An old settler, speaking of the expulsion of the squatters on the military reservation remarked: "At that time, and both before and since, the commanding officers of the fort were the lords of the north. They ruled supreme. The citizens in the neighborhood of the fort were liable at any time to be thrust into the guard-house. While the chief of the fort was the king, the subordinate officers were the princes, and persons have been deprived of their liberty and imprisoned by those tyrants for the most trivial wrong, or some imaginary offense."[145] This statement is doubtless rather extreme; but the fact remains that the fort was the only agency of government in the region, and so the commanding officer was indeed the supreme ruler in so far as he directed the policy and activities of the post. Interest in Old Fort Snelling is not primarily in the logs and stones which made up its building, but in the men and women who lived within its walls. Many were the lives influenced by a residence in its barracks. Characters were formed by the stern rigors of frontier service. Far from busy cities, in the tiresome routine of army life, men were being trained who were to be leaders in the political and military life of the Nation. Others never rose to a higher position; but they command attention because in their faithful performance of daily duties, year after year, they were quietly helping to make the history of the Northwest. It is impossible to consider every man who might be classed among the "Lords of the North", but a review of the careers of a few of them indicates the type of men whose natural ability was supplemented by the self-confidence and the grim determination which are the products of frontier service.[146] The memory of the man who led the troops to the mouth of the Minnesota River in 1819 is commemorated by a fort and a city in another State. The trials which he endured during that first winter at Cantonment New Hope were only harbingers of greater difficulties which were to bring to him the death of a frontier martyr. Although he had been educated for the lawyer's profession, Henry Leavenworth raised a company of volunteers in Delaware County, New York, in 1812, and was elected its captain. He served under General Winfield Scott and won honors for distinguished service at the Battle of Chippewa and at Niagara Falls. After the war he continued in the army, being appointed lieutenant colonel of the Fifth United States Infantry on February 10, 1818. After conducting the troops up the Mississippi River in 1819 and remaining through the winter, he was superseded by Colonel Snelling.