Jacques Vieau

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vieau

Jacques Vieau (or Vieaux) (May 5, 1757 – July 1, 1852) was a French-Canadian fur trader and first permanent white settler in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was born near Montreal, Canada and died in Howard, Wisconsin.

Vieau married Angelique Roy in 1786, the granddaughter of Potawatomi Indian chief, Anaugesa, at Green Bay. They had at least twelve children together.

While employed by the North West Company, Vieau established a fur trading post in the area that would become Milwaukee in 1795, along with outposts at Kewaunee, Manitowoc and Sheboygan. His Milwaukee cabin was built on top of a bluff overlooking the Menomonee Valley and became his winter residence away from Green Bay. A historical monument marks this location in Mitchell Park as the first house in Milwaukee.

In 1818 Jacques Vieau hired another French-Canadian named Solomon Juneau, who later married his daughter Josette and went on to found what was to become the City of Milwaukee.

Vieau is the eponym of Vieau Elementary School and also a street found in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Although the descendants of Vieau are centered around Green Bay, there is a direct male descendant of Vieau presently residing in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee.

• Reference: FamilySearch Genealogy - SmartCopy: Dec 9 2021, 22:50:39 UTC
• https://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc2031393/?q=Notenoquah

As trade goods became essential to the Indians, traders who supplied the
goods became friends of the Indians. Moreover, traders usually wanted to
establish rapport with the natives, learn their language for economic
advantages, and seek companionship for their lonely lives. This often led to
intermarriage. Such was the case of Jim Thorpe's great-great grandfather,
Jacques Vieux, a Canadian adventurer who operated fur trading posts
during the late 1700s and early 1800s along the shores of Lake Michigan,
near what is now Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.'

Jacques, a large six-foot man, married Angeline LeRoy, the niece of
Potawatomi Chief Puch-wa-she-gun, in 1786 at Green Bay, Wisconsin.
They both lived to be very old. Jacques was ninety-six when he died on July
1, 1852, and was buried at the French Catholic cemetery in Shantytown,
Wisconsin. Jim's great-great-grandmother, Angeline, died January 7,
1862, when she was one hundred and five years old. She is buried at
Lawrence, Brown County, Wisconsin.2

Soon after the Revolutionary War, Jacques Vieux left Quebec for the
Northwest as an employee of the American Fur Company. He worked for
several years in the Lake Superior region, near the Wabash, and then in the
Milwaukee area about 1790. He left the American Fur Company and
started operating his own trading posts, with the first one on the Menom-
inee River about two miles from where it crossed the Green Bay Trail.3

Jacques and Angeline had twelve children. Louis (Jim Thorpe's great-
grandfather) was born November 30, 1809, in the Green Bay area of
Wisconsin. The other children-Madeline, Josette, Paul, Jacques Jr.,
Joseph, Aumable "Mab," and Andrew J.-were born in the Green Bay
area, while Nicholas, Peter J., and Mary were born in the Milwaukee area.
The children spoke French, Potawatomi, and English, while Aumable
spoke nine different Indian languages. Josette, Louis' sister, married Solo-
mon Juneau, who platted and founded the village of Milwaukee on the site
of Jacques' old trading post (where several of Louis's younger brothers and
sisters had been born). Brother Charles had married Rosanne Mirandeau,
from another early French fur traders family around Milwaukee.4

Louis Vieux was born November 30, 1809, in a log house near the
trading post that his father had built in the wilderness near Green Bay. His
father, Jacques, and his Potawatomi mother, Angeline, had opened up fur
trade with the Potawatomi Indians in 1795 with a string of trading posts
from Green Bay to Milwaukee along the west shore of Lake Michigan. Like
his father before him, Louis as a young man moved out among the Potawa-
tomi trading centers. When he was about twenty-seven years old, he
married sixteen-year-old Charlotte, a full-blood Potawatomi daughter of
Ches-haw-gan.