The Battle of Prairie du Chien was a British victory in the far western theater of the War of 1812. During the war, Prairie du Chien was a small frontier settlement with residents loyal to both American and British causes. By 1814, both nations were anxious to control the site because of its importance to the fur trade and its strategic location at the intersection of the Mississippi River and the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway, a transportation route linking the Mississippi with the Great Lakes.
Although Prairie du Chien became a part of the United States following the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Americans made little effort to maintain a presence in the far western settlement. Thus, it remained largely under British influence into the 19th century. In the spring of 1814, American forces decided to secure the location, realizing that if it fell to the British, there would be no obstacle to a British attack on St. Louis. William Clark, the governor of Missouri Territory, organized a force in St. Louis that included 61 regulars from the 7th Infantry under Brevet Major Zachary Taylor and 140 volunteers who agreed to join the force for sixty days under the command of Frederick Yeizer and John Sullivan. Shortly after the force was assembled, Taylor left for personal reasons. In his place, Lieutenant Joseph Perkins of the 24th Infantry took command of the regulars. On May 1, Governor Clark and the combined forces under Perkins, Yeizer and Sullivan began moving up the Mississippi River en route to Prairie du Chien. On May 17, they scattered some Sauk warriors who attempted to bar their passage at the Rock Island rapids.
The American force arrived in Prairie du Chien on June 2. A few days later, on June 6, they began building a fort on a large mound north of the main village. The fort was named Fort Shelby in honor of Governor Isaac Shelby of Kentucky. Seeing that construction of the small wooden fort was underway, Governor Clark left to return to St. Louis on June 7. The Americans made steady progress on the fort, and although the defenses were unfinished, the barracks were occupied by June 19. Around the time that the fort was being occupied, the sixty-day terms of service for the volunteers led by Yeizer and Sullivan expired. Most of these men went home with Sullivan, although Yeizer and some men in his company agreed to stay aboard the American river gunboat Governor Clark, a thirty-two oar, fourteen gun wooden vessel anchored in the Mississippi River beside Fort Shelby.
Upon their arrival at Prairie du Chien, the American force captured some Winnebago. According to the Winnebago chief Tete de Chien, the Americans gave these prisoners food, then shot them while they were eating. Tete de Chien also said that Clark had another four Indians, including Tete de Chien's brother and the wife of a Sioux chief, imprisoned and shot after inviting them to meet with him. Clark later wrote that several Winnebago men had been shot while trying to escape. The historian Gillum Ferguson says that "Exactly what happened is impossible to determine". However, this incident encouraged the Indians of the region to support the British and oppose the Americans.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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