Who is the man on our new logo?
He’s the man Dodge County is named after, Henry Dodge, the first governor of Wisconsin Territory, from 1836 to 1841, then again from 1845 to 1848.
What did he have to do with us in southeastern Minnesota?
Our county was part of Wisconsin Territory, which was established in 1836, including what is now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, along with the Dakotas as far as the Missouri River. Parts of this region had previously been in the Northwest Territory.
What was happening here in Dodge County, Minnesota when Dodge was governor?
Native Americans were living here, with an occasional hunter or trapper passing through. David Cratte, a resident of Wabasha, born in 1837 and a noted guide and runner as a young man, wrote of the Dodge County area, “It was disputed territory among the Sioux and the Sauk and the Reynard (Sacs and Foxes) and was considered in those days very dangerous country to hunt in…”
Tom Holmes of Holmes Landing, now Fountain City Wisconsin, arrived in the area in 1841 and participated in hunts with Indians related to him by marriage, that ranged through “the territory drained by the Whitewater, “Zumboro” and Cannon rivers.” For safety, he would join an organized group of hunters called a company that included bands of river Sioux. “There were two grand hunts,’ he wrote, “instituted annually for drying meat, one for buffalo in the summer, and one for elk in September.”
Another report of activity in southeast Minnesota is provided by Henry Hastings Sibley, who later became Minnesota’s first governor, from 1858 to 1860. Sibley came to our area in 1840 on a hunting expedition with his old friend, Alexander Faribault, who later founded the city of Faribault. They traveled with a company of hunters that included about 250 Sioux Indians. They went to the ‘Rivierre aux Embarras,’ French for ‘river filled with obstructions,’ and later called the Zumbro.
In a dense body of timber that he later said was near the spot Mantorville was established, Sibley shot a large stag. The party ran into large herds of deer and elk in this area, he said. The hunt ended 28 days later at Prairie du Chien.
The following year Sibley joined another hunting party with a larger number of Sioux Indians, and that hunt lasted from October first to March first, a period of five months.
In 1849, Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas became Minnesota Territory.
The first documented settlers in Dodge County, Minnesota didn’t arrive until 1853, the same year a government land survey was done.
As for Henry Dodge, he stayed active in Wisconsin politics as a U.S. senator. In 1857, he retired from public life and moved to Burlington, Iowa, where he died in 1867 at the age of 85.
Above is a photo from the Signature of the Justice of Peace, John Merrill, for the plat of the town of Rice Lake.
See the “Minnesota Territory” at the top, signed August 23rd, 1857, 9 months before Minnesota’s statehood.
References:
History of Dodge County, H.A. Smith, Feb. 2004 partial reprint of 1884 original – History of Winona, Olmsted and Dodge Counties, together with biographical matter, statistics, etc.
https://www3.uwsp.edu/conted/Pages/Surveyors%20Handouts/2020-WCSA-Wisconsin%20County2020-01-28.pdf
http://military’history.fandom.com/wiki/Henry_Dodge