Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/127

 It can easily be imagined how the clangor of railway construction echoed in the minds and hearts of intending settlers. That they should have watched, with greedy eye, the reports of progress of the location of the road and hurried away to the land office as soon as it was definitely located, to buy the good lands adjacent to the right-of-way, is a perfectly normal phenomenon. The township plats showing original purchasers of the government land tell the story. In section 1, township 7-1 W, four forty-acre tracts were bought in 1854; eleven in 1855; and one in 1856. In section 2, one in 1854; twelve in 1855; and two in 1857. A single forty had been bought as early as 1847. The other sections of that township show very similar dates and proportions in the entries; the same is true of the other townships of the group. The 1854 entrymen were those who pursued the railway surveyors with keenest determination. The slower ones came mainly in the two years following, during which trains actually were put on the roadbed. In October, 1856, the village of Muscoda, which had maintained a precarious existence for twenty years, awoke to newness of life at the sound of the puffing locomotive. And the beginning of permanent prosperity for the village meant the beginning of prosperity for the rural neighborhood tributary to it.