USA > Wisconsin > Grant County > History of Grant County Wisconsin, including its civil, political, geological, mineralogical archaeological and military history > Part 5
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
upon the opposite submerged bank, with their whiffletrees and a log chain attached. Mr. Burt then swam back and fastening one of his ever-ready grape-vines to the end of the wagon-tongue, he swam out with the other end of the vine in his teeth and told his man to push the wagon into the deep water. The box had been fastened to the bolsters and it floated the wagon, which was towed by Mr. Burt to the opposite bank, where the horses could be hitched with the chain to the end of the tongue and draw the wagon out. The next great diffi- culty was met when they reached the top of the bluff on Grant River, near his home. It was a point where a track for rolling down logs had been cleared, but it was frightfully steep to drive down with a wagon. All the wheels were locked and a tree fifteen inches in diameter with a broad top was chained to the hind axle to check the descent of the wagon, and thus Mr. Burt drove safely down and reached home with his provisions uninjured.
Previous to the act constituting Grant County, there were very few roads in the county. The main one was the Military Road from Milwaukee to Prairie du Chien, entering the county at Wingville, run- ning along the Military Ridge, over the prairie to a point somewhat north of Patch Grove, thence down a valley to the Wisconsin, leaving thecounty by crossing that river at aferry kept by a Canadian French- man named Jean Brunet, near the present bridge. This ferry had been chartered by the Legislature of Michigan Territory and was the first one in the region. Previously the hardy pioneers had been obliged to cross the wide streams in some such manner as Mr. Burt has described.
But to return to the roads. Before 1837, there was another road running from Prairie du Chien, or rather branching off the Military Road near the present Patch Grove, leading through Beetown, Snake Hollow (Potosi), and Paris to Galena. Another road led from Bee- town to Cassville, in 1836, but the early settlers of Cassville had to go up around to where Patch Grove now is to reach the road to Ga- lena. In 1839 they were working a road through to Mineral Point, by way of the present site of Lancaster. There was also a road from Galena to Mineral Point, through the present townships of Hazel Green and Smelser, leaving the county in Section 12 of Smelser. It was mostly a prairie road. By going down the prairie ridge a few miles, the people of Platteville could avail themselves of this road in going to Galena, or to Mineral Point by going east a short distance over a prairie track.
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GRANT COUNTY DURING THE THIRTIES.
A second session of the Wisconsin legislature, in November, 1837, appointed Jonathan Craig, William Davidson, and Stewart McKee as commissioners to locate and establish a territorial road from Osceola (a new town-site on the Mississippi near where Potosi now is) to Bel- mont, by way of Platteville. They were to meet on or before the first Monday in August, 1838. This was the first territorial road laid out in Grant County.
At a meeting of the County Commissioners, May 4, 1838, Martial Detantabaratz, of Paris, petitioned for a road from Platteville to Paris, a town located at the junction of the Platte and Little Platte Rivers. The Board appointed Ralph Carver, James Gilmore and James Dixon commissioners to locate such road, the petitioner to deposit $25, as required by law. At the same meeting Detantabaratz and others presented a petition for a road from Lancaster to Galena by way of Paris. James Bonham, Jonathan Craig, and Enos P. Wood were appointed to lay out the road.
Asa E. Hough, mentioned on a previous page as the founder of Gibraltar near the mouth of the Platte, petitioned for a road from Cassville by way of Lafayette (near the present railroad station of Potosi) to the State line in the direction of Galena. Elias Dean, Jona- than Craig, and Enos P. Wood were appointed to lay out the road.
Daniel R. Burt presented a petition to lay out a road from Cass- ville, via Burt's Mill, to Snake Diggings by the best and most practi- cable route. J. E. Dodge, F. A. Sprague, and Enos P. Wood were ap- pointed commissioners to lay out the road. At every subsequent ses- sion of the Board some new road or roads were authorized to be laid out.
The legislature at its second session, in 1837, granted three chart- ers for ferries with landings on Grant County shores. One was for a ferry across the Wisconsin on the Military Road, by Jean Barrette, who had bought out the Jean Brunet mentioned on a previous page. The second was to William Walker and Joseph H. D. Street for a ferry across the Mississippi at Cassville. It was to be a horse or steam ferry boat. The third charter was to James P. Cox and Justus Per- sons, for a ferry from Osceola to Jones's Island in the Mississippi and thence to Persons's Landing in Iowa.
