Stories of the Badger State Part 8

WISCONSIN BECOMES A STATE

Some of the people of Wisconsin were not long content with a Territorial government. The Territory was only two years old when a bill was introduced in Congress for a State government, but the attempt failed.

In 1841 Governor Doty, the leader in the movement, had the question put to popular vote; but it was lost, as it also was in the year following.

In 1843 a third attempt was defeated in the Territorial council (or senate); and in 1845, still another met defeat in the Territorial house of representatives (or a.s.sembly).

But at last our Territorial representative in Congress gave notice (January 9, 1846), "of a motion for leave to introduce a bill to enable the people of Wisconsin to form a const.i.tution and State government, and for the admission of such State into the Union." He followed this, a few days later, by the introduction of a bill to that effect; the bill pa.s.sed, and in August the measure was approved by President Polk.

Meanwhile, the council and house of Wisconsin Territory had favorably voted on the proposition. This was in January and February, 1846. In April the question of Statehood was pa.s.sed upon by the people of the Territory, the returns this time showing 12,334 votes for, and 2487 against. In August, Governor Dodge issued a proclamation calling a convention for the drafting of a const.i.tution.

The convention was in session in the Territorial capitol at Madison, between October 5 and December 16, 1846. But the const.i.tution which it framed was rejected by the people. The contest over the doc.u.ment had been of an exciting nature; the defeat was owing to differences of opinion upon the articles relating to the rights of married women, exemptions, banks, the elective judiciary, and the number of members of the legislature.

As soon as practicable, Governor Dodge called a special session of the Territorial legislature, which made provisions for a second const.i.tutional convention. Most of the members of the first convention declined reelection; six only were returned. The second convention was in session at Madison from December 15, 1847, to February 1, 1848. The members of both conventions were men of high standing in their several communities, and later many of them held prominent positions in the service of the State and the nation.

The const.i.tution adopted by the second convention was so satisfactory to most people, that the popular verdict in March (16,799 ayes and 6384 noes) surprised no one. Arrangements for a new bill in Congress, admitting Wisconsin to the Union, were already well under way. Upon the very day of the vote by the people, before the result was known, the Territorial legislature held its final meeting, and left everything ready for the new State government.

The general election for the first State officers and the members of the first State legislature was held May 8. President Polk approved the congressional act of admission May 29. Upon the 7th of June, Governor Nelson Dewey and his fellow-officials were sworn into office, and the legislature opened its first session.

In the old lead mining days of Wisconsin, miners from southern Illinois and still farther south returned home every winter, and came back to the "diggings" in the spring, thus imitating the migrations of the fish popularly called the "sucker," in the south-flowing rivers of the region. For this reason the south-winterers were humorously called "Suckers." On the other hand, lead miners from the far-off Eastern States were unable to return home every winter, and at first lived in rude dugouts, burrowing into the hillsides after the fashion of the badger. These burrowing men were the first permanent settlers in the mines north of the Illinois line, and called themselves "Badgers." Thus Wisconsin, in later days, when it was thought necessary to adopt a nickname, was, by its own people, dubbed "The Badger State."

THE BOUNDARIES OF WISCONSIN

In the Ordinance of 1787, whereby Congress created the old Northwest Territory out of the triangle of country lying between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and Lake of the Woods and the Great Lakes, it was provided that this vast region should eventually be parcelled into five States. The east-and-west dividing line was to be "drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan"; south of this line were to be erected three States, and north of it two. "Whenever," the ordinance read, "any of the said States shall have sixty thousand free inhabitants therein, such State shall be admitted" to the Union.

It should be said, in explanation of this east-and-west line, that all the maps of Lake Michigan then extant represented the head of the lake as being much farther north than it was proved to be by later surveys.

The line as fixed in the ordinance proved to be a bone of contention in the subsequent carving of the Northwest Territory into States, leading to a good deal of angry discussion before the boundaries of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the five States eventually formed from the Territory, became established as they are to-day.

Ohio, the first State to be set off, insisted that Maumee Bay, with the town of Toledo, should be included in her bounds, although it lay north of the east-and-west line of the ordinance. Michigan, on the other hand, stoutly insisted on the line as laid down in the law. In 1835 and 1836 there were some popular disturbances along the border; one of these, though bloodless, was so violent as to receive the name of "the Toledo war." Congress finally settled the quarrel by giving Ohio the northern boundary which she desired, regardless of the terms of the ordinance; Michigan was compensated by the gift of what we now call the "northern peninsula" of that State, although it had all along been understood that the country lying west of Lake Michigan should be the property of the fifth State, whenever that was created. Thus, in order that Ohio might have another lake port from Michigan, Wisconsin lost this immense tract of mining country to the north.

When Indiana came to be erected, it was seen that to adopt the east-and-west line, established by the ordinance, would be to deprive her entirely of any part of the coast of Lake Michigan. In order, therefore, to satisfy her, Congress took another strip, ten miles wide, from the southern border of Michigan, and gave it to the new State.

Michigan made no objection to this fresh violation of the agreement of 1787, because there were no important harbors or towns involved.

Illinois next knocked at the door of the Union. The same conditions applied to her as to Indiana; a strict construction of the ordinance would deprive her of an opening on the lake. The Illinois delegate who argued this matter in Congress was shrewd; he contended that his State must become intimately connected with the growing commerce of the northern lakes, else she would be led, from her commercial relations upon the south-flowing Mississippi and Ohio rivers, to join a Southern confederacy in case the Union should be broken up. This was in 1818, and shows how early in our history there had come to be, in the minds of some far-seeing men, a fear that the growing power of slavery might some time lead to secession. The argument prevailed in Congress, and there was voted to Illinois a strip of territory sixty-one miles wide, lying north of the east-and-west line.

