but Rice convinced the Ojibwe to give up a tract west of the Mississippi between the Watab and Crow Wing Rivers. In the fall of 1847, Sibley wrote to his friend Charles Christopher Trowbridge regarding the Winnebago:"These poor fellows will be thrust between the powerful contending tribes of Sioux and Chippewas, and I fear they will fare badly... The whole policy pursued by the Govt. toward the Western Indians generally, has a tendency to destroy them, and that speedily. They dare now avow this as their object,...but by persisting in a course which they have been repeatedly warned must end in the extinction of the tribes, they show how little real regard they have for their welfare."In the summer of 1848, the Winnebago reluctantly began to move, with assistance from Colonel Seth Eastman and a company of infantry from Fort Snelling. Dousman and Rice received payment for "tribal debts." Dousman, who had chosen not to renew his contract with Choteau and Company after the original contract expired in 1846, had exited the fur trade and focused on his other business ventures. Political career Boundary with Wisconsin and governmental vacuum In December 1847, Wisconsin's second constitutional convention voted to place the northwestern border of Wisconsin at the Rum and Mississippi Rivers. In January 1848, St. Paul citizens petitioned Congress to oppose the proposed Rum River boundary. Rather than being relegated to a minor role at the far western edge of the new state, they envisioned St. Paul at the center of a new territorial government. Henry Sibley vigorously supported their efforts to keep St. Paul and the St. Croix valley out of the borders of Wisconsin, bringing him into direct conflict with his old business partner Hercules L. Dousman. Dousman once again had his eye on further opportunities to obtain treaty money, and wrote to Sibley that a Wisconsin border on the Rum River line would create pressure for a major Dakota land cession to the west of the Mississippi River.Wisconsin became a state on May 29, 1848, with Wisconsin's northwestern border finally pushed back to the St. Croix River. The residents of St. Paul, the lumbermen along the St. Croix, and the sawmill workers of St. Anthony Falls suddenly found themselves in a peculiar legal and governmental vacuum. Although most of them had protested against inclusion in the new state of Wisconsin, they were shocked and disappointed to find themselves