The settlement of Sawyer County is a fact long ago accomplished and, if we ever pause to think about it today, probably of not great interest to most of us. Should we actually delve into the history of this settlement, we could find it very complex and very interesting. To trace all of the facts of this migration in time and source would require a large volume so we can only outline some of the more important details in a less than complete treatment of the subject.

Usually we think of the loggers as the ones who opened up the country in the last century, the farmers following them and clearing farms from the cut-over lands. For the modern community that is essentially true. However, the area now known as Sawyer County has been inhabited and known throughout America and even to Europe for several hundred years. Radisson, who so nearly starved to death by Lac Courte Oreilles three hundred years ago, carried his tale back to London. Most of the famous early explorers made at least one trip through the county, traversing the Namekagon or Chippewa waters. Henry R. Schoolcraft, the early Indian agent, whose tales of the Chippewa legends inspired Longefellow to write Hiawatha , came down the Namekagon in 1832 to the portage to Windigo Lake and then met in council with the Chippewas at their village near the outlet of Lac Courte Oreilles. When we think of the Indians as being the first inhabitants here, we think of the Chippewas. Actually, like the rest of us, they are rather recent immigrants, as they and their relatives, the Ottawas, replaced the Sioux a little over two hundred years ago, though the Sioux contested their occupation for another hundred years.

One of the great racial and cultural influences in the settlement of Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin which has been largely ignored has been that of the French, or French-Canadian, people. We have books by the hundreds of the "romance" of the British colonial border settlers from the east coast; their fights with the Indians, their flatboats on the Ohio, the Wilderness Road and Zane's Trace across Ohio, their travial and hardship in the new country while they cleared the land and established new homes and towns. We have almost forgotten that in 1778 when George Rogers Clark marched his tiny army of one hundred and fifty "borderers," mostly Virginia frontiersmen, from the lower Ohio River across the southern tip of Illinois to take Kaskaskia and Cahokia on the Mississippi, these were well established towns of Frenchmen with families, churches, wineshops, farms and orchards, and that when Clark went on the next spring to capture Fort Vincennes (the one act that was probably the key in determining that our part of the country became American instead of British) almost half of his army was made up of these same French towns.

That this French influence was felt in the settlement of Sawyer County, there is no doubt. The people engaged in the early fur trade were Frenchmen, as were most of the later fur traders, though some of the owners, such as Alexander Henry, were British, but he took a Frenchman, Jean Baptiste Cadotte, into partnership. Even the later fur traders like th eWarrens, who married granddaughters of Cadotte, employed the French. The clerks and helpers on the posts and the boatmen who transported the furs, the coureurs de bois , were Quebec farm boys, "engaged" for a season, who made a small stake and enjoyed the adventure of a trip to the far wilderness with the traders. Many of them back for other seasons and, with a better knowledge of the frontier and the intention to settle in this new land, brought their wives and children, or married Indian women and raised metis--mixed--families. Of course, the French were not the only settlers who chose the latter course. Few white frontier families who came from the colonies on the east coast but that can boast of an Indian ancestor, as there are few Indians today who can boast, or not, as they choose, of a similar white ancestor, usually French.

When the loggers reached the Falls of the Chippewa about 1838, they were led by John Brunet, a Frenchman, who had come up the Mississippi to Prairie du Chein, then a town of French "habitants." His crew was recruited from these people and on the way up they passed French settlements on the river; traders, farmers and rivermen. When they arrived at the Falls their neighbor was Louis DeMarais, who had built the first house in Chippewa Falls. His wife was part Cree and her father had been a trader on the north shore of Lake Superior. Their daughters married the first loggers and their descendants are numerous today in northwest Wisconsin. A French-Indian settlement was built up at Chippewa Falls and Eagle Point, the men working in the logging camps and the women minding the cabins and small farms. As00 the loggers cut their way north, these men and their sons followed the timber, along with the 'jacks from Maine, Ireland and Scandinavia. The migration came to a climax in northern Sawyer County as the virgin forests on the Chippewa watershed came to an end. The men had no choice but to settle down and make the best of it as farmers, as scavengers of what was left of the timber, or to move on to where they could find other employment. Many of these families of French ancestry settled in Sawyer County, mostly at Reserve and the Post.

The fur trade brought many more French people into what is now Sawyer County. Jean Baptiste Cadotte had the only house at the Sault when Alexander Henry came through in 1765. He and Henry established their post on Madeline Island. His sone, Michael Cadotte, whose mother was Chippewa, married a Chippewa women and was given the area where we live as a trading territory by his father after he returned from Montreal where he had received his education. He and his sons continued the trade and two of his daughters married the American traders, the Warren brothers, and these people carried on the trade as long as it lasted in northern Wisconsin.

The first white man known to have made his permanent residence int he interior of northwestern Wisconsin was Jean Baptiste Corbin, and educated Frenchman, who came there as a trader for the Northwest Fur Company in 1801 as a young man and later established his own post on the present site of Reserve. He lived the rest of his life here, leaving many descendants; he died in 1886 and is buried in the cemetery of the Catholic church he do so much to establish.

Many French-Canadian families came to Chippewa County, which then included what is now Sawyer County, about 1840, among them the three Bellile brothers. Charles Bellile came up the Chippewa and settled at Bellile Falls a few miles sough of Radisson where he cleared a small farm and probably had a store and stopping place. The first school in Sawyer County was built at his settlement in 1877 and was called the Bellile School. The other two of the Bellile boys married Corbine girls and their grandsons live at Reserve today. William Bellile says they called the grandfather "Grandpa Canada".

The residents of Sawyer county today are prosiac Americans who have almost forgotten their origins, whether Anglo-Saxons fromthe Colonies, German, Scandinavian, or other new immigrants, or Canadians. However, when we scan a census of what is now Wisconsin for 1820 and 1850 and see the names Trepanier, Denome, Gauthier (Gokey), Cadotte, LaRush, Demarais, Bellile, and many others, we need not be amazed that one time French was the European langauage most commonly heard here.