John Lawe

John Lawe (December 6, 1779 - February 11, 1846) was a pioneer fur trader, merchant, land speculator, sawmill owner and judge in Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory.

Aird and Crooks were able to come to accommodation with the American authorities, but the emphatically anti-American Lawe was refused, as a British citizen, permission to trade, and returned to Green Bay the next spring, angry and embittered.

His commander wrote, toward the end of the war, "Lawe has shown great zeal, in the service of Government during the winter, and is worthy of being promoted, and appointed to conduct the duties of his department at this place.

Unlike some of his old partners who left for places like the Red River Colony after the end of the war, Lawe remained in Green Bay (now under increasingly firm American control, especially after the construction of Fort Howard).

In 1821, Lawe and some partners organized the Green Bay Company, an "outfit" (as they were called) with an exclusive agreement to trade with and for the AFC; this and similar arrangements would continue for the next two decades.

But the old-style traders chafed under the restrictions imposed by the arrangement with AFC (they'd been accustomed to seek trade wherever they would), and Lawe found himself in a bitter rivalry with old classmate Jean Joseph Rolette, head of the Western Outfit based in Prairie du Chien, who eventually succeeded in restricting the old Green Bay traders to a narrow compass (with tacit support from the company, which was not happy with the "indolence" of the casual, easygoing style they represented, as opposed to the AFC policy of strict economy, deadlines and budgets).

Entire tribes were said to insist on taking their furs solely to Lawe, and his home in Green Bay maintained a tradition of hospitality, including serving as a smallpox vaccination venue for neighbors.

By 1828, federal confirmation of title to lands whose claims he had bought from Franks and other traders made him the largest property owner of the lower Fox River (even though the AFC sometimes managed to foreclose on him to collect particular debts).

He was described as physically imposing, weighing over 300 pounds, but felt shabby in the face of all the "luxury and superfluity... in great abundance" and became homesick, gratefully returning to Green Bay (without collecting).

Lawe, who was of Jewish background, was baptised a Protestant, and had served as vestryman and treasurer of Wisconsin's first Episcopalian church, was reported to have made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, and was buried in a Catholic cemetery next to Thérèse.