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Bill Thayer

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Old Fort Crawford and the Frontier
by Bruce E. Mahan


[image ALT: A low wooden fort and a few single-story houses fronting on a body of water; in the foreground, the opposite shore: a small cliff partly covered in deciduous trees. It is the frontispiece of the 1926 print edition of the book 'Old Fort Crawford and the Frontier' by Bruce E. Mahan, the icon used on this site for my transcription of it.]

from a painting by Henry Lewis in Das Illustrierte Mississippithal

Old Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien

v
vii
A Prologue 1
The Treaty of 1804 16
Up the Mississippi 20
Old Fort Madison 34
Fort Shelby and Fort McKay 49
The First Fort Crawford 65
The Great Council of 1825 89
The Winnebago Outbreak 100
A New Fort Crawford 120
Indian Affairs and Treaties 1829‑1831 140
In the Black Hawk War 162
The Lure of Furs and Lead 179
The Fort and Indian Affairs 1834‑1840 201
In the Neutral Ground 220
Glimpses of Garrison Life 241
The End of Military Rule 266

Illustrations

Old Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien Frontispiece
Old Fort Armstrong on Rock Island facing 112
Old Fort Madison in Iowa facing 112
View from Pike's Peak in Iowa facing 113
Site of Prairie du Chien and Fort Crawford facing 125
The Great Council of 1825 facing 128
The New Fort Crawford facing 129
The Upper Mississippi Military Frontier facing 199
The Battle of Bad Axe facing 256
Old Fort Atkinson in Iowa facing 257
The Sentinel Post facing 272
The Prison Window facing 272
Fort Crawford Military Cemetery facing 273
The Remains of Fort Crawford facing 273
The Fort Crawford Military Reservation facing 276
Fort Crawford Tract Divided into Town Lots facing 279
[decorative delimiter]

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here was the original edition, published at Iowa City, Iowa in 1926 by the State Historical Society of Iowa. It is in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed at the appropriate time under the law then in effect, which would have been in 1953 or 1954: details here on the copyright law involved.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The edition I followed was very well proofread; the inevitable few errors I found, I corrected, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

A small number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Quick Fix

A good summary history of the fort is provided at FortWiki.



[image ALT: A low wooden fort and a few single-story houses fronting on a body of water; in the foreground, the opposite shore: a small cliff partly covered in deciduous trees. It is the frontispiece of the 1926 print edition of the book 'Old Fort Crawford and the Frontier' by Bruce E. Mahan, the icon used on this site for my transcription of it.]

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is my colorization of the book's frontispiece which you saw at the top of this page; in the print edition it faces the title page of course.


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Page updated: 4 Nov 14