USA > Wisconsin > Grant County > History of Grant County Wisconsin, including its civil, political, geological, mineralogical archaeological and military history > Part 18
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
1881 .- Jeremiah M. Rusk, Republican, 2,512; Fratt, Democrat, 1,323, Kanouse, Prohibition, 405.
1884 .- Rusk, Rep., 4,149; Fratt, Dem., 3,210; Hastings, Pro., 387. 1886 .- Rusk, Rep., 3,042; Woodward, Dem., 2,684; Olin, Pro., 575.
1888 .- Hoard, Rep., 4,264; Morgan, Dem., 3,407; Durant, Pro., 434, Powell, Labor, 96.
1890 .- Hoard, Rep., 3,513; Peck, Dem., 3,347; Alexander, Pro., 335; May, Labor, 60.
1892 .- Spooner, Rep., 4,206; Peck, Dem., 3,690; Richmond, Pro., 433; Butt, Pop., 71.
1894 .- Upham, Rep. 4,519; Peck, Dem., 3,137; Cleghorn, Pro., 227; Powell, Pop., 151.
1896 .- Scofield, Rep., 5,281; Silverthorn, Dem., 3,685; Berkey, Pro., 205; Henderson, Pop., 6.
1898 .- Scofield, Rep., 4,094; Sawyer, Dem., 2,947; Chapin, Pro., 188; Worsley, Pop., 49.
The vote of the county for President from 1848 to 1896 is as fol- lows :
1848 .- Zachary Taylor, Whig, 1,649; Lewis Cass, Democrat,. 1,148; Martin Van Buren, Free-Soil, 144.
1852 .- Winfield Scott, Whig, 1,341; Franklin Pierce, Democrat, 1,379; John P. Hale, Free-Soil, 129.
1856 .- John C. Fremont, Republican, 2,809; James Buchanan, Democrat, 1,419; Millard Fillmore, American, 186.
1860 .- Abraham Lincoln, Republican, 3,579; Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat, 1,922; John C. Breckinridge, Southern Democrat, 33.
1864 .- Abraham Lincoln, Republican, 3,247; George B. McClellan, Democrat, 1,561.
1868 .- Ulysses S. Grant, Republican, 4,640; Horatio Seymour, Democrat, 2,071.
1872 .- U. S. Grant, Republican, 4,307; Horace Greeley, Liberal, 2,319.
1876 .- R. B. Hayes, Republican, 4,723: Samuel Tilden, Democrat, 3,108; Peter Cooper, Greenback, 30.
1880 .- James A. Garfield, Republican, 4,654; W. S. Hancock, Dem- ocrat, 3,038; James B. Weaver, Greenback, 179.
1884 .- James G. Blaine, Republican, 4,137; Grover Cleveland, Democrat, 3,253; John P. St. John, Prohibition, 347; Benjamin But- ler, Greenback, 124.
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POLITICAL HISTORY.
1888 .- Benjamin Harrison, Republican, 4,242; Grover Cleveland, Democrat, 3,414; Streeter, Greenback, 94; Fisk, Prohibition, 649.
1892 .- Harrison, Rep., 4,217; Cleveland, Dem., 3,685; Bidwell, Pro., 418; Weaver, Pop., 76.
1896 .- Mckinley, Rep., 5,315; Bryan, Dem., 3,683; Levering, Pro., 188.
GEORGE C. HAZELTON.
A political history of Grant County would be very incomplete without a mention of one of its most prominent and one of its few pro- fessional politicians.
