Part 8

Judge Larrabee convened a special session of court, impaneled a grand jury, and having summoned two companies of militia--the Union Guards of Ozaukee County, a German company, and the Washington Guards, another German company, of Milwaukee--to come up for the protection of the prisoner, had him conveyed to the courthouse and examined. The grand jury brought in a true bill, charging murder in the first degree. To this the prisoner, on the advice of his attorneys, pleaded “not guilty.” The multitude which had been permitted to press into the court room, despite the judge’s instruction to the militia to limit the number to the seating capacity of the room, fairly raged when they found a trial would be required, and before the prisoner took many steps in the direction of the jail, they seized him and made way with him.

The severest censure was leveled against the militia companies and their leaders. All the American writers whose statements appear in the _Sentinel_ charge that these companies fraternized with the lynching party, and practically assert that they had an understanding by which the prisoner was to be given up to them. The captain of the Milwaukee company, who was a veteran of the Mexican War--though a German immigrant--insisted with vigor that his company did all it could to prevent the lynching. He did not speak for the Union Guards of Ozaukee. All witnesses agree that one of the Union Guard officers, Lieutenant Beger, performed his duty manfully and heroically, but the weight of the testimony condemns the companies as organizations, and especially their captains. It would seem that two companies of militia, if well led, ought to have been able with the butts of their guns to hold off a rabble of three hundred men, and no witness puts the number higher than that, while some declare the rush was made by not more than thirty-five men.

In the Milwaukee captain’s statement, as in the statements of other German apologists for the militia, we come at once upon the political note. They could not expect the “Know-Nothing American writers” to tell the truth about the tragedy. In other words, they found in the politics of the time an opportunity to charge prejudice against Americans, and by that means to dodge the real issue. Two German writers of West Bend, one of them the undersheriff, bitterly denounced both the militia companies and the lynchers, and both more than hint that the passions which led to the lynching were partly religious. Here, undoubtedly, we come upon one of the signs of division among the Germans themselves. It is possible that these two Germans were politically opposed to the main body of their fellow-countrymen, for by this time a light minority had already been attracted away from the Democratic party. However, we do not know that this was true, and merely call attention to the several psychological attitudes which, from the testimony, we know the case disclosed.

Of greatest interest is the attitude of English and German language papers of Democratic and Republican proclivities. The _Sentinel_ continued to admit contributions on the West Bend tragedy for approximately two weeks. It also published the results of an investigation made on the ground by one of its staff, and a petition to the governor, said to have been signed by 186 residents of Washington County, who asked for the disbandment of the two accused companies and the withdrawal of their officers’ commissions. But the _Sentinel_ does not appear to have tried by means of the incident to influence the political situation which was about to become superheated. At all events, what it published would all have been legitimate as news. On the other hand, the _Banner und Volksfreund_,[69] while condemning the lynching, made no demand for the punishment of the lynchers. It tried to exculpate the militia companies (accepting the Milwaukee captain’s testimony as against all other evidence), and deliberately charged that the _Sentinel_, in publishing the above-mentioned petition, was playing for political advantage. This charge was absurd on its face, for the success of the new Republican movement which the _Sentinel_ had espoused depended on its ability to detach Germans from the Democratic party, which assuredly could not be done by playing into the hands of the Know-Nothings, and the _Sentinel_ did not hesitate to declare the Know-Nothing support a handicap to the party.

Both American and German testimony discloses the existence in Washington County of a strong German party of law and order. They deplored the lynching and urged the apprehension and trial of the ringleaders. They realized that the crime would put a stigma upon their race as well as upon the county and the state. But, as a matter of fact, although some of the lynchers were identified in the verdict of the coroner’s jury, it must be recorded that no earnest effort was made to punish them.[70] Nor was any step of an official character taken (so far as I have been able to find) to determine the guilt or innocence of the militia companies and their officers. In fact, the Democratic press of the state, evidently fearful of sacrificing some German Democratic votes, which that year were all needed, deliberately tried to darken council by confounding this case in principle not only with the Mayberry case, which it resembled, but also with another of an entirely different nature, to which we must give passing attention.