At a meeting of the County Board April 2, 1838, a license was granted to Cox and Persons in accordance with the charter just men- tioned, and fixing the following rates of fare from Osceola to Jones's
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
Island: each person, 18% cents; each head of cattle, 16%, each hog, 4 cents, each sheep 3 cents; each carriage 8% cents a wheel; double these rates for ferriage between Osceola and Persons's Landing. It may be wondered why such fractional rates were fixed and how change could be made. It was thus: most of the silver change in circulation was French and Spanish coin which had come into the country be- cause its commercial transactions were mostly with New Orleans and St. Louis, where thesecoins were still the commercial currency. These coins were of 61/4, 81/s and 121/5 cents value, so that these ferry rates could be paid with them better than rates of five, ten, or twenty cents.
Later sessions of the Board granted licenses for other ferries across the Wisconsin and Mississippi; and also the Grant and Platte, which, on the lower part of their courses, were unfordable, especially at times of high water. Accounts of these ferries will be found in the histories of the several towns.
The first bridge in the county of which we have any record ap- pears to have been built at Paris; at least Martial Detantabaratz ob- tained a license for one in 1839.
THE EXECUTION OF OLIVER.
In 1838 occurred the first execution in the new county. John Rus- sell borrowed a skiff from Edward Oliver, living near the mouth of Turkey River in Iowa, and came over to Cassville with it. He did not return, and Oliver came over to get it. Meeting Russell, a quarrel en- sued in which Oliver abused Russell badly. At a second meeting at a shooting match near Cassville, the quarrel was renewed, and Russell, smarting under Oliver's epithets, started to beat him, when Oliver drew a pistol. A man named John Allen stepped between them, but Oliver reached around him and shot Russell in the breast-shot him "like a white man," as he said. He was arrested and sent to Lancas- ter. There was then no jail and Oliver was kept in irons until the log jail was built. He claimed that he wanted to make a confession, and J. Allen Barber entered his cell to write it. Observing that the mur- derer had one hand loose from his shackles and was edging towards some implement that could be used as a weapon, Mr. Barber suspected a design on Oliver's part to kill him and make his escape, and he re- tired from the cell, leaving the confession unwritten.
The murderer was executed October 29, 1838, in the presence of fifteen hundred people, and his body buried in a lonely hazel thicket. The bones and coffin were dug up in digging a treneh for a water-pipe,
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GRANT COUNTY DURING THE THIRTIES.
in June, 1897. His son, a youth of thirteen, tried to get laudanum to his father before the execution, for the purpose of suicide, but failed. After the execution he threatened to shoot the Sheriff, and was found waiting with a gun in a thicket near town, for the object of his re- venge. The Sheriff, Harvey Pepper, did not, however, execute the sentence on the condemned. That unpleasant duty was performed by a deputy, Lewis Reynolds.
Accounts of other murders will be found in the histories of the towns where the crimes were committed.
POST-OFFICES IN 1838.
In 1829 the only post-office in the county was at Platteville, but by 1838 there was a goodly list of these distributors of information: Platteville, Lancaster, English Prairie (Muscoda), Hazel Green, Cass- ville, Gibraltar, Sinsinawa Mound, Van Buren (Potosi), Blast Fur- nace, Brooklyn, Port Hudson, Sinipee, Menomonee, and Wingville.
PAPER TOWNS.
Soon after the organization of the county the era of paper towns- towns which consisted mostly of a plat filed in the office of the Regis- ter of Deeds-began and lasted some years. There was Mendota, at the mouth of the Wisconsin; Fayette, at the forks of the Blue River; Brooklyn, opposite the present town of Bridgeport; and others. These will be more particularly mentioned in the Town Histories. They represent the unfounded schemes of speculators and the disap- pointing dreams of landowners. Brooklyn, however, obtained a post-office, but no inhabitants except the postmaster and his family.
EARLY. IMMIGRATION AS J. T. MILLS SAW IT.
Before proceeding to later dates we copy the following racy ex- tract from an address delivered by Judge J. T. Mills at a meeting of the Old Settlers' Association at Prairie du Chien :
"It was forty years ago that I stood at the foot of the Lower Rapids. They came to me or I to them; no difference, we got to- gether. I occupied the same site then that the city of Quincy does now. You might have carried the embryo burg in a wheelbarrow, if you could have found one. There was a blockhouse on the bank, and there some mining adventurers and myself waited for steam naviga- tion. The voyage forty years ago required a large reserve of patience. Often we put our ears down to the water, as if the steamer was ex-
.