George C. Hazelton came to Boscobel from Schenectady, N. Y., in September, 1863. The war was then raging and Grant County was pretty well drained of its able-bodied young men, such as Mr. Hazelton then was. But, though he made eloquent war speeches, he preferred Mercury to Mars as a steady god. Heimmediately went into politics, and in 1864, when he had been in the State barely long enough to be a voter. he was elected District Attorney. While holding this office he was nominated for State Senator, much to the astonishment and dis- gust of many of the old "wheel-horses" of his party. When his aspira- tions for the Senatorship were first known, they appeared no less pre- sumptuous than hopeless. John H. Rountree, one of the "fathers of his county," a resident for thirty years, held the office and sought a reelection. Besides his own solidity, he had behind him every news- paper in the county, the great political weight of Platteville in the con- vention, and the aid and sympathy of the prominent lawyers and poli- ticians of Lancaster, who little relished the pretentions of the young adventurer to political leadership in the county. But Hazelton brought to bear against this apparently overwhelming opposition the knowledge gained in the hard-fought political fields of New York. He knew how to make a "machine" and how to run it. The political "machine" was then unknown to the politicians of Grant County. Packed and snap caucuses, the trading of delegates, the "pooling of issues" by several candidates, lavish promises of patronage-these were tactics as strange to the old war-chiefs of Grant as Napoleon's tactics were to the Austrian and Prussian generals. Hazelton's vic- tory in the convention at Lancaster came like a thunder clap. The Platteville Witness and the Boscobel Appeal rebelled. The Herald threatened while the nomination was pending, but after some ex- pressions of disgust, assumed after the nomination an attitude of
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"armed neutrality" toward the victor which it retained until the elder Cover gave up its management, when it went over to Hazelton. But the opposition within the party that hardly dared to bolt Hazelton openly found an object upon which to vent their wrath. Hazelton bad procured the nomination of T. J. Brooks, principal of the Boscobel schools, for County Superintendent, and the anti-Hazelton men and newspapers ( except the Appeal ) ferociously attacked Brooks. D. Gray Purman, who held the office, and who had the support of the Rountree men for a renomination, but was defeated, came out as an independent candidate. The result was that the vote of the county was divided nearly equally between the three candidates, but the Democrat, J. P. Hubbard, received a plurality of 139 votes over Purman.
Hazelton early made himself "solid" with the managers of the State Republican machine, and especially with that able and eloquent, but unscrupulous, Senator, Matt Carpenter. He was thus enabled to strengthen himself by distributing considerable patronage and prom- ising a great deal more with a show of fulfilling his promises. As a part of the anti-Hazleton movement came the bolt in the legislature of 1875. The Republican caucus had nominated Carpenter, but eighteen members, headed by B. M. Coates, of Boscobel, bolted the nomination. J. C. Holloway, of Lancaster, was, I believe, the only Senator to bolt. The firmness of the bolters rendered the election of Carpenter im- possible, and the Democrats and bolters united and elected Angus Cameron, a Republican.
While thus holding the office of State Senator, Hazelton laid his plans for the nomination as Congressman, and made the attempt in 1868; but the veteran Amasa Cobb, of Iowa County, was too strongly intrenched to be driven out. In 1870 J. Allen Barber was a candidate for the nomination against Hazelton and won only after one of the hardest and bitterest fights ever had in the county. In 1872 the custom of a second term was too strong to give Hazelton a show; but in 1874 he entered the field with a formidable and well trained force against two other Lancaster opponents, Col. John G. Clark and J. C. Holloway. But the First and Second Assembly Districts were carried by Col. Clark, and in the Congressional Con- vention Hazelton had 16 votes, Clark 8, and Richard H. Magoon, of Lafayette County, 12. Hazelton's sixteen men stood by him until the 129th ballot, when Clark's men went to Magoon and gave him the nomination.
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POLITICAL HISTORY.
In 1876, in spite of the fight of the opposing faction in Grant County, he carried the county and obtained the long-sought nom- ination. The Republican majority in the district was too large to be overcome by the few disaffected Republicans who dared carry their opposition to the extent of bolting a party nomination. And thus Hazelton enjoyed three terms in Congress.
But at last, in 1882, when the opposition in Grant County had become tired of the hopeless fight, defeat came from another quarter. Till then Grant County had been in a district with the "Granger" counties, and was far the heaviest of them all, but now she was in a district with the much stronger county of Dane. E. W. Keyes, of Madison, the Republican "boss," wanted the nomination, and failing to get it in the convention, he became an independent candidate. The Democratic candidate, Burr W. Jones, was also from Madison, and thus a large part of the overwhelming political force of Dane County was turned against Hazelton, and he was defeated at the polls.
He immediately used the remains of his political influence to obtain an administrative appointment at Washington, and ceased to be a factor in the politics of Grant County.
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PART III.
GEOLOGICAL, MINERALOGICAL AND ARCHÆOLOGICAL HISTORY.
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CHAPTER I.
GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF WISCONSIN.
Original Land. The Laurentian Period-The Isle Wisconsin in the Paleozoic Age-The Potsdam Period-The Lower Magnesian Limestone-The Trenton and Galena Limestones-The Hudson Shales and Niagara Limestone-Wisconsin during the Paleozoic Age-The Carboniferous Age-Natural Gas and Petroleum-The Mesozoic Age-The Glacial Epochs -Relations of Geology to Political Economy.
