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:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose.... It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)