Congressman, governor, military leader, and senior statesman--few people had a longer or more influential role in the shaping of the state of Minnesota than Henry Hastings Sibley (1811-91). Sibley's history reveals universal tensions about the duality of the nineteenth-century frontiersman who is at once a trade partner of the Indian/European/Métis worlds and the conquering government official of the ever-expanding colonization of the American West. Rhoda Gilman spent more than thirty years examining Sibley--through hints and fragments of stories that Sibley himself left in articles, an unfinished autobiography, and scores of family letters--and uncovers in this perceptive biography the complexities of a man who embodied these clashing extremes.

Gilman sets Sibley against the tapestry of trade, politics, frontier expansion, and intercultural relations in the Upper Mississippi valley, and reminds us that throughout his life Sibley was poised to become a national figure but always chose to remain in the place he loved and the state he helped to found.