Old Solomo
Fur trader Jacques Vieau left Mackinac in 1795 with orders from the Northwest Fur Company to establish trading posts along the west coast of Lake Michigan. Vieau embarked with his family in a birch-bark canoe, accompanied by a Mackinac boat rowed by twelve men, and loaded with merchandise for the Indian trade.
Vieau established "jack-knife posts" at Kewaunee, Manitowoc and Sheboygan, and late in August his party arrived at the mouth of the Milwaukee River. There he found wild-rice marshes teeming with ducks, fish, and muskrats, and he was welcomed by Potawatomi, Sac, Fox and Ho-Chunk Indians who lived there. Each year Vieau wintered over at Milwaukee, and each spring he gathered his winter pelts, bought maple sugar from the Indians, and embarked with his family for Mackinac, leaving behind a clerk to oversee the planting of potatoes and corn, and the purchase of “summer furs,” the red summer skins of deer. On his way "down the lake" to Mackinac, he stopped at his jack-knife posts to collect more furs and maple sugar. In 1818 Vieau hired a Canadian voyageur named Solomon Juneau as his clerk, and Juneau soon married one of Vieau's daughters. Juneau later recalled the feats of Indian horsemen on the beach at Milwaukee. "The Indians raced horses along a broad strip of hard, sandy beach near the mouth of the river. The races were exhibitions of speed, horsemanship, battle attitudes, and the physical prowess of the riders. They were short, but swift and spirited. Other exhibitions consisted of riding on the side, rump, neck, and almost under the horse, in a standing or crouching posture; in jumping from one horse to another while the animals were speeding at a wild rate; in leaping to the ground and back to the horse while the animals were on the run; and in performing various maneuvers with spears or poles." The first sailing vessel to deliver merchandise to Milwaukee was the Chicago Packet. In 1823 the little schooner arrived with Indian trade goods, and departed with furs. As advertised, Juneau's merchandise included "a complete assortment of goods adapted to the Indian trade, viz.: English blankets, ribbons, silver work, ornaments, beads, vermillion, wampum, worsted, hatchets, bridles, saddles, looking glasses, combs, hawk bells, flints, northwest guns, rifles, powder, cartouche, scalping knives and all sorts of Indian fixings, which will be sold for furs, skins and cash. Cash will be paid for furs of all kinds." In 1835 Juneau erected two posts in his front yard, and chained a bear to each. “I have spent many an hour watching the gambols of those bears," recalled James S. Buck. "They would climb to the tops of the posts, place their feet close together, and from thence survey, with the greatest complacency, the crowd of loafers and idlers. The bears were killed and eaten at a feast Juneau gave the Indians in 1837." In 1846 Juneau was elected the first mayor of the City of Milwaukee, yet "Old Solomo" never lost his affinity for the Indians. He died in 1856, while trading with the Menominee in northeastern Wisconsin. |