Grey Cloud Woman
She was born around 1793 at the village of Prairie du Chien to a Dakota mother, also named Grey Cloud Woman, and a Scottish fur-trading father, James Aird.
Grey Cloud lived through the final years when the fur trading economy was dominant in the region around the northern Mississippi River.
Grey Cloud Woman was directly affected by the War of 1812, when her husband, who fought on behalf of the British, chose to return to Canada rather than live under American rule.
Later, she and her family lived approximately 15 miles south and east of modern-day St. Paul, Minnesota on the Mississippi River island that would come to bear her name from 1838 to 1846.
Grey Cloud Woman likely knew her future husband, Thomas Anderson, in passing as a child, as he came through the village multiple times each year from 1800 to 1808.
He was outfitted as a trader and navigated the Fox River to arrive at Grey Cloud Woman's home village of Prairie du Chien, in present-day Wisconsin, a few weeks later.
Anderson may have been motivated to marry Grey Cloud to forge business connections with both her father, Aird, and her mother's family among his Dakota trading partners.
From 1810 to 1814, the young family would visit James Aird at a northerly summer trading post called Patterson's Rapids, near the mouth of the Yellow Medicine river.
Grey Cloud bore one additional child with Anderson, a baby girl named Mary or Marion, who did not survive infancy.
Grey Cloud and her children also frequently visited her parents in Prairie du Chien, remaining with them when Anderson was traveling for work.
James Aird was technically an American citizen, having declared his nationality around 1805[6] after discovering while in St. Louis, Missouri that foreign traders were banned from the fur trade in regions covered by the Louisiana Purchase.
"In 1814, Anderson learned that Americans had built a fort directly next to Prairie du Chien, a strategic site in the control of the fur trade, while traveling to Mackinac on business.
He received a commission while visiting the British commander at Mackinac and led a group of volunteer fur traders back to Prairie du Chien.
[6] Following Anderson's retreat to Canada, Grey Cloud Woman and her two children returned to life in the village of Prairie du Chien.
[12] Another part-time resident of Prairie du Chien during this period, John Shaw, decided to abandon the town due to "civil law not being very much in force" and the "petty tyrannies" of the current commander at the fort.
Grey Cloud Woman and her mother sold their home lot in the village, but continued living in Prairie du Chien until 1825, perhaps as renters.
Anderson remarried in 1820 to a woman named Elizabeth "Betsy" Hamilton, a member of a well-connected fur trading family with French, English and Ojibwe ancestry.
Following the birth of their first child, Anderson, at the urging of his new wife, wrote to Grey Cloud in 1821 or 1822, inviting their children to live with his family indefinitely and receive an English education.
Carroll believes that Grey Cloud viewed the separation as a permanent one, noting that it was common practice at the time to name babies after older children who had died.
Grey Cloud named another daughter, born in 1827, Jane Anne, perhaps indicating, according to Carroll, that she had no expectation of seeing her elder children alive again.
While not yet married to her mother, he and Grey Cloud Woman's young daughter, Jane Anderson (aged about 7 or 8) were both present when Aird died at Prairie du Chien in the winter of 1819.
[11] Later, he operated a trading post at Lake Traverse in the 1820s and early 1830s on behalf of the American Fur company, and both Grey Cloud and her mother left Prairie du Chien and lived with him.
According to family lore, Jane agreed to marry Robertson when he promised to travel with her back to Prairie du Chien and find her mother.
They looked for Grey Cloud Woman at Prairie du Chien, but learned she had remarried to Hazen Mooers and settled at a different trading post.
[6] Grey Cloud's adult daughter, Jane, and new son-in-law, Andrew Robertson, arrived in 1837 and lived with the rest of the family at the trading post through the winter of 1837–1838.
[6] In 1837, the Mdewakanton Dakota lost 5 million acres of land east of the Mississippi River following the treaty, which promised annuity payments to tribal members in exchange.
Grey Cloud Woman, her husband Hazen and two adult children, Angus Anderson and Jane Robertson were all signatories of an August, 1837 letter penned by trader Jean Baptiste Faribault to Henry Dodge, then governor of the territory.
Part of the Brown's extended household on the island included Susan's mother, Winona Crawford, her husband Akipa, and her son from a previous marriage, Gabriel Renville.
Other neighbors included an Englishman named James Clewett, Marcelle Courturier, Joseph Bourcier, and husband and wife Pierre Felix and Rosalie Frenier.
[6] Later in 1844, Grey Cloud's daughter Jane moved with her growing family off the island to a nearby location on the Mississippi river called Cave Spring.
