Stories Of The Badger State - free ebook by Reuben Gold Thwaites

STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE

BY REUBEN GOLD THWAITES NEW YORK CINCINNATI CHICAGO AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY Copyright , 1900, BY REUBEN GOLD THWAITES. STO. BADGER STA. W. P. I....

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PREFACE

The student of nature lives in a broader and more interesting world than does he who has not learned the story of the birds, the streams, the fields, the woods, and the hedgerows. So, too, the student of local history finds his present interest in town, village, city, or State, growing with his knowledge of its past. In recognition of this fact, these true stories, selected from Wisconsin's history, have been written as a means to the cultivation of civic patriotism among the youth of our common

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STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE THE MOUND BUILDERS

In the basin of the Mississippi, particularly in that portion lying east of the great river, there are numerous mounds which were reared by human beings, apparently in very early times, before American history begins. They are found most frequently upon the banks of lakes and rivers, and often upon the summits of high bluffs overlooking the country. No attempt has ever been made to count them, for they could be numbered by tens of thousands; in the small county of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, for ins

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LIFE AND MANNERS OF THE INDIANS

At the time when white men first came to Wisconsin, there were found here several widely differing tribes of Indians, and these were often at war with one another. The Winnebagoes, an offshoot of the Sioux, occupied the valleys of the Wisconsin and the Fox, and the shores of Green Bay as far down as Sturgeon Bay. If the theory of the ethnologists be correct, that most of the Wisconsin mounds were built by the Winnebagoes, then at times they must have dwelt in nearly every corner of the State. Th

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THE DISCOVERY OF WISCONSIN

In the year 1608, the daring French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, founded a settlement on the steep cliff of Quebec, and thus laid the foundations for the great colony of New France. This colony, in the course of a century and a half, grew to embrace all of what we now call Canada and the entire basin of the Mississippi River. CHAMPLAIN New France grew slowly. This was largely owing to the opposition of the fierce Iroquois Indians of New York, whom Champlain had greatly angered. Another reason

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RADISSON AND GROSEILLIERS

In the preceding chapter, the story was told how, in the year 1634, only fourteen years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, Jean Nicolet was sent by Governor Champlain, of Quebec, all the way out to Wisconsin, to make friends with our Indians, and to induce them to trade at the French villages on the lower St. Lawrence River. Whether any of them did, as a result of this visit, go down to see the palefaces at Three Rivers or Quebec, and carry furs to exchange for European beads, hatchets,

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THE STORY OF JOLIET AND MARQUETTE

In history there are two "discoveries of the Mississippi"; the lower waters were discovered by the Spanish explorer, De Soto (April, 1541); and the upper waters, by Frenchmen from Canada or New France. Nothing came of De Soto's discovery for over a hundred years, for the Spaniards had no love for exploration that gave no promise of mines of precious metals, and it is to the French that we give chief credit for finding the Mississippi; for their discovery immediately led the way to a general know

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THE JESUIT MISSIONARIES

In planting settlements in Canada (or New France, as it was then called), the French had two principal objects in view: the fur trade with the Indians, and the conversion of these Indians to the Christian religion. Roman Catholic missionaries from France therefore accompanied the first settlers, and were always prominent in the affairs of the colony. Governor Champlain brought to Quebec some missionaries of the Recollect order, a branch of the Franciscans; but after a few years, the difficulties

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SOME NOTABLE VISITORS TO EARLY WISCONSIN

It has been pointed out that wandering fur traders were in Wisconsin at a very early date. We have seen that Nicolet, Radisson, and Groseilliers made Wisconsin known to the world, at a time when Massachusetts colony was still young. It will be remembered that when Father Ménard went to Lake Superior, in 1660, to convert the Indians, there were several French fur traders with him. As early as the spring of 1662, these same traders had gone across country to the mouth of the Fox River. Three years

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A QUARTER OF A CENTURY OF WARFARE

Wisconsin was important, from a geographical point of view, because here were the meeting places of waters which flowed in so many directions; here were the gates which opened upon widely divergent paths. The explorer and the fur trader soon discovered this, and Wisconsin became known to them at a very early period. France had two important colonies in North America, New France (or Canada), upon the St. Lawrence River, and Louisiana, extending northward indefinitely from the Gulf of Mexico. It w

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THE COMMERCE OF THE FOREST

We have seen in previous chapters why Wisconsin, with her intermingling rivers, was considered the key to the French position in the interior of North America; why it was that fur traders early sought this State, and erected log forts along its rivers and lakes to protect their commerce with the people of the forest. It remains to be told what were the conditions of this widespreading and important forest trade. The French introduced to our Indians iron pots and kettles, which were vastly strong

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IN THE OLD FRENCH DAYS

In establishing their chain of rude forts, or trading posts, along the Great Lakes and through the valley of the Mississippi, the French had no desire to plant agricultural settlements in the West. Their chief thought was to keep the continental interior as a great fur bearing wilderness; to encourage the Indians to hunt for furs, by supplying all their other wants with articles made in Europe; and to prevent them from carrying any of their furs to the English, who were always underbidding the F