A knowledge of the geological history of the region of which Grant County is a part is necessary to a good understanding of the mineral resources of the county, and the geological history also has an important bearing on the political and commercial history of the county, which it is interesting to observe. These considerations induce me to note a few brief points in the long history of the "Isle Wiscon- sin;" for geological changes and formations are not confined to so small areas as counties. I shall try to do so, not in the technical jargon of the geologist, but in language which the school-boy and the working-man can understand.
This history has been given at a considerable length in a masterly manner by Prof. Chamberlin in the first volume of the Geology of Wisconsin ; but that was nearly twenty years ago, and since then the investigations of a dozen eminent geologists have added much to and taken something away from what is given in the volume cited.
ORIGINAL LAND.
Many million years ago (how many no man can say, for in those geologic times ten thousand years are as one day and a thousand years as a watch in the night) this mundane sphere, before a ball of liquid fire, had become cooled down so that its oxygen and hydro- gen gases became combined as vapor and then as liquid water, which descending, covered the whole face of the earth in one shoreless, unbroken sea.
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But the earth cooled still more, and as it cooled it shrank and wrinkled, just as a potato or an apple does when it shrinks by its internal juice drying up. These wrinkles appeared above the water as the pristine land. One great mass of it lay, shaped like a V, its arms extending on each side of where Hudson Bay now is, its point lying just north of Lake Superior. Another formed the beginning of what since became the now long-lost continent of Atlantis, famed in classic fable. A third formed the "Isle Wisconsin," a little south of the present site of Lake Superior.
This pristine land was of immense height, perhaps twelve miles, for a single formation from its ruins (the Laurentian) is known to have a thickness of 30,000 feet, nearly six miles. Even that vast height would not be a two-thousandth part of the circumference of the earth, less comparatively in size than the wrinkle upon a shriveled apple. This Isle Wisconsin must have had mountain cliffs beside which those of the Rockies or the Andes would be pigmies indeed. They were of the most primitive rock, just what cannot be told, for no geologist has ever seen their like in its primitive state. They were not granite nor gneiss, but were probably harder than either.
But hard and high as they were, they were all finally torn down by seas and storms-and such seas and storms! The earth's crust was then hot and the sun shone with terrific heat compared with to-day. This caused enormous evaporation ; evaporation begets both electricity and clouds, which unite to form storms. The earth then revolved upon its axis in twelve or fifteen hours and the rapid alternations of day and night added to the disturbances of its elements. Travelers have exhausted the powers of language in describing tropic thunder storms and newspaper reporters in writing up western cyclones, but they are tame indeed compared with the storms that beat upon the lofty mountain brows of the new-born Isle Wisconsin. I had almost said that these storms were appalling; but there was no living thing on all the globe to be appalled. On the raw, rough rocks of the dizzy cliffs there was not even the humblest moss to be tempest-torn; in the acid waters of the raging ocean there was not the lowest protoplasm or slime-life. It was the Azoic or Lifeless Age. So, too, that tremendous evaporation must have pro- duced storm-clouds of exceeding density and immense extent and depth. Those storms must have raged through a plutonian darkness that could hardly be illuminated by the sheets of awfully vivid light-
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ening that flashed through it almost incessantly. We think the climate of Wisconsin is now bad and blustery for a great part of the year, but compared with what it was in the Azoic Age it is the changeless, calm and smiling, perfect peace of Paradise.
With what inconceivable fury those mountain torrents, age after age, must have torn down those great cliffs, crunched the fragments together and hurled them down into the boiling sea! And the sea, too, battered ever upon the shores of the new land with a force of which we cannot now conceive. Its waters were also hot and acid and they not only tore down the cliffs of the shore, but dissolved their alkaline rocks as vinegar does limerock. The coarse fragments of the wasted cliffs were piled about the shore and the dissolved parts were carried farther out and deposited as fine sediment. And thus the land ever grew lower and broader.
Ages passed and theshrinking earth again wrinkled. This time the Isle Wisconsin, it seems, fell into a depression of a wrinkle instead of a ridge, and it sank far beneath the waves and lay there for centuries while the waters dropped slowly and silently upon it the sediments they had dissolved from the shores of other lands.
THE LAURENTIAN PERIOD.
