Stanislaus Chaput, a French-Canadian fur trader sometimes called Louis Chappee, became the first settler at the mouth of the Menominee River in the early 1800s. He fought with most of the Green Bay traders in the British attack on Fort Mackinac during the War of 1812. After the war he traded extensively in northern Wisconsin while working for John Lawe, a Green Bay fur magnate. In 1824, rival traders William Farnsworth and Charles Brush forcibly deposed him from his old location, and Chaput moved a few miles upstream and built a fortified trading post at the foot of the rapids. Until Chaput's death in the 1850s, the post at the rapids was a center of trade for the surrounding villages of Menominee Indians.