What was the turning point that started the wars and depression era

Although the fledgling United States took legal possession of Wisconsin at the close of the Revolutionary War, hardly anyone seemed to care. The new government had more important priorities than the remote Wisconsin frontier. And the few white residents here spoke little if any English, and looked not to Philadelphia and Boston for role models but to Montreal and Paris. The vast majority of Wisconsin residents were Native Americans, who needed good relations with both English and American fur companies to survive.

So when in 1812 politicians a thousand miles away began to complain about "freedom of the seas," few Wisconsin residents paid much attention. But when hostilities actually broke out and the British captured Mackinac, both Indians and frontier settlers chose up sides. As a general rule, Wisconsin's French residents and Indians usually sided with the British rather than the Americans, though many struggled to remain neutral. Support for the U.S. tended to come from the few American traders who had straggled up the Mississippi River from Illinois and St. Louis.

In 18l4 these Americans, led by William Clark (U.S. superintendant of Indian affairs at St. Louis and co-commander of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806), built Fort Shelby on St. Feriole Island at Prairie du Chien in the hope of keeping the upper Mississippi fur trade out of British hands. On July 17, with about 60 American soldiers inside the fort, the British arrived from Mackinac via Green Bay and attacked it with a force of about 150 regulars and 400 Indians. For several days the two sides half-heartedly tried to keep beyond reach of each other's guns, until the British managed to take the sole American gunboat out of action and lay siege to Fort Shelby. The Americans capitulated on August 9, the British moved in on August 20 and renamed their captured prize Fort McKay, and so ended Wisconsin's only participation in the war. The fort remained in British hands for only a few months, until December 1814, when both sides agreed to the restoration of territory captured from the other. The retreating British forces burned the fort prior to withdrawing from the Northwest in 1815.

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