Another shrinking of the cooling globe gave the Isle Wisconsin a second birth, but not at first as an island. It was probably a penin- sula of the great Labradorian continent until the advancing sea ate through the channel where now lie the Great Lakes (as it has done several times since), and made Wisconsin again an island.
It is probable that this elevation never attained any great height. The land rose very slowly through thousands of years and the heavy rains of that age probably cut away the land almost as fast as it rose. Then it sank again beneath the sea and remained thus for centuries in shallow water which dropped sediments upon it until they accumu- lated miles in depth.
This period of rising and subsequent sedimentation is called by geologists the Laurentian Period or age. That portion of the Lauren- tian formation which still remains is known to be 30,000 feet thick, and probably many thousand feet were washed away, when it rose again, by the rains of the Paleozoic Age. It may be asked : How can the thickness of this formation be known? The earth has never been penetrated to the depth of six miles. When this formation was the
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
second time heaved up it was very much crumpled and wrinkled and in some places, notably in Canada, the broken edges were turned up to the surface, and it is easy to measure across these upturned edges the thickness of the strata.
THE HURONIAN PERIOD.
At the close of the Laurentian sedimentation the Wisconsin land again began to rise and there followed another long period of rising, erosion, sinking and sedimentation, called the Huronian Period. While the Laurentian strata were under the water they became by pressure and heat solid rocks, but not brittle; they bent like half-melted glass. When they were thrown up again it was by the wrinkling of the earth's crust, and consequently they were very much folded and twisted. The Huronian formation is also, but in much less degree than the Laurentian. After the Huronian formation was formed, sank and was again upheaved, the earth ceased to wrinkle and all the subsequent formations lie in comparatively flat, unwrinkled strata.
The commercial and political development of the Wisconsin of to- day is connected in one important respect with this Huronian forma- tion of millions of years ago. It was during this period that the great Gogebic-Penokee iron deposits were laid down. The Gogebic region was then a low swamp covered by the high tides of the Superior Sea, which were heavily charged with iron in solution. These swamps must have been filled with a kind of vegetation which took up the iron dissolved in the water and deposited it with their dead remains.
It is noticeable that all great iron deposits (in the Appalachian range from Pennsylvania to Alabama, in the Ozark region, in the iron- bearing ranges of Colorado and New Mexico) were made in lands which were just above sea-level during the Huronian Period. South- ern Wisconsin was then all under water, and it has no iron worth mentioning.
THE ISLE WISCONSIN IN THE PALEOZOIC AGE.
The Paleozoic Age signifies the age of ancient or primitive life. When the Huronian sedimentation ceased the land in the northern part of Wisconsin was about the level of the water. Then occurred a most remarkable era. Along the southern shore of the Superior Sea (then become a shallow lake) and far across the Labrador continent, great fissures opened in the rock and lava flowed forth, not in rivers as from the crater of a volcano, but in vast lakes from abyssmal chasms a hundred miles in length.
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The flows of fiery rock followed each other at first in quick succession, heaping layer upon layer in immense thickness. Then they become slower and between each eruption the land sank beneath the sea and a layer of silt, sand, and pebbles was spread over each layer of lava. The thickness of these combined accumulations seems to have been not less than 40,000 feet, about one-fourth of which was watery sediment and the rest lavas. This eruptive era is called the Keweena- wan Period.
These Keweenawan rocks are important as being the formation in which the Lake Superior copper is found. It is thought that the copper was brought up from the interior of the earth by these eruptions. It was probably first dissolved by the acid water and then precipitated and concentrated by contact with the iron which was deposited in this region during the Huronian Period. How this may be you can see by placing a piece of iron in a solution of blue vitriol, when the iron will be covered with a coat of metallic copper. Although the copper was probably brought up by the Keweenawan eruptions, its solution by the water and subsequent pre- cipitation and concentration were probably the work of a long time afterward.
The formations I have described are grouped together by geolo- gists under the name of Archaan, that is, ancient. The highest parts of this. Archæan, never, after the Keweenawan Period, sank entirely under the sea, but formed a core about which the later formations, the sandstones and limestones I am about to mention, were wrapped, never completely covering it as a blanket, but encircling it like skirts, their inner edges lapping far upon it and their outer parts extending far out under the sea. This Archaan core corresponds to the locality of the pineries of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.
THE POTSDAM PERIOD.
