Thomas "Billy" Caldwell
/ Sauganash (1780-1841) British Indian Department official / entrepreneur
/ Potawatomi chief; born March 17 (?) 1780 near Fort Niagara (Canada)
to William Caldwell and an Mohawk woman; abandoned by his father
and spent his early years with his mother's tribe; sent to his
father's Amherstburg estate ca. 1790 to be trained to manage the
plantation; entered the fur trade in the US 1797; ca. 1803 became
clerk of the Forsyth and Kinzie trading interests at Fort Dearborn
(Chicago); claimed to have saved the Kinzie family during the Fort
Dearborn massacre in 1812; joined the British Indian Department
to fight against the Americans in the War of 1812; assembled a
list of Potawatomi casualties in the Battle of Amherstburg on February
5, 1816; discharged for incompetence in October, 1816; disinherited
by his father in 1818; returned to Chicago in 1820 and resumed
work for the Kinzie, Forsyth, and Wolcott families; became Justice
of the Peace in 1825; appointed Potawatomi chief by the American
government for the purposes of
treaty negotiation
in 1829; received an estate of 2 1/2 sections along the north branch
of the Chicago River and a government-built frame house at the
corner of State and Chicago; Chicago's first hotel "The Sauganash" opened
in 1831 at Lake and Market (Wacker); signed a petition requesting
the establishment of a Catholic church in Chiago; negotiated the
Treaty of Chicago of 1833, which ceded the remaining Potawatomi
lands
in
Illinois
to the Americans; in the treaty, arranged a grant of $5000 a stipend
of $400/year for himself and a grant of $600 for his children;
the Kinzie family received $18,466 and the Forsyths $15,700 under
the treaty; in 1837 convinced the Potawatomi to forfeit payment
for lands if they did not voluntarily relocate; sold his land and
relocated with the tribe to Council Bluffs, Iowa; resisted additional
attempts to move the Potawatomi to Kansas; died of cholera September
27, 1841; the Potawatomi petitioned the US to officially recognize
them as "The Prairie Indians of Caldwell's Band of Potawatomis." Caldwell's
Indian name, Sauganash, translates as "The Englishman." <sources>
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