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
pected underneath the surface, for "suckers" were then more numer- ous than any other passengers. I well remember one day, while re- peating this acoustic experiment, I heard a thumping in the water like a heart-beat, and soon, to my inexpressible satisfaction, I saw 'a smoke way down de riber.' Puff, puff, the discharge of a blunderbus, the ringing of a bell-no steam whistle then-and the strongly built steamer Warrior, Captain Throckmorton, landed on the shore. The mining adventurers rushed aboard and threatened to take possession of the vessel. 'On to Dubuque!' 'Forward to Snake!' 'Hurrah for Hardscrabble!' were the watchwords yelled as vociferously as 'On to Richmond !' years later by the New York Tribune. But what was the Great West in 1834, as seen from the Father, and yet the child, of many waters? Illinois above Rock River, with slight exceptions, was wholly vacant. The State of Iowa had not even been christened. The owl hooted from the forests that covered its bottoms or crowned its headlands.
'The wolf's long howl from Onalaska's shore Was heard above the troubled water's roar.'
If Campbell could make poetry out of this long howl, his muse would have been rampant, had he tried this voyage. These devil-eyed, white-teethed denizens of the forest amused us with their nightly sere- nade, whether we hissed or applauded.
"And still the wide prairies on either hand seemed opening to re- ceive the immense and teeming population destined to supplant Na- ture's husbandry by that of civilized man. The very soil, the streams and the woods that skirted them, seemed conscious, sitting up of nights and watching by day for 'the coming events that cast their shadows before.' The bear, the elk, and the deer heard all too fre- quently the crack of the backwoodsman's rifle. He was trespassing on the domain of the Winnebago, the Sac, and the Sioux. The Great Spirit had packed up his airy wigwam, converted it into a balloon and sailed westward, beckoning his children to follow; hard-fisted miners, men of ' mighty bone and bold enterprise,' had built their tene- ments of sods, palisades, and mud at different places. Galena, Nep- tune-like, had reared her head above the mud in which she floundered, and was visible to a considerable distance. Patches of corn and po- tatoes showed that a race of men were pressing into this region who could work the surface of mother Earth as well as burrow, gopher- like, in her bowels. These were the scattering drops, the earnest of that human flood that has swollen into millions, rolling westward on
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GRANT COUNTY DURING THE THIRTIES.
foot, on horses, on wheels, till the locomotive and thundering train behind commands the highway to California, has changed the front- age of the continent, has completed the American section of the thor- oughfare that encircles the globe, and changed the direction of com- merce. All this since 1834."
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CHAPTER V.
GRANT COUNTY IN THE FORTIES.
Statistics of 1840-Life in Grant County in The Forties-The Last "Winnebago Fuss"-Land Troubles -- Weather Extremes -- The Mexican War and Other Events.
STATISTICS OF 1840.
In 1840 the population of the county was 3926. There were 2474 males and 1452 females. Excluding children and colored people, there were 1788 men and 548 women. Of the men, 927, or more than half, were between twenty and thirty years old. This indicates a large number of unmated miners and adventurers. The report of the several school districts in April, 1840, showed the following number of pupils: Menomonee district, 24; Platteville, 149; Blue River, 29; Snake Hollow, 68; Lancaster. 74; Cassville, 28; Wisconsin (Patch Grove), 37; total, 409.
The census of 1840 shows that there were then 17 furnaces in Grant County, producing annually 6,020,350 pounds of lead and giv- ing employment to 86 men. There were 5,735 horses and mules, 4,197 neat cattle, 463 sheep, 8.645 swine, 32 stores and groceries, 2 lumber yards. 1 brewery, 2 flouring mills, 3 grist mills, and 11 saw mills. The products were 10,796 bushels of wheat, 3,246 bushels of barley, 65,400 bushels of oats, 13 of rye. 1,059 of buckwheat, 100,- 055 of Indian corn, and 74,629 of potatoes; 3,912 tons of hay, 100 pounds of tobacco, 1,355 pounds of maple sugar. 63,647 pounds of soap, and 9,742 pounds of tallow candles.
The first two towns in Grant County to be incorporated were Platteville and Potosi which were both incorporated February 19, 1841.
LIFE IN GRANT COUNTY IN THE FORTIES.
