Hypolite Dupuis

Hypolite Dupuis (October 16, 1804 – July, 1879) was a fur trader with the American Fur Company. He was born in LaPrairie de la Madeleine, near present-day Montreal in lower Canada. By 1831 he had moved to what would become the Minnesota Territory to work at Joseph Renville’s Lac qui Parle trading post. He moved to Mendota, Minnesota around 1840 and built a house on the property of Henry Hastings Sibley. Dupuis worked as a clerk for Sibley and managed the company store. He married Angelique Renville, daughter of Joseph Renville, and they had eight children.

The fur trade had largely died out by the 1850s, and Sibley and Dupuis liquidated their fur trade interests in 1853. In 1854, DuPuis built a home for his family and operated a general store until it closed during the financial panic of 1857. The house is part of the Sibley House Historic Site. DuPuis was active in the Mendota community, serving as county treasurer in 1854, the justice of the peace in 1855, and as the Mendota postmaster from 1854 to 1863.

In 1871 DuPuis sold his brick home to Timothy Fee, and moved to the Devil’s Lake Reservation in North Dakota to work as storekeeper for the Fort Totten Indian Agency. The Indian Agent for the reservation was William H. Forbes, a former employee for Henry Sibley. By 1879 DuPuis had moved back to Minnesota, where he died at the age of 74.^[1][2]

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