Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/119

 were taken first. Parrish entered fractional lots 2 and 3 of section 1; Frederick Bronson the northeast fraction of the southeast quarter of section 1; Isaac Bronson the south half of the southeast fractional quarter; Garrit V. Denniston the southeast half of the fractional southwest quarter; and Denniston and Charles Bracken fraction No. 4 of fractional section 1. Other water front tracts in section 2 were bought by Denniston at this time; between 1836 and 1841 other tracts in the same sections were bought by others. All of these lands were obviously deemed favorable locations for a prospective town dependent on river transportation.

The way in which the village was begun, by the erection of a smelting furnace, is rather startling, in view of the absence of lead in the region adjacent. The motives which induced Colonel William S. Hamilton of Wiota to build a furnace at English Prairie can only be conjectured.

Colonel Hamilton was the son of the great Alexander Hamilton, Washington's Secretary of the Treasury. As a lad of seventeen in 1814 he entered West Point but resigned in 1817 to accept a commission as deputy surveyor-general under Col. William Rector, surveyor-general for Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. From that time young Hamilton was almost continuously in the West, though he made one trip east, on horseback, to see his mother. He was in Wisconsin as early as 1825 and in 1827 began his career as a lead miner and smelter in what is now Lafayette County at Wiota or Hamilton's Diggings. He took part in the Indian troubles of 1827, and also in the Black Hawk War.

It is not known with certainty when Hamilton established his furnace at English Prairie. Tradition says it was in the year 1835. If the furnace was operating then, it is strange that so careful an observer as Featherstonhaugh, who dropped down the Wisconsin in August, 1835 and stopped at English Prairie to draw a sketch of its landscape,