Pierre Bottineau

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Pierre Bottineau (January 1, 1817 – July 26, 1895) was a Minnesota Frontiersman.

Known as the "Kit Carson of the Northwest", he was an integral part of the history and development of Minnesota and North Dakota. He was an accomplished surveyor and his many settlement parties founded cities all over Minnesota and North Dakota. Those settlements would become cities such as Osseo, MN and Maple Grove, MN northwest of the Twin Cities, as well as Breckenridge, MN and Wahpeton, ND on either side of the Red River. He also took part in the founding of Orono Village, Sherburne County, MN (later absorbed by), Elk River, MN and the booming city of St. Anthony (later absorbed by Minneapolis, Minnesota). He was also a renowned diplomat and translator, earning him the nickname "The Walking Peace Pipe". He played a part in forging many treaties with Native American tribes. According to his obituary he spoke French, English, Sioux, Chippewa, Cree, Mandan, and Winnebago.

Pierre was born in a hunting camp on the buffalo trail near Grand Forks. His father was a French-Canadian Protestant, and his mother was half Sioux and half Ojibwe of the Lake of the Woods band. Although technically born in United States territory, control of the Upper Mississippi Valley fell to the British during the War of 1812. Even after the 1815 Treaty of Ghent returned the land to the United States, British and Canadian traders and the Native American tribes held all real control in the area. The government used Pierre and others like him to settle the land and help establish American sovereignty. Most mixed race, or Métis, lived as outcasts to both White and Native societies, but Pierre would soon use his many talents to become accepted as an American hero. His many invaluable services earned him celebrity status in his time. Upon his retirement, congress granted him a pension of 50$ a month. He died in Thief River Falls, MN at the age of 78.

Bottineau County, ND, and its county seat Bottineau, ND are named in his honor as well as the Pierre Bottineau branch library in Minneapolis.

[edit] Sources

• The Bottineau Family Website
• The Bottineau Boulevard Partnership
• Minnesota Historical Society
• City of Osseo Website

Red Lake Falls, Minnesota

Pierre Bottineau in his later years

Minnesota Historical Society

Pierre Bottineau spent his youth hunting and trapping in the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota under the tutelage of his French-Canadian father, a voyageur in the employ of the Canadian trading companies that operated freely in the area before the Americans were able to assert their control. His father had been embroiled in the Pemmican War of 1816, a series of skirmishes between two of the largest trading companies in Canada. The internecine conflict had diminished Canadian influence in the area, while American control of trade routes grew with the success of Fort Snelling. By the 1860's, the Red River Valley was being settled in a way that was beyond the dreams of the founders of the Selkirk trading colony in Winnipeg, who had tried, with little effect, to introduce agriculture to the region. The place had simply been too remote, and the mix of white and Indian interests too volatile, during the period of Canadian control of the trade routes in the American fur country.

Thanks in no small part to the services of Pierre Bottineau, the veteran expeditionary guide, and interpreter, rail was mitigating the distance between farm and market. It was also diminishing the role of the ox cart caravans that had moved people and goods through the corridor for a hundred years. In 1863, Bottineau helped negotiate the sale of 11 million acres (45,000 km²) of key Red River Valley land by the Pembina and Red Lake Ojibwe to the United States. This accession meant U.S. control of the prime Red River crossing into Canada and the West. In 1869, Bottineau guided a much-ballyhooed expedition to explore routes through the area for the Northern Pacific Railroad. By the 1870s, Bottineau no doubt saw that his native frontier was closing, and he was motivated to claim its fertile heart before it could be over-run by opportunists from distant parts.

In May, 1876, Bottineau led 119 families from St. Paul into the Red River Valley. Like Bottineau, most of these families were of French-Canadian descent, early settlers of Ramsey and Hennepin Counties. The wagon train wound its way up the Northwest Corridor from the Twin Cities, passed through St. Cloud and then the dozens of outlying settlements strung out along the ox-cart trails. At Crookston the Bottineau party turned north and east, arriving 17 days after its departure at the cradle of the Red Lake and Clearwater Rivers. Bottineau's Ojibwe ancestors had occupied the area 200 years before. A French trading post had started operating nearby in 1798. Yet the wave of American homesteading had ignored this place, which contained some of the most fertile soil in the world.

There the Bottineau party set up the towns of Red Lake Falls and Gentilly. At first times were tough. Tales were told of living all winter on a barrel of flour and jack rabbits. But the area soon flourished. In 1878, Bottineau traveled into Canada and recruited yet more settlers.

It was in Red Lake Falls, within 50 miles of his birthplace at Grand Forks, that the famous ranger Pierre Bottineau more or less retired, though he was said to have been as strong and active at 65 as he was at 30. In 1879, influential Minnesotans secured him a Congressional pension of $50 per month in recognition for his long service. He sat on the village council of Red Lake Falls from 1882-1887 and was elected its president in 1885. He remained active in regional affairs and was involved in another land treaty with the Pembina Ojibwe in 1889.

Bottineau died in 1895, aged 78, vigorous to the last. It was said he took ill while on a moose hunt near Thief River Falls. He was eulogized across the state as the last of the breed of hearty frontiersman that put Minnesota on the map. A memorial to Bottineau stands in the cemetery at Red Lake Falls.