Peggy Derrick
Catalog Number: 2011.fic.823
In 1841, 18-year-old Nathan Myrick, seeking adventure and opportunity, left eastern New York and traveled to the Mississippi River.
From the town of Prairie du Chien, he visited the spot known as Prairie La Crosse. He brought with him trade goods to sell to the Indigenous people that had long used that spot on the Mississippi River as a meeting place.
American military presence, combined with a series of treaties with the region’s tribes, was paving the way for white Americans from the east to be pioneer settlers.
Enterprising New Englanders like Nathan Myrick felt they were engaged in fulfilling the country’s destiny to expand across the continent.
As part of their agreements with the tribes, the federal government had begun making direct payments to the Indians. Because of these allotments, Nathan Myrick had a ready customer base for the goods he brought to Prairie La Crosse.
Myrick engaged in some logging, selling fuel to the steamboats traveling on the Mississippi. White settlers like himself were able to claim plots of land, paying the territorial government a pittance for the land it had only just acquired. Myrick also engaged in land speculation.
He and his young family left Prairie La Crosse in 1848 for St. Paul, Minnesota, after a financial loss in the logging business and poor health. But he continued to deal in real estate, and, with his brother Andrew, operated a string of trading posts throughout the Minnesota Territory.
From the start, Myrick had envisioned Prairie La Crosse as a permanent settlement. The property he had claimed rights to was platted and became the nucleus of a rapidly-growing frontier town. By the time he left for St. Paul, the name had been shortened to La Crosse, and about 20 hardy pioneers resided in the tiny hamlet.
It would be a couple of more years before its value as a steamboat landing and ideal site for sawmills would start to draw growth and development. By the time of La Crosse’s 50th anniversary in 1892, 20 residents had grown to more than 25,000.
In that year, Mayor Frederick A. Copeland invited Myrick to join the celebration of the city’s founding.
Myrick was elderly and in poor health, and instead of making the journey, he sent a letter of reminiscences telling about his first days in what both he and Copeland thought of as the “Wild West.”
The mayor read the letter aloud to the crowd at the celebration, and it was reprinted in the local newspaper. Myrick’s reputation as a pioneer hero and the city’s founding father was firmly established.
This large portrait of Myrick was also a gift from him to the city of La Crosse. His intention was for it to be displayed in the public library. At some point, which we have not been able to determine, it was transferred from the library to the old City Hall, which at that time stood on State Street, between 5th and 6th Streets.
When that building was torn down, and City Hall moved to its new location in 1970, the painting was donated to the La Crosse County Historical Society.
Today the name Myrick is also associated with the 1862 Dakota Uprising. The Dakota people were suffering great hardships when they attacked the Lower Sioux Agency in southwestern Minnesota and killed the agency’s manager, Nathan’s brother Andrew and nine other people.
The attack was the beginning of the largest Indigenous rebellion in U.S. history, resulting in the killing of more than 600 settlers and more than 100 of the Dakota.
While the starving Dakota had genuine and long-held grievances with the U.S. government, early historians of the event say Andrew Myrick may have triggered the attack with a callous declaration that if the Indians were hungry “they could eat grass.”
After the rebellion was suppressed, Nathan Myrick joined the first party of whites to enter the area, in search of his brother’s body, which he found and buried.
Today we admire much about Nathan Myrick, but we recognize that he was a much more complex figure than the one Mayor Copeland idolized in 1892.
People are complicated, and consequently, history is messy. When we focus on a historical figure that we want to honor, we tend to ignore those traits we might not find admirable.
For Myrick, Native Americans were simply a lucrative business. He did not question the ethics of an allotment system that gave him vast leeway to set prices. This left Native Americans with nothing to show for the loss of their ancestral lands but an endless cycle of debt.
Nathan Myrick’s story is embedded in La Crosse’s history. We take pride in his initiative, bravery and determination.
Myrick is presently remembered in La Crosse with a park named in his honor and a plaque at the site of his first log cabin — the first white settler’s permanent abode in Prairie La Crosse, near what is now the corner of Front and Second streets.
This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on July 25, 2020.
This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.