Again the sea advanced upon the land until the shore line of the Southern Sea was considerably north of central Wisconsin and that of Superior some fifty miles south of the present shore of Lake Superior. Some knobs of the ancient rocks of especial hardness resisted the teeth of the ocean and stood as little islets and still stand in central Wisconsin.
But the sea was very shallow and its surf and breakers ground up the fragments of the Archaan rocks that were dug out of the shore or borne into the sea by the torrents from the land. The waters
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
of the ocean were still acid and from the ground-up fragments of the granites and gneisses they dissolved out the lime, potash, soda and clays, and carried them far away into the deep water. But the silica was insoluble and it remained behind in the form of grains of quartz or sand, which sank to the bottom of the shallow sea and in time hardened into sandstone.
This deposit is of great extent and in places 1,000 feet thick. It is called the Potsdam Sandstone. It is a common outcrop in central Wisconsin, but is too low to appear in Grant County, except in the northeastern corner, where it forms the base of the bluffs of the Wisconsin River. The deposit of the Southern Sea was generally white or yellow, but on the Superior side it was stained red or brown by the iron and various shades of green by the copper, forming the "Pictured Rocks" of Lake Superior.
During the Potsdam Period occurred a deposit in central Wiscon- sin that may in the near future have an important influence on the commercial and political history of the State. It was the Potsdam iron deposit, found in Sauk, Vernon, and northern Richland, and Crawford Counties. It is not so rich as the deposits of the Huronian Period in the northern part of the State, but may yet be valuable. It shows that at the close of the Potsdam Period the region where this deposit occurs became a marsh with vegetation capable of precip- itating iron from the currents that crept through it.
Southern Wisconsin was still wholly under water and did not catch any of this deposit.
THE LOWER MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE.
At the end of the Potsdam Period the sea on the southern shore of the Isle Wisconsin suddenly became deep. The isle had become low; its rivers were cut off and no longer bore the débris of the Archæan rocks into the sea, and such as the sea broke off from the shore sank into deep water and were not ground up.and dissolved. So the sand deposits ceased.
The deep waters became clear and fitted for marine life. In the Huronian Age life began and consisted at first of a low order of vegetation in the shore marshes and zoophytes or plant-like animals, such as sponges, in the sea. At the end of the Potsdam Period life had developed into mollusks or shell-fish, at first very minute, with shells no larger than a grain of sand, or coral-like insects. These had the power to extract lime from the sea water to
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make their shells. These shells and corals accumulated upon the still bottom of the deep water forming a limestone deposit, called the Lower Magnesian Limestone. What innumerable billions of these little animals there must have been and how many thousands of years they must have worked to make the 250 feet thick of this limestone that still exists in some places !
This limestone forms the bulk of the bluffs at Boscobel, but its surface is the floor of the Wisconsin River at its mouth, while at Glen Haven its upper surface is below the river, showing that the bed of the sea during this formation sloped sharply to the southwest. Near the shore of Lake Michigan, in Wisconsin, the top of this lime- stone lies about 1,150 feet below the surface, showing a southeast slope on that side of the State.
This formation was laid down upon a smooth surface of sand- stone, but its upper surface is rough and billowy. This shows that at its close the sea suddenly retreated, leaving the land exposed to the channeling and eroding rains of centuries.
Again the sea covered the southern part of Wisconsin, but the water was shallow and laid down only sand. This formation is called the St. Peter Sandstone. It formed only a narrow fringe about the Isle of Wisconsin and has not much thickness or continuity north of the Wisconsin River. In Grant County it is the only sandstone we see, except in the extreme northeastern corner. It comes to the sur- face in places near the Military Ridge, but slopes so much to the south- west, that in the central parts of the county it is seen only in the deep valleys. ! Its most southern outcrop is on the Mississippi about two miles below the mouth of the Platte.
THE TRENTON AND GALENA LIMESTONES.
Again deep water prevailed over southern Wisconsin and the ma- rine animalcules and mollusks laid down a thick formation of lime- stone called the Trenton. Then the water began to shoal and the limestone that was formed was somewhat impure and coarse-grained and is called the Galena Limestone.
These two formations, more especially the Galena, are important on account of being the lead and zinc-bearing strata. The source of these metals and the manner of their deposition have been a subject of much speculation and many theories. The best authorities at present conclude that they were brought by oceanic currents and pre- cipitated by decaying animal matter in the waters, furnishing sul-
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