Footnotes
Historian’s Office, Journal, 7 June 1853; Wilford Woodruff, Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, to George A. Smith, 30 Aug. 1856, in Historian’s Office, Letterpress Copybooks, vol. 1, p. 364.
Historian’s Office. Journal, 1844–1997. CHL. CR 100 1.
Historian’s Office. Letterpress Copybooks, 1854–1879, 1885–1886. CHL. CR 100 38.
See the full bibliographic entry for JS Collection, 1827–1844, in the CHL catalog.
Footnotes
For more information on the background of these letters, see Historical Introduction to Letter from Lyman Wight and Others, 15 Feb. 1844–A.
Wight, Address by Way of an Abridged Account and Journal of My Life, 1–3; Letter from Lyman Wight and Others, 15 Feb. 1844–A.
Wight, Lyman. An Address by Way of an Abridged Account and Journal of My Life from February 1844 up to April 1848, with an Appeal to the Latter Day Saints. [Austin, TX], [ca. 1848].
For more information on the removal of white lumber workers from Menominee-occupied lands, see the annotation in Letter from Lyman Wight and Others, 15 Feb. 1844–A.
According to Miller, he gained the support of Oshkosh, chief of the Menominee, to continue logging. Oshkosh said the timber “was all his, and that the agent and United States had no business to interfere in the matter; that he had come to attend to his timber himself.” The Menominee had previously granted special privileges to a few white men that allowed them to operate lumber mills on Menominee land in exchange for goods and services, and Oshkosh proposed a similar arrangement with the Latter-day Saints, stating that they “should have the exclusive privilege of cutting timber” in the Black River Falls region in exchange for their feeding “his people in their passing by.” Such arrangements were often ratified or witnessed by the local Indian agent or other government officials. It may have been for this reason that Oshkosh suggested to Miller that he go “to the Wisconsin with him, and he would procure me a written permit from the agent, in order to silence the lumbermen.” Miller traveled the sixty miles to the Wisconsin River with Oshkosh and with Latter-day Saint Cyrus Daniels. The Indian agent, David Jones, was at the Wisconsin River touring a government-run blacksmith shop when they arrived. (George Miller, St. James, MI, to “Dear Brother,” 27 June 1855, in Northern Islander, 23 Aug. 1855, [1]–[2]; Thwaites, Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 15:9–19; David Jones, Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory, to James D. Doty, Madison, Wisconsin Territory, 24 Feb. 1844, in U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, reel 319.)
Northern Islander. St. James, MI. 1850–1856.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Vol. 15. Madison: Democrat Printing, 1900.
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–81. National Archives Microfilm Publications, microcopy M234. 962 reels. Washington DC: National Archives, 1959.
As early as the 1820s, tribes living in this area had leased or sold logging and milling rights to white settlers. These agreements were usually sanctioned by the federal government, though the lessees often abused the terms of the agreement. (Beck, Siege and Survival, 118–119.)
Beck, David R. M. Siege and Survival: History of the Menominee Indians, 1634–1856. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Miller initially thought the country surrounding the Black River “presented one of the most beautiful prospects I ever beheld. It was the prospect of a country well suited in all respects for the various pursuits of the husbandman and also of the manufacturer.” Allen J. Stout, another Latter-day Saint at the pineries, was more cautious, noting that the land was “extreamly varied with rich & poor land.” Alfred Brunson, a local Indian agent, described the area surrounding the falls as “one of the most dismal pine and tamerack swamps that teams ever undertook to pass.” (Mills, “De Tal Palo Tal Astilla,” 96; Allen J. Stout, Black River Falls, Wisconsin Territory, to Hosea Stout et al., Nauvoo, IL, 10 and 13 Sept. 1843, Allen J. Stout, Letters to Hosea Stout, CHL; Brunson, Western Pioneer, 144; Brunson, Northern Wiskonsan, 4–5.)
Mills, H. W. “De Tal Palo Tal Astilla.” Annual Publications Historical Society of Southern California 10 (1917): 86–174.
Stout, Allen J. Letters to Hosea Stout, 1843. CHL.
Brunson, Alfred. A Western Pioneer; or, Incidents of the Life and Times of Rev. Alfred Brunson, A. M., D. D., Embracing a Period over Seventy Years. Vol. 2. Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden, 1879.
Brunson, Alfred. Northern Wiskonsan. Madison, Wisconsin Territory: No publisher, 1843.
Alfred Brunson described the potential of the iron deposits near Black River Falls in an 1841 report to the House of Representatives of Wisconsin Territory: “Iron ore of a superior quality, and inexhaustible in quantity, has recently been discovered. It is, in fact, nothing short of an iron mountain. . . . The timber in the neighborhood is abundant for a supply of coal, lumber, &c.; and it would seem as if nature had provided and supplied this place to be the great iron works of the Upper Mississippi.” (Brunson, “Report of the Select Committee on the Subject of Territorial Geologist,” 147–148, italics in original; see also Brunson, Northern Wiskonsan, 5.)
Brunson, Alfred. “Report of the Select Committee on the Subject of Territorial Geologist.” In Journal of the House of Representatives, First Session of the Third Legislative Assembly of Wisconsin; Begun and Held at Madison, on Monday, the Seventh Day of December, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Forty, appendix P, 146–149. Madison, Wisconsin Territory: Charles C. Sholes, 1841.
Brunson, Alfred. Northern Wiskonsan. Madison, Wisconsin Territory: No publisher, 1843.
Ephraim Potter and Harrison Sagers were both appointed to serve missions in Jamaica, a British colony in the West Indies, in 1841, but it is unlikely that either of the two men ever went. (Letter to Edward Hunter, 21 Dec. 1841; JS History, vol. C-1, 1258.)