Early Success
With encouragement from his future brother-in-law Henry Hastings Sibley, Steele saw opportunities in the western frontier and traveled to Fort Snelling via the steamboat Burlington, arriving June 18, 1838; he soon became a storekeeper at the fort. At that time, the land on both sides of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls was controlled by the U.S. Government as part of the Fort Snelling Reservation. However by 1837 over 150 squatters had staked unofficial claims on fort property. In 1838, the fort commander, Joseph Plympton convinced the government to release the east bank of the river for settlement, hoping to stake a personal claim on the valuable land closest to the Falls. But Steele surreptitiously staked the first claim on the choicest land before sunrise on the first day of legal settlement. He claimed a half-mile of east-bank riverfront, controlling half of the water power of St. Anthony Falls; adjacent property was claimed by Pierre Bottineau (1817–1895), a Métis, of French-Canadian, Ojibwe, and Dakota descent.
Steele's sister, Abbian, would marry a prominent physician, Thomas R. Potts in 1847. Potts would become the first Mayor of St. Paul.
Read more about this topic: Franklin Steele
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or success:
“O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, “Not unto us, not unto us.” According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)