Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 58, number 4, summer, 1975

              Red Child, White Child:
The Strange Disappearance of Caspar Partridge
By William Converse Haygood
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HAT the Negro was to most of the South, the Indian was to most of the upper Middle West—an ex¬ ploitable minority to be used for the accumu¬ lation of wealth. Although the Indian en¬ joyed a personal freedom denied the slave, it was, following the white invasion, primarily the freedom to hunger, sometimes to starve, often to perish en masse from imported dis¬ eases, and always to witness the slow erosion of an ancient and marvelously adaptive so¬ ciety. For the Negro this latter process was mercifully swifter; generally African memo¬ ries and customs did not outlive a generation of captivity, surviving only as nearly untrace¬ able folkways. Physically the Negro mainly had it better, too. His dole of rations and clothing was supervised by masters to whom his health was as important as the proper oil¬ ing of an expensive machine. Conversely, the payground annuities given the Indians were soon   squandered;   the  watered  whiskey,   the
note: In the course of the research for this article I have become indebted to a number of people. My request for information published in Wisconsin Then and Now (April, 1973) brought such a flood ot cor¬ respondence that space does not permit listing all ot the respondents here. The staffs of the Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee County Historical societies were generous in their aid, as were Mal¬ colm Rosholt, Mrs. Robert Beyer, Mrs. Marion Fuller Archer, Professor Carl H. Knoche, Msgr. John B. Gehl, and Fred Prell. My deepest indebtedness is to my colleague, John O. Holzhueter, without whose extra¬ ordinary research instincts and pertinacity the riddle of the lost Partridge child would never have been solved.   w.c.H.
musty pork and cheap blankets were soon dissipated; and few cared about the Indians' well-being except the charlatan medicine man. For Wisconsin, in particular, the aborigine was of peculiar importance to economic de¬ velopment. In an era when banking was chaotic, paper money suspect or worthless and specie hard to come by, the annual infu¬ sion of dependable federal funds distributed to the Indians in return for their ceded em¬ pires was an incalculable financial boon. An army of traders and hucksters fed from this source; and many early Wisconsin fortunes, such as that of Hercules Dousman and those of the later lumber barons, were founded on the government's unrelenting program to rid the region of a troublesome native population hindering the inexorable white advance.^ In the brief period of nineteen years, practically all aboriginal title to Indian lands in Wis¬ consin had, in the coldly legalistic term, beer "extinguished." In the mid-1840's, as a tidal wave of new settlers began to break, only one Wisconsin tribe, the Menominee, still held title to a sizeable portion of its ancestral hold¬ ings, a huge, wedge-shaped tract in the east- central section, extending roughly from Por¬ tage northeast to near Mountain in Oconto County, from thence southwest to near Pitts-
' Alice E. Smith, The History of Wisconsin, Volume I: From Exploration to Statehood (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973), 292-293; Rhoda R. Gilman, "The Fur Trade in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1630-1850," in the Wisconsin Magazine of His¬ tory, 58:  17   (Autumn, 1974).
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