Mrs Prescott's name

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With pen and pencil on the frontier in 1851; the diary and sketches of Frank Blackwell Mayer

VIII Social Life at Old Fort Snelling

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June 24th 1851. Left St Paul for Fort Snelling where I arrived in an hour & was politely received by Franklin Steele Esq. to whom I had a letter, he introduced me to his wife, formerly Miss [Anna] Barney of Baltimore.1 I was enabled to procure board at Mr [Philander] Prescotts the interpreter & superintendant of Indian farming. He is an old resident of this country & familiar with the Indians, speaking their language fluently & connected with them by marriage.2 His long intercourse with them seems to have given him a reserved manner

[Note 1: 1 Franklin Steele was the sutler at Fort Snelling from 1838 to 1858. He was a prominent figure in frontier Minnesota, particularly in the development of the lumber industry. Hansen, Old Fort Snelling, 87; Stanchfield, "History of Pioneer Lumbering on the Upper Mississippi and Its Tributaries," in Minnesota Historical Collections, 9:354.]

[Note 2: 2 Philander Prescott settled in the vicinity of Fort Snelling in 1820. He married Mary Keehei, a Sioux woman of the Lake Calhoun band. See Warren Upham and Mrs. Rose B. Dunlap, Minnesota Biographies, 1655-1912, 392, 615 (Minnesota Historical Collections,vol. 14). Prescott's report as "Superintendent of farming for the Sioux" for 1851 is in Indian Office, Reports, 1851, p. 173.]

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His son in law, a tall raw boned Yankee, of rather amiable qualities is misnamed Petty-John, but John is unfortunately of enormous altitude & joined after the manner of a steam engine.5 His motions, actions, & voice are all on the ponderous, hard & harsh style of execution as musicians would say. He walks the floor & an earth quake seems approaching, he asks me for

[Note 5: 5 Prescott's son-in-law was Eli Pettijohn, a native of Ohio who went to Fort Snelling in 1841 as a government employee to furnish supplies and teach farming to the Sioux. He is listed in the manuscript schedules of the Fort Snelling census for 1850 as a farmer, thirty-two years of age. His wife, Lucy, was aged twenty-one. In the late seventies Pettijohn went to California, where he began the manufacture of the breakfast foods since known by his name. See a sketch of Mrs. Prescott in the Minnesota Historical Society Scrapbooks, 1:16, and an obituary sketch of Pettijohn in the Minneapolis Tribune, May 23, 1915. The census schedules are in the possession of the Minnesota Historical Society.]