A few days after Governor Ramsey took up his residence in St. Paul, another citizen established himself in that city of promise. His ambition was not confined to sharing in the unearned increment of a rapidly growing capital city; he wished also to take a part in public affairs. Henry M. Rice, born in 1816 in Vermont, emigrated to Michigan at the age of nineteen, equipped with an academy education and two years of law studies. He came on to Minnesota in 1839, and was employed presently by the Chouteaus of St. Louis, who took over the business of the American Fur Company, to manage their Winnebago and Chippeway trade from Prairie du Chien. In 1847 he became a partner in the business and removed to Mendota, a place much too strait for two such men as himself and Mr. Sibley. Established in St. Paul, Mr. Rice threw himself into every movement and enterprise projected for the development of the town. He generously shared his gains with the public. His personal qualities were such that he could not help desiring public employment and obtaining great success in it. His manners were so gracious and yet not patronizing, that he made friends with all sorts and conditions of men. He divined with an unerring instinct the motives of men and parties, and knew when and how by appropriate suggestion to let them apparently move themselves towards his desired ends. An early example of Mr. Rice’s influence and success may be found in a contract which he obtained in 1850 for collecting vagrant Winnebagoes and returning them to their reservations. The Winnebagoes were a powerful Wisconsin tribe when the white man came, and long after. The government persuaded them to vacate first their mineral lands and later all their lands in Wisconsin, and move to the so-called “neutral ground” in Iowa. This was a strip of territory some twenty miles wide, starting from the northeast corner of Iowa and running south of west to the Des Moines River. The generous presents and annuities required to effect the sale and removal were the ruin of the Winnebagoes. They became idle, dissolute, mischievous. The white settlers could not endure them, and the Indians themselves tired of their confinement to a narrow area. Accordingly in 1846 a treaty was effected for the exchange of the neutral ground for a reservation of eight hundred thousand acres in Northern Minnesota. A tract lying between the Watab and Long Prairie rivers, west of the Mississippi, was obtained from the Chippeways for this purpose.