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THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH

Upon the eighth day of September, 1760, the French flag ceased to fly over Canada. In a long and bitter struggle, lasting at intervals through an entire century, French and English had been battling with each other for the control of the interior of this continent; and the former had lost everything at the decisive battle on the Plains of Abraham, before the walls of Quebec. Reduced to the last extremity, the authorities of New France had ordered her fur traders, coureurs de bois and all, to hur

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WISCONSIN IN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

We ordinarily think of the Revolutionary War as having been fought wholly upon the Atlantic slope. As a matter of fact, there were enacted west of the Alleghanies, during that great struggle, deeds which proved of immense importance to the welfare of the United States. Had it not been for the capture from the British of the country northwest of the Ohio River by the gallant Virginia colonel, George Rogers Clark, it is fair to assume that the Old Northwest, as it came to be called, the present St

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THE RULE OF JUDGE RÉAUME

By the treaty of peace with Great Britain, in 1783, the country northwest of the Ohio River was declared to be a part of the territory of the United States; but it was many years before the Americans had anything more than a nominal control of Wisconsin, which was a part of this Northwestern region. The United States was at first unable to meet all of its obligations under this treaty; hence Great Britain kept possession of the old fur trade posts on the Upper Lakes, including Mackinac, of which

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THE BRITISH CAPTURE PRAIRIE DU CHIEN

Although the Northwest was obtained for the United States by the treaty with Great Britain in 1783, the fur trade posts on the Upper Great Lakes were openly held by the mother country until the new republic could fully meet its financial obligations to her. After thirteen years, a new treaty (1796) officially recognized American supremacy. Nevertheless, for another thirteen years English fur traders were practically in possession of Wisconsin, operating through French Canadian and half-breed age

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THE STORY OF THE WISCONSIN LEAD MINES

It was the fur trade that first brought white men to Wisconsin. The daring Nicolet pushed his way through the wilderness, a thousand miles west of the little French settlement at Quebec, solely to introduce the traffic in furs to our savages, and others were not long in following him. Soon it was learned that there were lead mines in what is now southwest Wisconsin. It is not probable that the aborigines, before the coming of white men, made any other use of lead than from it to fashion a few ru

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THE WINNEBAGO WAR

The world over, white men, representing a higher type of civilization, have wrested, or are still wresting, the land from the original savage occupants. This seems to be inevitable. It is one of the means by which civilization is being extended over the entire globe. We glory in the progress of civilization; but we are apt to ignore the hardship which this brings to the aborigines. While not relaxing our endeavor to plant the world with progressive men who shall make the most of life, we should

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THE BLACK HAWK WAR

In November, 1804, the Sac and Fox Indians, in return for a paltry annuity of a thousand dollars, ceded to the United States fifty million acres of land in eastern Missouri, northwestern Illinois, and southwestern Wisconsin. There was an unfortunate clause in this compact, which quite unexpectedly became one of the chief causes of the Black Hawk War of 1832; instead of obliging the Indians at once to vacate the ceded territory, it was stipulated that, "as long as the lands which are now ceded to

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THE STORY OF CHEQUAMEGON BAY

Chequamegon Bay, of Lake Superior, has had a long and an interesting history. Nearly two and a half centuries ago, in the early winter months of 1659, two adventurous French traders, Radisson and Groseilliers, built a little palisade here, to protect the stock of goods which they exchanged with the Indians for furs. This was on the southwestern shore of the bay, a few miles west of the present city of Ashland, and in the neighborhood of Whittlesey's Creek. These men did not tarry long at Chequam

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WISCONSIN TERRITORY FORMED

What we now know as Wisconsin was part of the vast undefined wilderness to which the Spaniards, early in the sixteenth century, gave the name Florida. Spain claimed the country because of the early discoveries of her navigators and explorers. Her claim was undisputed until there came to North America the energetic French, who penetrated the continent by means of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers and the Great Lakes, and gradually took possession of the inland water systems, as fast as discovere

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WISCONSIN BECOMES A STATE

Some of the people of Wisconsin were not long content with a Territorial government. The Territory was only two years old when a bill was introduced in Congress for a State government, but the attempt failed. In 1841 Governor Doty, the leader in the movement, had the question put to popular vote; but it was lost, as it also was in the year following. In 1843 a third attempt was defeated in the Territorial council (or senate); and in 1845, still another met defeat in the Territorial house of repr

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THE BOUNDARIES OF WISCONSIN

In the Ordinance of 1787, whereby Congress created the old Northwest Territory out of the triangle of country lying between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and Lake of the Woods and the Great Lakes, it was provided that this vast region should eventually be parcelled into five States. The east-and-west dividing line was to be "drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan"; south of this line were to be erected three States, and north of it two. "Whenever," the ordinance read, "an

