Henry Leavenworth

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Lieutenant Colonel Henry Leavenworth about 1820Born in 1783 in Connecticut, Henry Leavenworth was educated in Vermont and New York. He became a lawyer and entered the military. He made his way up the ranks, eventually declared colonel of the 25th U. S. infantry. He then served in the New York State Assembly, and in 1816, went to Prairie du Chien as Indian agent. In 1818, he was made lieutenant-colonel of the Fifth U. S. infantry. 

In 1805 the U.S. Army ordered Lt. Zebulon Pike to explore the Mississippi River and select potential sites for future military posts. When he arrived at the junction of the Mississippi and St. Peters (the present-day Minnesota) rivers, Pike made a treaty with several local Dakota representatives and acquired land on which he promised a U.S. trading post would be built. The trading post was never constructed, but following the War of 1812 the U.S. government sought to firmly establish its presence and stamp out any existing British influence in the Northwest Territory by building a fort at the river junction. The first troops arrived in 1819 under the command of  Leavenworth. In 1820 he initiated the construction of Fort St. Anthony, which was later called Fort Snelling.

A few years later, he led U.S. troops in the first military expedition against a Great Plains Indian nation, the Arikara. While in the West he built military posts, one of which was Fort Leavenworth, established in Kansas in 1827. In 1833 he received the full rank of brigadier-general.
 
By 1834, he was commanding an expedition of the U.S Regiment of Dragoons in Indian Territory where hoped to create relationships between the United States and the Comanche, Kiowa, and Wichita nations. He died on this expedition in 1834.
 
Married three times, Lake Harriet, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is named for his last wife, Harriet Lovejoy.
 

 

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