The dominating element, giving a tone to the whole, of the early population of Grant County came from Missouri, Kentucky, and Vir- ginia, may of them having sojourned for a time in southern Illinois, and the customs were mostly those of Southern Border States. At first their cabins were of the rudest sort-of rough stones, sods. dug-
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GRANT COUNTY IN THE FORTIES.
outs, or rough logs chinked with sticks and stones and daubed with mud. Even in the more substantial buildings, although the broad fireplace was of stones, the chimney was built of sticks built up like a rail pen, covered thickly with clay mud to protect the sticks from the fire. Later on houses were built of hewn logs, the interstices neatly chinked with stone and plastered with lime mortar-much morecleanly than the primitive mud daubing. The interior was usually white- washed. They were of one story. The attic, with a floor of rough boards (sometimes even puncheons hewn from split logs), sometimes but not always lighted by a little window in the gable, was used as a storage room and a sleeping room for the children, usually numerous, while the "old folks" slept below in the living room. Later on set- tlers with considerable means built substantial stone houses, but al- ways with the wide fireplaces and large chimneys, and queer little windows in little gables projecting from the roofs. Many houses of this style may yet be seen in the South, but very few in Grant County, and these only in the old mining towns-Platteville, Potosi, Beetown, etc. The ordinary house of the settler of moderate means was a double log house-two houses built twelve or fifteen feet apart and covered with one roof leaving a space between which was roofed but not floored and open at the sides. In this space in warm weather the family ate and the old folks smoked their cob pipes and gossiped with their neighbors. It was a style of building better suited to the Border States, whence it was introduced, than to Wisconsin with its short summers.
The settlers lived in rude plenty with moderate exertion, at least on the part of the men. With the produce of their mineral they bought the necessary groceries: coffee, tobacco, and (last but by no means least) whisky, which was very cheap then. Little sugar did they have to buy; the wild bees of the woods had laid up in many a hollow oak an abundant store of sweets gathered from the incredible profusion of prairie flowers, and the maple tree offered its delicious juice every spring. The quantity of game was enormous. Deer were to be found everywhere and were even a nuisance in the settlers' grain fields. The rivers and creeks swarmed with fish in numbers hardly credible in this day. That old pioneer, D. R. Burt, is responsible for the following fish story: "With a seine twenty feet in length I have caught a wagon-load in thirty minutes, some of them weighing thirty pounds apiece. From the ford up to the mill-dam the river would be literally filled with fish. To throw a stone into the river at the point
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
named would seldom fail of killing one or more, and by striking a spear into the water, not aiming at any, you would bring out one or more fish."
The number of wild fowl was astonishing. The still reaches of water in the rivers, sloughs, and creeks swarmed with wild ducks; every spring and fall countless flocks of wild geese tarried on their journeys long enough so that many fell victims to the settlers' rifles. The fields and prairies swarmed with prairie chickens. The men picked their heads off with their deadly rifles and the boys trapped them in great numbers. Even late into the fifties many a farmer boy pur- chased his red-topped Sunday boots, "store clothes," and a great many other coveted notions with the proceeds of his trapped prairie chickens and quails. Wild pigeons passed over in such enormous num- bers that they darkened the sky for hours at a time.
There was no fairer country on earth than this when spring-time came and the groves were green (and in no other land is such vivid verdure) and the green carpet of the prairies was spangled with wild flowers of every hue in incredible profusion. Then, too, the wild fruits! The woods were full of blackberries and the edges of the groves with plums, large, mellow ones, and the prairie and river bottoms scarlet with strawberries. What joy for the boy or girl, with basket or bucket on arm, to push aside the tall grass and see the crimson gleam of the great clusters against their bright green background! No won- der the pioneers looked back on life in those days as the veritable Golden Age. All the hardships and privations were forgotten, or only vague and dim in the memory, while those pleasant things shone un- dimmed in the mist of that dear dead past. As Ben Taylor says:
"There's a magical isle up the River of Time, With a cloudless sky and a balmy clime ; And the name of that isle is the Long Ago, And we bury our treasures there."
