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Manuel Lisa
Manuel Lisa
Manuel Lisa (September 8, 1772 - August 12, 1820) was a fur trader and explorer who was among the founders of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, later known as the Missouri Fur Company. In addition to building the fur trading business, Lisa was highly influential among American Indian tribes, and helped keep them as allies of the United States during the War of 1812 against Great Britain. mouth of the Little Missouri and the Big Knife rivers, in what is now North Dakota.[2] The 1811 expedition was famous in its day because the company’s barges, heading up the Missouri, overtook a rival Astor Expedition sent by John Jacob Astor, which had set out three weeks earlier. The Missouri Fur Company would continue business under various names until about 1828-1830. Astor’s American Fur Company managed to monopolize the American fur trade by 1830. In 1812 Lisa became the first U.S. settler of Nebraska, building his second Fort Lisa (1812-1823) on the Missouri River about 12 miles north of Omaha. For a decade this outpost was the most important in the region.[3] The War of 1812 disrupted fur trade, as warring interrupted trading with tribes who were allies of the British in Canada and near the border. Both sides raided posts of the other, as their warehouses stored valuable goods and furs. After several founding members of the Missouri Fur Company left, Manuel Lisa headed the company. After 1814 he renamed it Manuel Lisa and Company.[4] After the war, the US government and state governments attempted to exert more control over the Native Americans. They still worried about the British fomenting unrest among them in the northern and northwest reaches. They began to appoint their own Indian agents, and in some areas built military forts along the northern border, for instance, a fort in 1820 at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.[5] In 1814, for example, William Clark, by then governor of the Missouri Territory, appointed Lisa subagent to the tribes located above the mouth of the Kansas River. That same year Lisa married his second wife, a member of the Omaha tribe. They had two children.[6] Marriages between fur traders, generally men of social standing, as was Lisa, and Native American women, often daughters of chiefs, deepened their alliances and ties. In the early years of the settlements of the trading posts, fur traders and their families, and high ranking Native Americans, comprised the ruling class over workers of Euro-
Marriage and career
By 1796 Lisa had married Polly Charles Chew, a young widow from New Orleans. He operated a trading vessel along the Mississippi River. In 1799 he obtained a land grant in Missouri and they relocated to St. Louis. By 1800 Lisa was the pre-eminent trader in the fur business. In 1802 the Spanish government granted him a monopoly for fur commerce with the Osage Nation. Lisa was also involved in the supply preparation for the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1803-4. Beginning in 1807, Lisa organized annual fur-gathering expeditions to the Upper Missouri region. On the first such excursion, he established a trading post at the mouth of the Bighorn River in present-day Montana; the following year he augmented the site with a fort, the first such outpost in the upper Missouri region. He called it Fort Raymond (or Rémon) after his son, but it was commonly referred to as Fort Manuel. While operations from the area were profitable for Lisa, the outpost suffered frequent attacks by the nearby Blackfeet tribe. During these years of expeditions, his wife and children stayed in St. Louis.[1] In 1809 Lisa helped found the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, a joint venture with Pierre Chouteau, Sr., Jean-Pierre Chouteau, William Clark, Andrew Henry, and others. Its first fur expedition that year consisted of 350 men. On that expedition, Lisa moved his trading post operations further east and south, building his first Fort Lisa (1809-1812), also known as Fort Manuel Lisa Trading Post, near a Gros Ventres village between the
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American, mixed-race, and Native American descent[7] Lisa later married again and brought his third wife, Mary Hempstead Keeney (another widow), for the winter of 1819-20 to Fort Lisa (Omaha). Later in 1820 they returned to St. Louis, where Lisa died.[8] He is buried there in Bellefontaine Cemetery. After his death Joshua Pilcher took over the presidency of the fur company.
Manuel Lisa
Historical Society of Iowa, reprinted at Iowa GenWeb, accessed 4 Aug 2008 George F. Robeson, "Manuel Lisa", The Palimpsest, Vol. VI, No.1, Jan 1925, State Historical Society of Iowa, reprinted at Iowa GenWeb, accessed 4 Aug 2008 Hiram Martin Chittenden, et al., The American Fur Trade of the Far West: V. 2,1902, reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, pp.143-145, accessed 8 Aug 2008 Robert E. Bieder, "Sault Ste. Marie and the War of 1812:A World Turned Upside Down in the Old Northwest", Indiana Magazine of History, XCV (Mar 1999), accessed 13 Dec 2008 (1904) Semi-Centennial History of Nebraska - 1904, scanned on US Gennet, Retrieved 8/6/08 Robert E. Bieder, "Sault Ste. Marie and the War of 1812:A World Turned Upside Down in the Old Northwest", Indiana Magazine of History, XCV (Mar 1999), accessed 13 Dec 2008 (1904) Semi-Centennial History of Nebraska - 1904 Retrieved 8/6/08
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Quote See also
• Fur trading • Fort Lisa • St. Louis Missouri Fur Trading Company
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References
[1] (1904) Semi-Centennial History of Nebraska - 1904 Retrieved 8/6/08 [2] George F. Robeson, "Manuel Lisa", The Palimpsest, Vol. VI, No.1, Jan 1925, State
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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Lisa" Categories: 1772 births, 1820 deaths, Fur traders, Mountain men, Spanish-Americans This page was last modified on 23 May 2009, at 11:12 (UTC). All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) taxdeductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers
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