Company after working there again in the summer of 1830. In 1832, AFC manager Robert Stuart selected Sibley to transact important business for the company, and sent him on a perilous journey back to Detroit in a bark canoe paddled by nine voyageurs. Despite a severe storm, damage to the canoe, and news of a cholera outbreak in Detroit which killed his grandmother, Sibley successfully completed the journey and secured several licenses for the American Fur Company from Michigan Territorial Governor George Bryan Porter. From 1832 to 1833 and again from 1833 to 1834, Sibley was charged with the responsibility of buying supplies for the company via its offices in Cleveland, which required him to canvass rural Ohio and Pennsylvania on horseback in winter. In 1834, as American Fur Company founder John Jacob Astor prepared to retire, the company was in the midst of reorganization as a partnership, with Astor's chief lieutenant Ramsay Crooks as president and senior partner. Sibley approached Crooks directly and asked to be released from his employment contract with Astor, which ran until 1835, one year early. He explained that his parents "were strongly opposed to [his] longer sojourn in what was little better than a wild Indian country," and that he had been offered much better paying positions as a cashier at two banks, including one in Detroit. However, Crooks rejected Sibley's offer to pay US$1,000 to be released from his contract. Instead, his counteroffer was to include Sibley as a junior partner in the American Fur Company's newly constituted Western Outfit, together with Jean Joseph Rolette and Hercules L. Dousman, who had been running the company's Upper Mississippi Outfit. Sibley would be the regional manager for fur trade with the Dakota north and west of Lake Pepin, based at the mouth of the Minnesota River (then called St. Peter's). Sibley later wrote that he was finally persuaded by Dousman's glowing description of the Minnesota Valley as a hunter's paradise where "woods abounded with bear, deer and other game animals, and the numerous lakes with aquatic fowl of every variety." Fur trade in Minnesota country In October 1834, 23-year-old Henry Sibley left Mackinac, traveling to Green Bay and up the Fox River, then to the Wisconsin River via a two-mile portage trail. On the Wisconsin River, he found a tiny stern-wheel steamboat which took him to Prairie du Chien. After spending several days at the