Euphrosine Antaya Powers came into the courtroom on March 17, 1840, and told Judge James Lockwood that she needed still more time to pay off the debts. She had been trying to settle her late husband’s estate for eight months and had sold Strange’s personal effects but that had not earned enough to cover the financial obligations. So she asked the court for permission to sell some of the couple’s real estate, the old Meskwaki land. This was the beginning of Euphrosine’s journey into the world of real estate dealing, of selling, buying, giving, subdividing, mortgaging, losing, defending, and haggling over Prairie du Chien lots, “half-breed” treaty claims, and bounty lands. Like many of her neighbors, she faced the many challenges of the mid-nineteenth century creatively, learning to mobilize the resources at her disposal, including land, family, and tribal ties. Two decades later, many of the Creoles had moved on, but she was still in Prairie du Chien with the Dousmans, Brisbois, and some of the other early fur-trade families.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, hundreds of Creoles like Euphrosine Antaya Powers and her family faced hard choices. Would they follow the fur trade north and westward and leave behind their old homes at the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers? Would they follow the tribes – parents, siblings, cousins, and friends – as they were removed to the west? Would they move to “half-breed” lands or cash in on their real estate? Or would they stay and find ways to make a living in the changing economy, by wage labor, business management, farming the land, and/or drawing their sustenance from the river and nature’s other gifts, as did the neighbors we examined in the previous chapter?