But there were privations and hardships, and they fell especially heavy on the women. The housewife had not only to knit the stock- ings and make the clothes for the whole family, but to card the rolls, spin the yarn, and weave the cloth. Then, indeed, she could say, "Woman's work is never done." Nearly all the old settlers kept in or close to the timber, and avoided the prairies, as well they might, for those broad fireplaces, with the great backlog and the high pile of long sticks, ate up a great amount of wood during the long winters. In a later day, when stoves came into general use, this cheerful, roar-
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GRANT COUNTY IN THE FORTIES.
ing, open fire became another of the bright and pleasant memories of the past.
The early mills were so few and far between that often the house- wife made her meal by grating ears of corn on a grater made by punching holes with a nail in the bottom of a superannuated pan. The mills were rude affairs, the stones made of coarse native stone that left no little grit in the flour, which by no means rivaled in fine- ness and whiteness the product of the Minneapolis roller mills of to- day. By 1845 the millers were introducing French buhr-stones and the mills were much improved.
Oats were generally threshed by having horses or cattle tramp them out. Wheat and buckwheat were threshed with flails. A rude home-made thresher was built for Mr. Thomas Shanley, near Lancas- ter, in 1845. About 1848 threshing machines were introduced, con- sisting simply of a toothed cylinder run by a one-horse tread-mill. The grain, straw, and chaff all came out together. The grain was cleaned in fanning-mills. There were fanning-mill factories at Platte- ville and Potosi.
Beasts of prey and reptiles-"varmints"-were no small ills of pioneer life. Rattlesnakes were especially numerous until hogs became sufficiently numerous to clear them out. They were especially numer- ous in the harvest field. It was not uncommon to pick up an un- bound bundle of wheat and find a rattlesnake under it, or for the man loading bundles to find that a rattler had been pitched up to him along with a bundle. It is wonderful that so few persons were bitten by these reptiles.
Wolves and wildcats were numerous; bears were common; but only seldom was heard the scream of the much-dreaded panther or "painter." Bears were the first of these wild animals to disappear. The last one the editor knows of to be killed in the county was found in the fall of 1855, wandering in a cornfield on the lower part of Blake's Prairie. Pursued by men and dogs, it took refuge in the cellar of John Hickok's house (or that of some one in that vicinity), where it was shot. Wolf-baiting was a favorite sport. A large wolf being caught in a trap, he was brought to where a good many spectators were assembled and three or four dogs let loose on him. Though rather cowardly when retreat is possible, the large gray wolf is a ter- rible fighter when he has to fight or die. He is a match for four times his weight in dogs, especially the noisy but not very brave hound dogs
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HISTORY OF GRANT COUNTY.
of the Missourians. But the thrilling stories so often told of wolves attacking men are pure fiction. I do not believe that one (or many) ever attacked (although they often followed) a human being. I have seen one old sow "stand off" three large wolves that were trying to get her pigs.
Although the early miners were rude and reckless, shooting and stabbing affrays were not common, considering the circumstances, as the practice of carrying weapons except for hunting, was not common. Men fought out their battles with fists and feet, teeth and nails. Most of them, especially the Kentuckians and Missourians, were men of large frame and great muscle, and there were some terrible struggles between them. The editor remembers one old one-eyed pioneer who, it is said, had the missing eve knocked out and a leg broken in one fight, and he was a powerful man himself. But generally they were not quarrelsome. As one of them said in later days, "The whisky was not so bad then as now." It was noted in 1835 that there was not a man from the lead mines in the penitentiary.
Petty larceny was unknown. Tools or clothing could be safely left lying anywhere. People would leave their houses alone and un- locked. Any person coming along was free to come in and eat or drink anything he could find ; but carrying away things from such un- guarded houses was unknown. Locks upon doors were unnecessary. As Schiller, in his Wilhelm Tell, says of ancient Switzerland :
"Und feft mar feine Wohnung als bas Grab ... (No dwelling fast was but the grave.)
As the number of miners in the county increased the number and size of the liquor shops increased. In an early day proper-speaking people called them "groceries," but in common slang they were called "light-houses." The word "saloon" was a later fashion. When the building of the liquor-seller was too small to contain the crowd of miners who came in on Saturday afternoons, they would congregate on the shady side of the house in warm weather, and there play cards, tell stories, or witness wolf-fights. A necessary adjunct of every light- house was the bowling-alley, an athletic substitute for billiards. As this is so near extinct in the county, a description may not be amiss. It was of rough boards usually, with an alley or raised floor of smooth boards about fifty feet long and four or five feet wide. At the farther end were set up ten wooden pins in a wedge-shaped group. The players then endeavored to knock these pins down by rolling balls
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