William Whipple Warren

Who was William Whipple Warren?

William Whipple Warren was an historian, interpreter, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Of Ojibwe and European-American descent, he lived in two cultures, so was considered an Ojibwe "relative"; he is the first historian of the Ojibwe people.

He moved from Wisconsin to Crow Wing in present-day Minnesota in the fall of 1845. He worked as an interpreter for the fur trader Henry Mower Rice.

Bilingual and educated in the United States style, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe from an early age to tell their history. He used oral history to tell about the people prior to their encounter with Europeans, and combined it with documentation in the European style. After suffering from lung problems for many years, he died as a young man of 28 from tuberculosis on June 1, 1853. His history was published posthumously in 1885 by the Minnesota Historical Society. A revised, annotated edition was published in 2009.