In the previous year, 1854, occurred at Milwaukee the famous Glover rescue. Glover was a runaway slave who had been apprehended by his self-styled owner, brutally man-handled, and confined in the Milwaukee County jail for safekeeping. Sherman M. Booth, editor of the _Daily Free Democrat_, one of the founders of the Republican party, a vigorous free-soil and antislavery partisan, and the man in the state who was perhaps most feared and hated by the Democracy, had argued hotly for the protection of Glover’s rights against the man claiming him under the “unconstitutional” compromise law of 1850. Booth called a public meeting at the courthouse for the purpose, as he claimed, of concerting measures for helping Glover without the use of force. But the upshot was a rescue party which battered down the door of the jail, took Glover out, and by various shifts and transfers on the underground railway, carried him to Canada and freedom. Booth was then made to suffer for all that had been done; he was tried in the federal court, convicted, fined, and given a jail sentence.

We cannot go into the details of the Booth case, a _cause célèbre_ in ante-Civil War political history. But the Democratic papers, after the DeBar lynching, ostentatiously bemoaned the fact that due to recent events “neither national nor state laws” could hereafter be enforced in Wisconsin. The beginning of the trouble was the setting at naught of the national law for the rendition of slaves, in which the arch Republican Booth was ringleader. The Mayberry lynching and the DeBar lynching followed in natural sequence. These editors did not choose to analyze the difference between the Glover case and the others--the fact that the one was a rescue performed at their own risk by philanthropic men, the others brutal killings committed by men crazed with the lust of blood vengeance. In other words, the Democratic press, including those papers printed in the German language, attempted the impossible feat of arranging in the same straight line the “higher law” and the lower law.

Of course, the Republican press retorted handsomely, and probably with considerable political effect, that if the apologists for mob law in Kansas were “in favor of the execution of the fugitive slave act in Wisconsin” they would like their avowal to that effect.[71] It is well known that during the 1855 campaign, as in the previous year, a good many Germans were converted from their old-time Democratic allegiance.[72] But both parties were too intent on their immediate political objects to risk pressing for an investigation of the West Bend tragedy, which might have alienated a large section of the German vote in three German counties.

It is not impossible that politics was responsible for the severity of the onslaught upon the militia companies, since the nativist propaganda for an exclusively American militia would be quick to seize upon such an opportunity, and it is not to be supposed that the politics of the case was all on one side. Yet, unless the governor was in possession of facts which were withheld from the public, the least that could be said against the companies is that they exhibited criminal inefficiency. From this distance, it looks as if politics affected the Republican attitude as well as the Democratic; as if crime was condoned in the interest of party success, since one party was intent on holding its former German adherents and the other was determined to take as many of them as possible into the opposition camp.

Whether or not the incident leaves the stain of blood on the path of Wisconsin politics, it marks the nearest approach to a race war between Germans and Americans which this general period affords. And by Americans we practically mean Yankees. For it was a truth which the German press sensed instinctively, that the Republican party--made up of “shreds and patches,” as was said,--embracing prohibitionists, abolitionists, free-soilers, nativists, and Whigs, was dominated by the “Puritan” element.[73] A glance at the history of its origin in Wisconsin will at least convince the reader of its Yankee paternity.[74]

However, the Republican party changed radically in character during the next few years, and as the German population came to be distributed between it and the Democratic party, a healthier social tone was the result. The political campaign of 1856, when Frémont was candidate for the presidency, was conducted with such enthusiasm by Wisconsin Republicans, as to make serious inroads on the Democratic German vote. A number of prominent German leaders took the stump for Frémont, speaking in the German language to German audiences with telling effect. Thereafter, in successive state campaigns and in the presidential canvass of 1860, the Germans of Wisconsin were electrified by the compelling oratory of their greatest campaigner, Carl Schurz, to whom the success of the Lincoln ticket, both in Wisconsin and other western states harboring many Germans, was largely due. Such participation was doing much to justify the prophecy of Dr. Huebschmann--that political equality would help to make the people of Wisconsin “one people.”

