Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/118

10 rish and Charles Bracken, who were well-known lead miners and smelters living farther south. Others among the early land owners of Township 8-1 W have been identified as mining men.

The lead mines, while known and worked by Indians and a few traders for many years, received the first large body of emigrants in 1828, when several thousand came scattering out widely over the territory which now constitutes Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette counties in Wisconsin, together with adjacent parts of Iowa. These were the lead miners who under Dodge and Hamilton fought the Black Hawk War. It was these hardy pioneers who as troopers patrolled the Wisconsin River and who finally delivered the coup de grace to Black Hawk's band far to the north on the banks of the Mississippi.

Many of the lead miners were shrewd business men always on the lookout for good financial prospects. With the knowledge of new regions gained during the war, either from personal observation or from reliable report, with the sense of a new era opening to settlement and expansion in the region dependent for transportation facilities on the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers, it is not strange that some of them should have been interested in river points lying as far outside the mineral belt proper as did English Prairie.

A RIVER PORT

For it is clear that it was water and not lead that the pioneers of Muscoda sought. Surveyors and prospectors had found no hopeful signs of mineral north of townships 6-1 W and 7-1 E. A few years later (1839) Dr. David Dale Owen, the geologist, made his famous survey of the lead region and excluded from it everything north of the heads of Blue River in townships 6 and 7-1 E. When the lands in township 8-1 W were offered for sale in November, 1834, it was precisely the river front lots and subdivisions which