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The Annotated Early Life Among the Indians: Reminiscences from the Life of Benjamin Green Armstrong 1892
The Annotated Early Life Among the Indians Reminiscences from the Life of Benjamin Green Armstrong 1892 Author:James A. Brakken This is the annotated 1892 memoir of Benjamin Green Armstrong, a trader, woodsman, and a man whose drive to protect his friends, the Ojibwe people, knew no bounds. His efforts to assist them included persuading the government to honor treaties granting them the right to gather fish, game, rice, and other bounty from the lands they ceded to the g... more »overnment in the mid-19th century. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment occurred in 1852, when he led a small contingent of Ojibwe leaders to Washington, hoping to convince President Millard Fillmore to honor past treaties. The effort was successful and avoided a war between the Lake Superior Ojibwe and the United States.
But Benjamin Armstrong’s memoir is more than an account of his defense of the Ojibwe. His story encompasses more than six decades of life as a woodsman and trader working in northwestern Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, and northern Minnesota during a time when the pelts of beaver, mink, otter, and other furbearers represented the greatest economic export of a developing nation. It was also a time when the fur trade declined and industrialists’ interests shifted to timber, minerals, and the abundant lands controlled by Native Americans. This, in Benjamin Armstrong’s narrative, gives us a first-hand account of the Ojibwe people’s plight. It also offers a detailed depiction of 19th century life in the western Great Lakes states when hardworking European settlers and American businessmen descended on the north, cultures clashing and life changing forever. « less