James L. Fisk

James Liberty Fisk (ca. 1835 -1902) was an officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War who promoted settlement of the western United States. He led four expeditions from Minnesota to Montana in the 1860s.

Fisk was born in New York of Irish extraction, the eldest of six sons of John B. and Jerusha T. Fisk. He worked as a "raftsman, farmer, carriage maker, and newspaperman" for the Daily Courier of Lafayette, Indiana. Four of his five brothers also became newspapermen.

Becoming engrossed with the western frontier, he moved to White Bear Lake, Minnesota sometime in the 1850s, married Lydia Burson, and started farming. In 1857, he was in the expedition of William H. Nobles which tried unsuccessfully to build a wagon road from Fort Ridgely to South Pass. Later, he was the secretary of the Dakota Land Company, which promoted settlement along the road.

In 1861, he enlisted in the Third Minnesota Volunteer Infantry as a private. An undisciplined soldier, on May 19, 1862, he was called to Washington, DC, where he was "commissioned captain and assistant quartermaster of volunteers in the quartermaster corps" and "appointed superintendent of emigration ... on a route between Fort Abercrombie, Dakota, and Fort Walla Walla, Washington", a political appointment engineered by influential Minnesotans interested in promoting the settlement of the west. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton instructed him to "organize and outfit a corps for the protection of emigrants 'against all dangers' that might beset their way west." He was authorized to enlist 50 men for this purpose.

He had little supervision in his new responsibilities:

Fisk was commissioned in the quartermaster corps, yet the quartermaster kept no financial records of his activities; he was on detached duty under assignment from the secretary of war, yet he was a volunteer and owed his appointment to influence from Minnesota; he was ordered to report regularly to the adjutant general, yet he had no immediate superior who was at all concerned with what he was doing. His Western duties were of no great importance to the war department in its preoccupation with the larger concerns of the Civil War.

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