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LIFE IN PIONEER DAYS

So long as the fur trade remained the principal business in Wisconsin, the French were still supreme at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien; and, until a third of the nineteenth century had passed away, there existed at these outposts of New France a social life which smacked of the "old régime," bearing more traces of seventeenth-century Normandy than of Puritan New England. With the decline of the fur trade, a new order of things slowly grew up. There being little legal machinery west of Lake Michi

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROADS

When white men first came to our land, the Indian trails formed a network of narrow, deep-sunken paths over the face of the country, as they connected village with village, and these with the hunting and fishing resorts of the aborigines. Many of the most important trails simply followed the still earlier tracks of the buffalo, which in great herds wandered from plain to plain, in search of forage, or in hiding from man, through the dark forest and over the hills. The buffalo possessed an unerri

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THE PHALANX AT CERESCO

In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century there was much agitation, both in France and America, over the teachings of a remarkable man named François Marie Charles Fourier. He claimed that if people would band themselves together in communities, in the proper spirit of mutual forbearance and helpfulness, and upon plans laid down by him, it would be proved that they could get along very well with no strife of any sort, either in business, or religion, or politics. Then, if the nations would

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A MORMON KING

In the year 1843 there came from New York to the village of Burlington, Racine county, an eccentric young lawyer named James Jesse Strang. Originally a farmer's boy, he had been a country school-teacher, a newspaper editor, and a temperance lecturer, as well as a lawyer. Possessed of an uneasy, ambitious spirit, he had wandered much, and changed his occupation with apparent ease. Strang was passionately fond of reading, was gifted with a remarkable memory, and developed a fervent, persuasive sty

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THE WISCONSIN BOURBON

Two years after Louis the XVI., Bourbon king of France, and his beautiful queen, Marie Antoinette, were beheaded by the revolutionists in Paris, in the closing decade of the eighteenth century, their imbecile child of eight years, called the "dauphin," was officially reported to have died in prison. But the story was started at the time, and popularly believed, that the real dauphin, Louis the XVII., had been stolen by the royalists, and another child cunningly substituted to die there in his pl

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SLAVE CATCHING IN WISCONSIN

There had been a few negro slaves in Wisconsin before the organization of the Territory and during Territorial days. They had for the most part been brought in by lead miners from Kentucky and Missouri. But, as the population increased, it was seen that public opinion here, as in most of the free States, was strongly opposed to the practice of holding human beings as chattels. Gradually the dozen or more slaves were returned to the South, or died in service, or were freed by their masters; so th

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THE STORY OF A FAMOUS CHIEF

One of the best-known Indians with whom Wisconsin Territorial pioneers were thrown into personal contact was Oshkosh, the last of the Menominee sachems, or peace chiefs. It is worth while briefly to relate the story of his career, because it was the life of a typical Indian leader, at the critical time when the whites were coming into the country in such numbers as to crowd the reds to the wall. Oshkosh was born in 1795, at Point Bas, on the Wisconsin River. Cha-kau-cho-ka-ma (meaning Old King),

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A FIGHT FOR THE GOVERNORSHIP

Between the time when Wisconsin became a state (1848), and the opening of the War of Secession (1861), party feeling ran high within the new commonwealth. Charges of corruption against public officials were freely made; many men sought office for the plunder supposed to be obtained by those "inside the ring"; newspaper editors appeared to be chiefly engaged in savage attacks on the reputations of those who differed from them, and general political demoralization was prevalent. When, however, imp

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OUR FOREIGN-BORN CITIZENS

It is probable that no other State in the Union contains so many varieties of Europeans as does Wisconsin. About seventeen per cent of our entire population were born in Germany; next in numbers come the Scandinavians, natives of Great Britain, Irish, Canadians, Poles, Bohemians, Hollanders, Russians, and French. These different nationalities are scattered all over the State; often they are found grouped in very large neighborhoods. Sometimes one of these groups is so large that, with the Americ

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SWEPT BY FIRE

Before the great inrush of agricultural settlers, in 1836, most of the surface of Wisconsin was covered with dense forests. In the northern portion of the State, pines, hemlocks, and spruce predominated, mingled with large areas of hard wood; elsewhere, hard wood chiefly prevailed, the forests in the southern and eastern portions being frequently broken by large prairies and by small treeless "openings." In the great northern pine woods, lumbermen have been busy for many years. They leave in the

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BADGERS IN WAR TIME

The men of Wisconsin who had fought and conquered the hard conditions of frontier life, developing a raw wilderness into a wealthy and progressive commonwealth, were of the sort to make the best of soldiers when called upon to take up arms in behalf of the nation. From the earliest days of the War of Secession until its close, Wisconsin troops were ever upon the firing line, and participated in some of the noblest victories of the long and painful struggle. General Sherman, in his "Memoirs," pai

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