The trapper was sent into the wilderness to find where a sawmill would be built. The trapper had to winter there, the third cataract.  He had traps for meat. The Natives had no money to buy traps, so the trapper trapped more meat than he could eat. The extra meat was left in a few traps for the natives as he collected the others.  They followed him, and did not steal the traps.

He went back east, and the next year, he returned with others to build the sawmill. All settlers received land as part of a government claim. The trapper had land—he had been born in New England and knew wood. He did not have to work the land because the sawmill was on the corner.

Natives hunted the land, but other landowners would drive them away. Some of the Natives spoke French. It turned out the land was in a zone between the Sioux and the Cherokee. The tribes warred but could not kill each other in this DMZ. The trapper, a mill owner during working hours, had good relations with the natives who extended to him the no kill policy.  He understood their plight.

A generation later, the family name was well known to the Sioux. One of the trapper's nephews, born on the land had a farm not far away. A posse rode out to fetch him one day because the only real Indian war Minnesota ever had was about to start. Warned, the nephew told them to go away.  He had nothing to fear from his friends.

But he was tied up, thrown over a horse, and taken to town. That was a good thing, too, because when the war party came through, they killed all the whites they could find. The war party had men from more than a hundred miles away.  The local Indians feared for their lives.  Any young Sioux men found were given the choice to fight in the war party or die.  Mothers hid their children.  The nephew would have been killed.

The first part of this story was told to me by my grandmother more than a century later. The second part was told to me by my mother, who has the same maiden name as the trapper. I am descended from that trapper.  With me, the story dies.

There is a town where the sawmill was.  It has the same last name.