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Up for sale a VERY RARE! "Minnesota Fur Trader" Henry M Rice Clipped Signature.
ES-975A
Henry Mower Rice
(November 29, 1816 – January 15, 1894) was a fur trader
and an American politician
prominent in the statehood of Minnesota. Henry
Rice was born on November 29, 1816, in Waitsfield, Vermont
to Edmund Rice and Ellen (Durkee) Rice. Both Edmund and Ellen were of entirely
English ancestry; their ancestors had been in New England
since the early 1600s. Rice lived with family friends from an early age due to
the death of his father. When Rice was 18, he moved to Detroit,
Michigan,
and participated in the surveying of the canal route around the rapids of Sault Ste. Marie between Lake Superior
and Lake Huron.
In 1839 Rice secured a job at Fort Snelling,
near what is now Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He became a fur trader with the Ho-Chunk
and Chippewa
(Ojibwe)Indians, attaining a position of prominence and influence. Rice was
trusted by the Indians, and he was instrumental in negotiating the United
States treaty with the Ojibwe Indians in 1847 by which they ceded extensive lands. Rice lobbied for the bill to establish Minnesota Territory in 1849 and later served as
its delegate to the 33rd and 34th Congresses from March 4, 1853, to
March 4, 1857. His work on the Minnesota Enabling Act, passed by Congress on
February 26, 1857, facilitated Minnesota's statehood. Henry Rice was a Democrat
in the wing of the Minnesota Democratic party sometimes referred to at the time
as "Moccasin Democrats" because of his affiliation with the fur trade
and the supplying of Indian Agency contracts. He and his one-time partner
trader Henry H. Sibley, also a Democrat, had a
falling out in 1849 and thereafter were political rivals, Sibley being part of
the non-Rice wing of the party. At statehood in 1858 Rice and James Shields
were elected by the Minnesota legislature as Democrats to the United States Senate. Rice served from
Minnesota's admittance on May 11, 1858 to March 4, 1863 in the 35th, 36th, and 37th Congresses and was not a candidate
for re-election; he was an unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1865. Rice
also served as a member of the board of regents of the University of Minnesota from 1851 to 1859
and was president of the Minnesota Historical Society. H.M. Rice
participated in official or unofficial capacities in a number of Indian
treaties: the 1846 Winnebago treaty at Washington, the 1847 treaties with
Ojibwe at Fond du Lac (Minn) and Leech Lake (Minn.), the 1854 treaty with
Ojibwe at LaPointe (Wisc), as a United States Commissioner during 1887 – 1888,
with the Ojibwe of Minnesota, and is rumored to have influenced the secondary
negotiations with the Dakota at St. Paul after the Senate revised the
1851 Dakota treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux (Minnesota). He helped
organize the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) removal from the Neutral Ground (Iowa) in
1848 and received a federal contract to re-remove Winnebago in 1850 who had
either not removed to Long Prairie (Minnesota Territory) or who had scattered
away. Documentation of these activities is in the federal Serial Set,
newspapers such as the Minnesota Pioneer and the Prairie du Chien Patriot,
and William Folwell's A History of Minnesota (1921). He died on January
15, 1894, while on a visit to San Antonio, Texas.