Prairie du Chien: Where the Rivers Converge

The name Prairie du Chien translates loosely from French as Prairie of the Dog, a reference to a Fox Nation chief whose clan symbol was a dog. But long before French names arrived, this place at the mouth of the Wisconsin River was one of the most important intersections on the continent. For thousands of years, Native nations gathered here to trade, and the site sat at the exact hinge point where the Fox-Wisconsin waterway met the Mississippi, connecting the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico in a single unbroken water road.

French explorer Nicolas Perrot built a trading post here in sixteen eighty-five. By the time John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company arrived in the early eighteen hundreds, Prairie du Chien was the western anchor of the entire Great Lakes fur trade network. Canoes stacked with beaver pelts paddled in from the north and west; trade goods and European manufactured items flowed back the other way. It was, for a brief era, one of the most commercially significant places in what is now the upper Midwest.

The War of eighteen twelve came to this remote prairie in a dramatic way. American forces under William Clark, later famous for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, built Fort Shelby here in the spring of eighteen fourteen. On July seventeenth of that year, a British force of roughly six hundred and fifty men arrived, a mix of British regulars, Canadian militia, and warriors from the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and Fox nations. After three days of siege, the American well collapsed. The garrison surrendered on July twentieth. The British renamed the post Fort McKay. When the Treaty of Ghent ended the war in February of eighteen fifteen, the British burned the fort and withdrew to Canada, leaving Prairie du Chien to the United States permanently.

Fort Crawford was built here in eighteen sixteen, and for the next two decades it served as a U.S. Army post at the edge of the American frontier. Among its officers was a young Zachary Taylor, future president, and a young Jefferson Davis, future Confederate president, who was actually stationed here and met his first wife, Taylor's daughter Sarah, in the early eighteen thirties. Sarah died of malaria three months after their marriage. Davis returned years later to lead the Confederacy against the nation he once served at this very fort.