Dousman, Hercules L. (Hercules Louis), 1800-1868

Wealthy Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, fur trader and regional investor.

Born on Mackinac Island in 1800 and educated in New Jersey, Dousman worked at a New York mercantile house as a clerk and with his father at Mackinac before coming in 1826 to Prairie du Chien. There Dousman worked as an agent of the American Fur Company in partnership with Joseph Rolette (whose widow, Jane Fisher Rolette, Dousman married in 1844). In 1834, Dousman, Rolette, and H.H. Sibley became stockholders in Ramsay Crooks' reorganized American Fur Company and contracted to run the Western Outfit for Crooks. With the assignment of that company to creditors in 1842, the trio transferred their trade, becoming the Upper Mississippi Outfit of Pierre Chouteau Jr. & Co. of St. Louis.

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