The Unfinished Autobiography Of Henry Hastings Sibley

This account focuses on the fur trade experiences of Henry Hastings Sibley (1811-1891), better known as commander of the military forces suppressing the Sioux [Dakota] uprisings of 1862 and 1863, and, in 1858, Minnesota's first governor. Sibley was born in Detroit to a prominent family of New England ancestry but spurned a settled life in that community for a more adventurous career, including a stint as a clerk for John Jacob Astor, and later as the American Fur Company's agent in trading with the Sioux [Dakota]. He began this reminiscence in 1883, at the age of 73, and seems to have added to it as late as 1886. The events he writes about, however, do not extend beyond 1835. Sibley shares his insights about voyageurs, native Americans, and life in military forts and trading settlements, although little of this material relates specifically to Minnesota. There is some commentary on settlements at Mackinac, Milwaukee, St. Peter's (Mendota), and Chicago, as well as the city of Detroit, where cholera reached epidemic proportions in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book also contains eleven letters from Sibley to Ramsay Crooks, agent and eventual president of the American Fur Company.

A full-scale biography of Henry Hastings Sibley--congressman, army general, and Minnesota's first governor. Congressman, governor, military leader, and senior statesman--few people had a longer or more influential role in the shaping of the state of Minnesota than Henry Hastings Sibley (1811-91). Sibley's history reveals universal tensions about the duality of the nineteenth-century frontiersman who is at once a trade partner of the Indian/European/Métis worlds and the conquering government official of the ever-expanding colonization of the American West. Rhoda Gilman spent more than thirty years examining Sibley--through hints and fragments of stories that Sibley himself left in articles, an unfinished autobiography, and scores of family letters--and uncovers in this perceptive biography the complexities of a man who embodied these clashing extremes. Gilman sets Sibley against the tapestry of trade, politics, frontier expansion, and intercultural relations in the Upper Mississippi valley, and reminds us that throughout his life Sibley was poised to become a national figure but always chose to remain in the place he loved and the state he helped to found.

The first full-scale biography of Henry Hastings Sibley, congressman, army general, and Minnesota's first governor.

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The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of childhood in the West from antiquity to the present day. By broadly incorporating the research in the field of Childhood Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in this crucial field.