Jonathan Carver - Carver's Grant

Carver's Grant

After Carver's death, Dr. John Coakley Lettsom purchased the copyrights to the book and had published a third edition. Lettsom claimed he had in his possession a deed, signed by two chiefs of the Sioux, giving Carver title to about 10,000 square miles (30,000 km2) in what is now Wisconsin and Minnesota. The deed could not be located after the death of Carver's London widow.

In 1804, a group of descendants of Carver petitioned the U.S. Congress for ownership rights to a large tract of land in Wisconsin and Minnesota, claiming that the deed supposedly dated at the "Great Cave, May the 1st, 1767" entitled Carver and his family to over 10,000 square miles (30,000 km2) of land. Specifically they identified; "the whole of a certain tract or territory of land, bounded as follows, viz.: from the Falls of St. Anthony, running on the east bank of the Mississippi, nearly southeast, as far as Lake Pepin, where the Chippewa joins the Mississippi, and from thence eastward, five days travel, accounting twenty English miles per day, and from thence again to the Falls of St. Anthony, on a direct straight line." This triangular tract in northwestern Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota would have been bounded by lines running from modern Minneapolis southeast to Pepin, then due east to near Stevens Point, and from there northwest roughly through Eau Claire to Minneapolis.

Congress investigated their claim and ultimately concluded that English law at the time prohibited any land grants to individuals. They also concluded that Carver himself never made any mention of such a grant in his book or afterwards, and finally that no Indians in the region had any knowledge of such a transaction having been made by their grandparents' generation; in 1817, Sioux elders in St. Paul had even told Carver's heirs that no chiefs with the names on the deed had ever existed. Congress concluded, on Jan. 29, 1823, not to permit Carver's heirs the rights to this land in Wisconsin. Land speculators and con-men nevertheless continued to promote the sale of portions of "Carver's Grant" for another half century.

According to the Wisconsin Historical Society:

Modern scholars who have reviewed all the evidence cannot confirm the existence of any such grant to Carver, who never mentioned it in surviving records. They have, however, documented a great deal of deceit, manipulation, and self-delusion by his heirs and their agents as they attempted to sell portions of the land in the decades following his death.