John Lawe
John Lawe was a pioneer fur trader, merchant, land speculator, sawmill owner and judge in Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory. He served in the brief "Rump Council" which may be regarded as the first legislature of what was to become Wisconsin.
Background
Although the family history is fragmentary and contradictory, Lawe seems to have been born December 6, 1779, in Montreal, son of Captain William Lawe and Rachel or Midd Franks, a member of the prominent Jewish Franks family of Quebec and British North America. His father died a few years later, and he and his mother joined her brother Jacob Franks, a fur trade clerk in Montreal. Young Lawe became a classmate of Jean Joseph Rolette. In 1790, Lawe's mother went to the East Indies to join another of her brothers, and neither John nor Jacob ever learned what happened to her.In 1792, Franks' employer sent him to run their trading post in Green Bay. In 1796, Lawe went to work for his uncle on Mackinac Island, and the next year both of them moved to Green Bay permanently; Franks set up his own business, and Lawe clerked for him. For years, Lawe would be sent out to serve as his uncle's agent, wintering at various posts along the Mississippi, Fox and Wisconsin rivers.
Work with James Aird
In 1805, Franks, Robert Dickson and other traders formed a trading partnership, allocating territories and pooling profits or losses. Lawe went to work for another of the partners, James Aird, whose assigned territory was the Missouri River Valley. In the fall of 1805, Aird led an expedition to spend three years exploring upriver as far as the region later to be known as The Dakotas. This included four flatboats of trade goods, voyageurs and Aird's clerks. In addition to Lawe, these clerks included young Ramsay Crooks. The two became friends on the trip from Green Bay to St. Louis.When the party came to St. Louis, it was discovered that U.S. president James Madison had recently forbidden British subjects to trade in the Louisiana Purchase. Aird and Crooks were able to come to accommodation with the American authorities, but the emphatically anti-American Lawe was refused, as a British citizen, permission to trade, and returned to Green Bay the next spring, angry and embittered. In 1810, Lawe would encounter Crooks at Mackinac Island, who was part of the Astor Expedition on their way to the Columbia River country. It was only with great difficulty that he was dissuaded from joining the expedition, and as consolation he was made a full partner.
Marriage
In 1808, Lawe married Thérèse Rankin Grignon, daughter of a British trader and Weauwining, a daughter of chief Ashauwbemy of the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwa; and adopted her two children by her prior marriage. They would stay married until Thérèse's death in 1836, and would have eight more children together.War of 1812
Pro-British traders like Franks and Lawe evaded the Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts, smuggling goods from Montreal into Green Bay and beyond. With the outbreak of the War of 1812, this became more difficult, and the customers dependent on them began to suffer. Despite the shortness of supply, Lawe spent 1812-13 trading somewhere on the Trempealeau River, and came down with something he called "common sickness". As a result, Lawe was unable to join his fellows from Green Bay in the British attack on Detroit. His uncle, who had gone back to Montreal insisted that Lawe return to Green Bay to trade. He traded, collected money from tenants in his various land holdings, and worked on supplying the Indian Department and the British garrison at Mackinac Island. His commander wrote, toward the end of the war, "Lawe has shown great zeal, in the service of Government during the winter, and is worthy of being promoted, and appointed to conduct the duties of his department at this place. He is, indeed one of the few belonging to the department who are of any service." Lawe and Franks quarreled bitterly over money, and were never reconciled before Franks' 1841 death.Postwar
Unlike some of his old partners who left for places like the Red River Colony after the end of the war, Lawe remained in Green Bay. Policies were unabashedly favorable towards new "Yankee" traders out of the U.S. over the established Green Bay traders like Lawe who were regarded as foreign nationals. And the biggest of these was the arrival of John Jacob Astors American Fur Company, intent on control of the fur trade across the United States.In 1821, Lawe and some partners organized the Green Bay Company, an "outfit" with an exclusive agreement to trade with and for the AFC; this and similar arrangements would continue for the next two decades. Lawe's assigned territory was the watersheds of the Green Bay and the Wolf River. But the old-style traders chafed under the restrictions imposed by the arrangement with AFC, and Lawe found himself in a bitter rivalry with old classmate Jean Joseph Rolette, head of the Western Outfit based in Prairie du Chien, who eventually succeeded in restricting the old Green Bay traders to a narrow compass.
Lawe himself maintained an excellent reputation with those around him, being known for shrewd trading, integrity and generosity towards all manner of neighbors. Entire tribes were said to insist on taking their furs solely to Lawe, and his home in Green Bay maintained a tradition of hospitality, including serving as a smallpox vaccination venue for neighbors. By 1828, federal confirmation of title to lands whose claims he had bought from Franks and other traders made him the largest property owner of the lower Fox River. Almost everybody in the growing area had borrowed money from him, and he donated to local institutions and occasionally paid delinquent taxes for neighbors.