fur trader, first for the Hudson's Bay Company and later for the American Fur Company. As he traveled from one Indian village to another in quest of pelts, he picked up many languages and learned about their cultures. In addition to speaking Swedish, English, French and Ojibwe, Fahlstrom learned Dakota and Iroquois. Jacob Fahlstrom drifted southward to Minnesota country around 1818. He traded for beaver pelts with the Ojibwe at Leech Lake and Red Lake. As Fort Snelling was being built in 1820, he took two jobs: supplying the fort with wood and carrying the mail north to the Lake Superior region, and from Prairie du Chien to St. Croix Falls. In 1823 he married Marguerite Bonga Fahlström, daughter of Pierre Bonga of the Lake Superior Chippewa. One of her grandfathers was a freed slave from Africa. In 1837 or 1838 the "Swede Indian" was converted at the Methodist mission at the Mdewakanton Dakota village of Kaposia. Thereafter he became a sort of missionary to the Indians and also to the men of the lumber camps in the north woods. In 1841 Fahlstrom moved to what would become Washington County, where he took up a claim at Valley Creek near Afton. His home there was pretty well filled with nine children, but he still longed to travel. It is said that he once owned where the business district of St. Paul stands today. Unfortunately he gave up this claim because he thought the place was too hilly. He had more use for the island he owned in White Bear Lake; it was covered with sugar maples, and his wife and children made sugar there every spring. Jacob Fahlstrom died in 1859. His widow Marguerite survived until 1880. Legacy The graves of Jacob and Marguerite Fahlstrom are marked in a small graveyard on Fahlstrom Place road in Afton, Minnesota. Jacob Fahlstrom has also been honored by having his portrait hung in the Swedish Art Institute of Minneapolis. It is not a work of art, however, but rather dark and forbidding with a half-circle fringe of whiskers, revealing nothing of the character of the man which was kindly, sincere and devoted. In Augustus Easton's History of the St. Croix Valley (1909), he is described as follows: Jacob Fahlstrom was a sort of preacher, and he could pray pretty well, and could be depended on upon to do so, providing a good meal