MUSCODA, 1763-1856

JOSEPH SCHAFER

The light which local inquiry can shed upon general history is well illustrated from a variety of viewpoints in the story of the Wisconsin village which is the subject of this sketch.

Muscoda as a present-day railway station is inconspicuously located on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul line, Prairie du Chien division, at the distance of fifty-six miles almost due west from Madison, one hundred and fifty-two from Milwaukee; it is forty-two miles east from Prairie du Chien. The village was begun at the river bank on the south side of Wisconsin River, in section 1, township 8 north, range 1 west of the fourth principal meridian. It stretches south from the river toward the flanking hills about three-fourths of a mile, the main portion now clustering about the depot, whereas the “Old Town” lay farther north and hugged the river bank.

The ground on which Muscoda stands is a portion of the sandy plain, the outwash of the erosion process by which the Wisconsin and its larger tributaries worked their way through the sandstone stratum. The upper courses of these tributaries and the smaller streams which feed them have laid down flood bottoms of rich alluvium. Often, too, the bench land of their valleys is a fertile limestone soil intermingled with clayey patches and occasional streaks of sand. These are all characteristics of the “Driftless Area,” as the geologists have named this region, because the various primordial movements of glacial ice, so influential in modifying the topography elsewhere, passed around instead of over it, leaving no “drift” upon it. The terrain is just what the eroding waters in the course of countless ages made it--a system of regular valleys perfectly drained and bounded by symmetrically sculptured hills or bluffs, which exhibit a level sky line and decrease in altitude steadily till at the heads of the streams they merge in the great plateau or “prairie” of southern Wisconsin. The valleys make natural and not ill-graded highways from the prairie to the Wisconsin River, while the ranges of bluffs separating them appear like promontories running out fingerwise from the main plateau and terminating either where two smaller streams converge or at the edge of the lower plain laid down by the Wisconsin.

The principal stream entering the Wisconsin from the south, in the neighborhood of Muscoda, is Blue River--the “Riviere Bleu” of the French traders. It has several head streams rising in township 6-1 E, and a large affluent named the Fennimore rising in 6-1 W, the Six Mile Creek, rising in 7-1 E and Sandy Branch which heads in 8-1 E. There are also several small branches entering the Fennimore from 7-2 W. In its lower course the Blue River swerves to the west, entering the Wisconsin near Blue River Station, in Township 8-2 W, but its rich upper valleys and those of its tributaries have always been mainly within the trade area of Muscoda. North of the Wisconsin the valleys most intimately associated with Muscoda are Indian Creek, Eagle Creek, and Knapp’s Creek in Richland County. The “Sand Prairie,” by which name the sandy plain along the Wisconsin on the south side has long been known, and a narrow tract of shelving land between the river and the hills on the north are also within the Muscoda area.

Since the bluffs are mostly rough land, with only limited areas on their summits where the soil is deep, free from stones, and sufficiently even for cultivation, and the sand prairie comparatively infertile, Muscoda as a trade center suffers from the low average productivity of her territory. Still, from pioneer days the long valleys beyond the sand prairie have yielded abundant harvests; the roads through them from the high prairie to the south opened to Muscoda’s merchants for some years a great trade in livestock and grain beyond her legitimate boundaries; while the cross ranges which run out from the high prairie northward approximately fifteen miles forced the only rival railway,[75] when it came, back upon the great ridge, leaving the north trending valleys still as a whole tributary to Muscoda.

