ere quietly helping to make the history
of the Northwest. It is impossible to consider every man who might be
classed among the "Lords of the North", but a review of the careers of a
few of them indicates the type of men whose natural ability was
supplemented by the self-confidence and the grim determination which are
the products of frontier service.[146]

The memory of the man who led the troops to the mouth of the Minnesota
River in 1819 is commemorated by a fort and a city in another State. The
trials which he endured during that first winter at Cantonment New Hope
were only harbingers of greater difficulties which were to bring to him
the death of a frontier martyr. Although he had been educated for the
lawyer's profession, Henry Leavenworth raised a company of volunteers in
Delaware County, New York, in 1812, and was elected its captain. He
served under General Winfield Scott and won honors for distinguished
service at the Battle of Chippewa and at Niagara Falls. After the war he
continued in the army, being appointed lieutenant colonel of the Fifth
United States Infantry on February 10, 1818. After conducting the troops
up the Mississippi River in 1819 and remaining through the winter, he
was superseded by Colonel Snelling.

Expeditions and Indian duties occupied his attention during the
next few years, and in May, 1827, he established "Cantonment
Leavenworth" on the west bank of the Missouri River. On February 8,
1832, the name was changed to Fort Leavenworth. During a campaign
against the Pawnee Indians, who were harassing the caravans of the Santa
Fe traders, Colonel Leavenworth was taken sick with fever and died on
July 21, 1834, in a hospital wagon at Cross Timbers in Indian Territory.
The body was wrapped in spices and sent by way of St. Louis, New
Orleans, and New York City, to Delhi, New York, where it remained until
in 1902 it was reinterred in the national cemetery at Fort Leavenworth.
A granite shaft some twelve feet high marks his resting-place.[147]

The monument to the man under whose direction the fort was built is the
modern military establishment named Fort Snelling. The erection of this
fort was the last achievement of a life which, though comparatively
brief, had already accomplished much. Josiah Snelling was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, in 1782. His first commission was as a first
lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry and bears the date of May 3, 1808. In
the Battle of Tippecanoe on Novemb