Sawyer County, Wisconsin: History
=== Indians and fur trade ===
The area that is now Sawyer County was contested between the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples in the 18th century as part of the Dakota-Ojibwe War. Oral histories tell that the Ojibwe defeated the Dakota locally in the Battle of the Horse Fly on the upper Chippewa River in the 1790s. By this time, Lac Courte Oreilles had become the site of an Ojibwe village, which explorer Jonathan Carver described after traveling through in 1768: [The village] is situated on each side of the river (which at this place is of no considerable breadth) and lies adjacent to the banks of a small lake. This town contains about forty houses, and can send out upwards of one hundred warriors, many of whom were fine stout young men. The houses of it are built after the Indian manner, and have neat plantations behind them ...
Ojibwes allowed trader Michel Cadotte to build a fur-trading post in the area in 1800, with its clerk John Baptist Corbin the first white resident of the future Sawyer county. The United States acquired the region from the Ojibwe Nation in the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters, but the Ojibwe retained the right to hunt and fish on treaty territory. After elements of the U.S. tried to move all Ojibwe west of the Mississippi resulting in the Sandy Lake Tragedy, the Ojibwe people successfully negotiated to establish the permanent Lac Courte Oreilles Indian Reservation in the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe.
Charles Belille was the first white settler in what would become Sawyer County. He was a French-speaker from Quebec who around 1830 paddled with a crew of voyageurs up through the Great Lakes to La Pointe. He married an Ojibwe woman named Esther Crane and came south to settle on the Chippewa River near the mouth of the Couderay in the late 1830s. In this wilderness he built a cabin, trapped and traded, and raised a large family. Each spring he and Indian helpers paddled his huge double dugout canoe down to Chippewa Falls to exchange furs for supplies. When U.S. surveyors marked the section corners in 1853, they found Belille logging around his home—the start of small-scale logging. …