THE BACKGROUND

According to Father Verwyst, a distinguished authority, the name Muscoda is a corruption of the Chippewa word “Mashkodeng” which means “prairie.” A similar corruption occurs in the name “Muscatine,” a town in Iowa, and there was a tribe of Indians on the Upper Fox River called Mascouten (prairie Indians).

The earlier name of the place was English Prairie, and while it is clear that geography suggested “Prairie” (or Savannah), there are various traditions to explain the association of the word “English” with it. One is that some English families were settled there as early as 1812 and that they were massacred by the Indians. Another, that the place was so named from the fact that Colonel McKay, who descended the river in 1814 with a regiment of British troops to capture Prairie du Chien, encamped at this place which thereafter was called English Prairie.

A more hopeful clue to the origin of the name occurs in the journal of Willard Keyes, a young New Englander who passed down the river with a party in 1817. He writes, under date of August 29, 1817: “pass a place called ‘English meadow’ from an English trader and his son, said to have been murdered there by the savages, 20 Leagues to Prairie du Chien.”[76] Now, the fact of “an English trader and his son” being murdered at some point on the Wisconsin River between the Portage and Prairie du Chien is well established. In the journal of Lieut. James Gorrell, the first English commandant at Green Bay after the ejection of the French, we read, under date of June 14, 1763: “The traders came down from the Sack [Sauk] country, and confirmed the news of Landsing and his son being killed by the French.” When all the Sauk and Foxes had arrived at Green Bay a few days later they told Gorrell that their people were all in tears “for the loss of two English traders who were killed by the French in their lands, and begged leave ... to cut them [the French] in pieces.”[77]

In the following summer, 1764, Garrit Roseboom testified, that “about the latter end of April, 1763, he was going from the Bay [Green Bay] to the Soaks [Sauk] to look for his Partner Abrah[a]m Lancing who had been up there, being told that he was killed, that on his way he met some Indians coming down with some Packs [of furs], which he knew to be his, and which they said he could have for paying the carriage. That both the French and Indians told him, Mr. Lancing and his son were killed by two Frenchmen” who were servants of Mr. Lansing and who afterwards escaped to the Illinois Indians.[78]

When we reflect how persistent is the memory of great tragedies and recall that some of the French traders and voyageurs who were on the river when the murder took place remained there for many years and handed down the traditions of the river to their successors, it is not hard to believe that it was the story of Abraham Lansing and his son, slightly altered, which Willard Keyes heard from the rivermen as his boat drifted along the “English meadow” in 1817. The French traders in whose company he was would not be likely to ascribe the murder to their own people so long as there were “savages” who might just as well serve as scapegoats. We may consider it almost certain, then, that the place came to be called English Prairie from the gruesome crime of 1763, which had occurred almost three-quarters of a century before the postoffice of that name was established, and more than half a century prior to the voyage of Willard Keyes. Jonathan Carver, who visited a village of the Fox Indians at that place in 1766, does not use the name; but neither does he mention the story of the murder which occurred only three years before.

No definite information about the fur trade at English Prairie, aside from the record in Lansing’s case, has come down to us. Tradition has it that Laurent Rolette, brother of the famous Prairie du Chien trader, Joseph Rolette, traded there for some years, going later to the Portage. It appears also that some time before the arrival of white settlers a trader named Armstrong operated in that neighborhood. But no details have been preserved and we can only infer from the fact that Indians were still numerous when settlers came that the trade at English Prairie in earlier times was probably important.

It was the Black Hawk War and the treaties following it that produced the revolutionary change in the life of the natives in this region. From that time forward Indians could live south of the river only on sufferance, though they were permitted to roam the forests to the northward for about a quarter of a century longer. During the Black Hawk War a detachment of Colonel Henry Dodge’s Mounted Volunteers went to English Prairie, another detachment going at the same time to Prairie du Chien. Between them these two bodies of troops scoured both sides of the Wisconsin from the mouth to the Portage, dislodging all natives. English Prairie was also the camping ground for 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 Parrish 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