibley and American Fur at Mackinac

Apprentice Trader: Henry H. Sibley and American Fur at Mackinac Rhoda R. Gilman The political power wielded by large fur companies in the northwestern territories of the young American republic and the reciprocal role they played in supporting westward expansion through u.s. acquisition of Indian land are a familiar story. One of the leading chapters in it is the alliance between Lewis Cass, who served as governor of Michigan Territory from 1813 to 1831. and the American Fur Company. The staying power of that alliance and the way in which it was built into the lives of a succeeding generation are illustrated in the careers of younger men like Governor James Duane Doty of Wisconsin and Minnesota's Henry Hastings Sibley. Sibley, who was elected Minnesota's first delegate to Congress in 1849, and who presided over the state's constitutional convention, became its first governor in 1857, and led its volunteer army against the embattled Dakota Indians in 1862. He had come to the area in 1834 as a representative of the American Fur Company. This fact was not purely fortuitous. His father, Solomon Sibley, had been one of the first American lawyers to take up practice in Detroit and had formed long-time ties as friend, neighbor, and counsel to some of the company's most influential agents. A native of Massachusetts, Solomon Sibley had also served two terms as Congressional delegate from Michigan and was a firm political ally of fellow New Englander Lewis Cass, who ultimately secured Solomon's appointment as chief justice of the territory.} Thus, in 1828, when seventeen-year-old Henry Sibley announced his strong distaste for the lebal profession and turned longing eyes toward the remote lake country northwest of Detroit, an apprenticeship in the fur trade was almost inevitable. Like most human stories, however, it seemed far from predestined at the time. Its unfolding gives us at least a distant glimpse of the personal networks , the corporate culture, and the day-to-day operations of the American Fur Company at Mackinac in the early 1830s. Sibley's first position was not with American Fur, nor was it at Mackinac. Probably through the influence of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie and a friend of the Sibley family, the youth was hired in early summer of 1828 as a clerk in the sutler's store run by Schoolcraft's brother-in317 RHODA R. GILMAN Figure 1. The earliest known likeness of Henry H. Sibley is this portrait, probably taken in Washington, D.C. in the 1850s during his service as Congressional Delegate from Minnesota Territory. Brady Studios, Washington, D.C., photo courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society. law, John Hulbert, at Fort Brady. After several months, the death of Schoolcraft's father-in-law, the trader John Johnston, resulted in moving young Sibley to the Johnston store. He spent the rest of the fall and winter there, working for Susan Johnston, who continued her husband's business.2 The change was welcome. Never before away from his parents and the large, warm clan of eight Sibley children, Henry had been bitterly homesick. His strict Calvinist upbringing also produced disgust with much of what he encountered at the fort. "I have seen so much deception practiced here ... that I hardly know whom to trust," he had written to his brother-in-law and confidant, Charles C. Trowbridge. Life in association with the Johnston-Schoolcraft clan was better. The family included "three educated and lady-like daughters," whose company 318 ApPRENTICE TRADER: HENRY H. SIBLEY AND AMERICAN FUR AT MACKINAC made him the envy of the unattached officers at the fort. By spring, nevertheless, he was ready to leave the Sault and try his luck at Mackinac.3 There, on the 8th of May, 1829, he signed a memorandum of agreement with Robert Stuart, agent of American Fur, under which he was to work as a clerk from I June "until the close of business the ensuing fall." Stuart agreed to pay him $40 a month and give him board and lodging. Since Sibley was not needed for the next three weeks, he took the opportunity to make a trip with an old school chum, John Kinzie, who was leaving by ship for Chicago. Kinzie also had worked for Stuart, and it is easy to imagine him briefing Henry on the habits of his formidable new employer...