Note 17 — Front matter

(page page 16).—James Duane Doty was born at Salem, N. Y., November 5, 1799. Having studied law, he settled at Detroit in his twentieth year, and soon became clerk of the Michigan Supreme Court and secretary of the territorial legislature. In 1820 he made a tour of the upper lakes in company with Governor Lewis Cass, penetrating to the sources of the Mississippi. In 1823 he was appointed United States district judge for that portion of Michigan Territory lying west of Lakes Michigan and Superior, and for ten years held court both at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. In 1834, as a member of the territorial legislature, he drafted the act which made Michigan a state and Wisconsin a territory. From 1837-41 he served as delegate to Congress from Wisconsin, and from 1841-44 as governor of the new territory. Vigorously ambitious in behalf of Wisconsin, he long though vainly sought to regain from Illinois the strip of country north of a line drawn due westward from the southernmost part of Lake Michigan, the ordinance of 1787 having named this as the boundary between the two states to be erected to the west of Lake Michigan and the Wabash River; had his contention prevailed, Chicago would have been a Wisconsin city. Doty served in the Wisconsin state constitutional convention (1846); was a member of Congress (1850-53); in 1861 was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs of Utah, and signed the first treaty ever made with the Shoshones; and in May, 1863, was appointed governor of Utah, in which office he died, June 13, 1865.