Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/116

 a military company composed of friendly Indians recruited at Green Bay and led to Prairie du Chien by Samuel C. Stambaugh in July, 1832. The route of march was from Green Bay to the Portage, thence to Sugar Creek (near Blue Mounds), thence to Fort Dodge (Dodgeville), thence to English Prairie, thence to Prairie du Chien "with one other camping between."

RELATION TO THE LEAD MINES

History repeats itself in making the Indian War of 1832 the impulse to a great new expansion movement among American pioneers. Just as the Pequod War of 1638 by familiarizing the coast settlers of Massachusetts with the rich lands of the interior enticed them westward, and as the Seven Years' War destroyed the last obstacle to western and northern expansion in New England, so in a very real sense this war made the beginnings of the agricultural settlement in Wisconsin. Immediately after the Black Hawk War the survey of the lands in southern Wisconsin began. In the four years, 1832 to 1836, the entire region from the Illinois line north to the Wisconsin, the Fox, and Green Bay, and from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan, was checked off into townships and sections. Hardy, resourceful government surveyors, with their crews (usually two chainmen and one axman) traversed every square mile, whether prairie, forest, valley, or bluff. In 1834 a land office was opened at Mineral Point for the sale of lands in the western portion of Michigan Territory (as it was then).

The ranges of townships numbered 1 W and 1 E, of which the townships numbered eight (Muscoda and Pulaski) bounded by the Wisconsin, were for some years the northernmost, were surveyed by Sylvester Sibley in 1833. The next year those lands were offered for sale and some tracts along the river were actually sold to private individuals. Among the purchasers were Thomas Jefferson