James “Bully” Wells
This article is from the 2014 edition of the RCHS Fall Newsletter. RCHS is working to share more of our content digitally.
Today it is unlikely anyone with the nickname “Bully” would be proud of it, at least openly. James “Bully” Wells, however, is noted in history books as insisting on people calling him by his nickname. Rice County’s Wells Township and Wells Lake, west of Faribault, are named after Bully, one of the earliest settlers in the county. But who was “Bully” Wells?
In The 1882 History of Rice County, Bully Wells is described as “a man of good impulses, rough spoken, but with a heart that always beat for those distressed and hands that never failed to offer relief.” Yet, it also noted that, to those who crossed him, he could be a frightening foe. As his son, Phillip Wells, wrote in 96 Years Among the Indians, “His associates called him ‘Bully Wells’ because of his unhappy proneness to settle questions with his fists and argue them afterwards.”
James “Bully” Wells was born in Gloucester, New Jersey, in 1804. He is reported in the History of Rice County as having “run away to sea” as a boy, serving as a cabin boy on an American war vessel. Eventually, he enlisted with the U.S. Army. He ended up coming to Fort Snelling in 1819 with Col. Henry Leavenworth.
After leaving the military, Wells spent most of his life as a fur trader. He was also connected to the fur trading Faribault family through his marriage to Jane Graham, the youngest sister of Elizabeth Graham Faribault, the wife of Faribault’s founder, Alexander Faribault.
Jane Graham Wells is described in The History of Rice County as “a bois brule.” The term was used for descendants of French Canadian men and Native American women. Jane was the youngest of four daughters born to fur trader and later British Army captain Duncan Graham and his Dakota wife, Susanne Hazahotawin Pennishon.
Bully and Jane married in 1836 and would go on to have ten children: Sarah, Alfred, Orman, Mark, Elizabeth, Wallace, Lucy, Phillip, Aaron, and Agnes.
Bully and Jane at Lake Pepin
The Wells operated a successful trading post on Lake Pepin, located in present-day Frontenac from 1830 to 1852, but times were changing by the beginning of the 1850s. Minnesota had become a U.S. territory. Bully, along with his brother-in-law, Alexander Faribault, served in the first legislature of the new Minnesota Territory, serving from 1849-1852 and 1853-1854. Aware that many new settlers would come to claim land in the state after the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Mendota Treaty, Bully and Jane Wells sold their land at Western Landing on Lake Pepin in 1852.
Bully Wells and Jane Graham Wells, after leaving Lake Pepin, operated a small trading post on the west end of what now Wells Lake in Rice County. They are recorded in the History of Rice County as spending the winter of 1853 in Faribault, along with the Alexander Faribault family, Frederick Faribault and family, Edward J. Crump and his wife, Luke Hulett, and a Mr. Springer and his wife.
Bully had staked a claim in section 34 of Wells Township as soon as the property came on the market in 1853. The area he claimed was prairie land in southeastern Wells Township, which was much easier to establish farmland on than forested land. He soon turned from trading to farming. By 1858, he is reported as having “one of the finest (farms) in the vicinity” of Faribault.
An adventurer all his life, Wells died 150 years ago. According to Rice County Families: Their History, Our Heritage, Bully and his sons, Wallace, Philip and Aaron were on a hunting trip on Aug. 18, 1864, near Floyd River, Iowa, when he was killed. His sons are reported to have buried their father on a bluff near the river.
The Bully and Jane Wells family continue today, working together to document the last 150 years of their family’s history. They have created a Facebook page, “Descendants of James Bully Wells & Jane Graham Wells” that was, “created for the descendants of James Bully and Jane Graham Wells to convene, share genealogical information, and upload documents and photographs to share.”
– Pauline Schreiber, RCHS volunteer