Joseph Bailly
Bailly's great-grandfather Nicholas Antoine Coulon, Sieur de Villiers was a trader and Army officer who was killed by Fox Indians on the shore of Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1733.
His uncle, Father Charles-Francois Bailly de Messein, spent more than twenty years as a Catholic missionary to the Mi'kmaq Indians of Nova Scotia, and was appointed coadjutor Bishop of Quebec in 1788.
Following the family interest in the fur trade, Joseph Bailly received an advanced education in Montreal, and served a clerkship with the North West Company.
From 1793 to 1810, his winter residence was a trading post located near an Ottawa village at the foot of the Maple River Rapids, in Lebanon Township, Clinton County.
Joseph married Angelique McGulpin (Bead-Way-Way or Mecopemequa) in 1794 in Maketoquit's village at the foot of Maple River rapids, Michigan.
Sophia was adopted by a close friend of both parents, fur trader Magdelaine Laframboise, who summered on Mackinac Island and wintered on Grand River (now Lowell, Michigan).
Rousseau and Bailly maintained large warehouses on Mackinac and in Montreal; trading in numerous locations with several fleets of voyageurs.
She was born in 1783 in Ma-con, a large mixed-band Indian village on the Raisin River west of present Monroe, Michigan.
He was seized as a prisoner of war in January 1814, while visiting his post at Parc Aux Vaches (very near the site of today's campus of the University of Notre Dame), by United States militia.
He sent his eight-year-old daughter Sophia to live with her adopted brother, trader Joseph LaFramboise in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, but the war theater soon expanded westward to that village.
In Montreal, a little-known legal case first asserted American jurisdiction over the lands of northern Minnesota and the upper Great Lakes.
In the summer of 1802, Rousseau and Bailly hired Paul Hervieux of Repetingy (Montreal) to act as bourgeois (partner) and take a canoe under an American license issued at Michilimackinac and to go to Grand Portage.
Shortly after they had set up camp, Duncan McGillivray and Simon McTavish appeared among their tents and ordered Rastoute, Hervieux's clerk, to move beyond the "little fort".
Upon their return to Mackinac, Bailly and Rousseau filed suit for recovery of damaged and lost goods in the courts of Montreal, Quebec.
[8] Joseph Bailly returned to Mackinac Island in 1817 to establish US citizenship, prior to re-entering the fur trading business.
They were the first family of European descent in northern Indiana, and their home became a popular and lively stop for travelers between Chicago and Detroit or Fort Wayne.
Bailly purchased over 2,000 acres (8.1 km2) of land, drafting plans for developing a commercial harbor, city and infrastructure at the mouth of the Calumet.
The Bailly home was a center of the Catholic faith in northern Indiana, but Joseph also strongly supported the Baptist Carey Mission to the Indians.
Daughter Sophia Graveraet and her husband lived on Mackinac, and traded with the Ottawa and Chippewa (Ojibwa) in the region of Grand Traverse Bay.
Esther Whistler was in charge of the fledgling stages of Bailly's grand development called Baillytown, which ceased on her sudden death in 1842.
Eleanor became Mother Mary Cecilia Bailly of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, based near Terre Haute, Indiana.
One of his many projects was to clear the lands acquired by Joseph Bailly, subdividing them and selling farmsteads to pioneering families of modest means.
Joseph Bailly died of illness on 21 December 1835 in his home in Porter County, Indiana, and was buried in the family cemetery nearby.
Nearby Chellberg Farm, part of the original Joseph Bailly land holdings which was purchased from Joel Wicker by a Swedish immigrant family from Chicago, showcases life from the subsequent pioneer period.
Howe, who was partially raised on the Bailly homestead, was an extremely pious and probably racist woman who wrote devotional literature for the Catholic Diocese of South Bend.
Howe, who has been described as a "swarthy" Indian and a middle-aged spinster, reportedly acted superior to her immigrant neighbors living next to the homestead and gradually became a recluse.
In her attempt to literally whitewash much of the family history, Howe reportedly had the bones of many Native Americans who had been buried in the large grave around her grandparents disinterred.
With her adopted daughter Emma Cecilia Bachmann (an orphan from Terre Haute), Howe had also attempted to turn the Bailly homestead into a girls' school but failed.
In 2005, teams under the direction of Valparaiso University professor Randa Duvick began translating Joseph Bailly's 1799-1802 fur trade business account book from the original French language.
Viewing the account book as an important historic resource, Duvick has compared the translation to an archaeological dig, revealing rarely discovered intricate detail about everyday life over the large areas of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois that Bailly covered in his trade.