Thus again was the region later to be called Wisconsin deprived of a large and valuable tract. When Wisconsin Territory was created, there was a great deal of indignation expressed by some of her people, at being deprived of this wide belt of country embracing 8500 square miles of exceedingly fertile soil, numerous river and lake ports, many miles of fine water power, and the sites of Chicago, Rockford, Freeport, Galena, Oregon, Dixon, and numerous other prosperous cities.

An attempt was made in 1836, at the time the Territory was established, to secure for Wisconsin's benefit the old east-and-west line, as its rightful southern boundary. But Congress declined to grant this request.

Three years later, the Wisconsin Territorial legislature declared that "a large and valuable tract of country is now held by the State of Illinois, contrary to the manifest right and consent of the people of this Territory."

The inhabitants of the district in northern Illinois which was claimed by Wisconsin, were invited by these resolutions to express their opinion on the matter. Public meetings were consequently held in several of the Illinois towns interested; and resolutions were adopted, declaring in favor of the Wisconsin claim. The movement culminated in a convention at Rockford (July 6, 1839), attended by delegates from nine of the fourteen Illinois counties involved. This convention recommended the counties to elect delegates to a convention to be held in Madison, "for the purpose of adopting such lawful and const.i.tutional measures as may seem to be necessary and proper for the early adjustment of the southern boundary."

Curiously enough, the weight of public sentiment in Wisconsin itself did not favor the movement. At a large meeting held in Green Bay, the following April, the people of that section pa.s.sed resolutions "viewing the resolutions of the legislature with concern and regret," and asking that they be rescinded. With this, popular agitation ceased for the time; and in the following year the legislature promptly defeated a proposition for the renewal of the question.

Governor Doty, however, was a stanch advocate of the idea, and at the legislative session of 1842 contrived to work up considerable enthusiasm in its behalf. A bill was reported by the committee on Territorial affairs, asking the people in the disputed tract to hold an election on the question of uniting with Wisconsin. There were some rather fiery speeches upon the subject, some of the orators going so far as to threaten force in acquiring the wished-for strip; but the legislature itself took no action. However, in Stephenson and Boone counties, Illinois, elections were actually held, at which all but one or two votes were cast in favor of the Wisconsin claim.

Governor Doty, thus encouraged, busily continued his agitation. He issued proclamations warning Illinois that it was "exercising an accidental and temporary jurisdiction" over the disputed strip, and calling on the two legislatures to authorize the people to vote on the question of restoring Wisconsin to her "ancient limits." At first, neither the legislatures of Illinois nor Wisconsin paid much attention to the matter. Finally, in 1843, the Wisconsin legislature sent a rather warlike address to Congress, in which secession was clearly threatened, unless the "birthright of Wisconsin" were restored. Congress, however, very sensibly paid no heed to the address, and gradually the excitement subsided, until eventually Wisconsin was made a State, with her present boundaries.

We have seen that the northern peninsula was given to Michigan as a recompense for her loss of Toledo and Maumee Bay. But when it became necessary to determine the boundary between the peninsula and the new Territory of Wisconsin, now set off from Michigan, some difficulty arose, owing to the fact that the country had not been thoroughly surveyed, and there was no good map of it extant.

There were various propositions; one of them was, to use the Chocolate River as part of the line; had this prevailed, Wisconsin would have gained the greater part of the peninsula. But the line of division at last adopted was that of the Montreal and Menominee rivers, by the way of Lake Vieux Desert. This line had been selected in 1834, because a map published that year represented the headwaters of those rivers as meeting in Lake Vieux Desert; hence it was supposed by the congressional committee that this would make an excellent natural boundary. When, however, the line came to be actually laid out by the surveyors, six years later, for the purpose of setting boundary monuments, it was discovered that Lake Vieux Desert had no connection with either stream, being, in fact, the headwaters of the Wisconsin River; and that the running of the line through the woods, between the far-distant headwaters of the Montreal and Menominee, so as to touch the lake on the way, involved a laborious task, and resulted in a crooked boundary. But it was by this time too late to correct the geographical error, and the awkward boundary thus remains.

As originally provided by the Ordinance of 1787, Wisconsin, as the fifth State to be created out of the Northwest Territory, was, even after being shorn upon the south and northeast, at least ent.i.tled to have as her western boundary the Mississippi to its source, and thence a straight line running northward to the Lake of the Woods and the Canadian boundary. But here again she was to suffer loss of soil, this time in favor of Minnesota.

As a Territory, Wisconsin had been given sway over all the country lying to the west, as far as the Missouri River. In 1838, all beyond the Mississippi was detached, and erected into the Territory of Iowa. Eight years later, when Wisconsin first sought to be a State, the question arose as to her western boundary. Naturally, the people of the eastern and southern sections wished the one set forth in the ordinance. But settlements had by this time been established along the Upper Mississippi and in the St. Croix valley. These were far removed from the bulk of settlement elsewhere in Wisconsin, and had neither social nor business interests in common with them. The people of the northwest wished to be released from Wisconsin, in order that they might either cast their fortunes with their near neighbors in the new Territory of Minnesota, or join a movement just then projected for the creation of an entirely new State, to be called "Superior." This proposed state was to embrace all the country north of Mont Trempealeau and east of the Mississippi, including the entire northern peninsula, if the latter could be obtained; thus commanding the southern and western sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior, with the mouth of Green Bay and the foot of Lake Michigan to the southeast.

The St. Croix representative in the legislature was especially wedded to the Superior project. He pleaded earnestly and eloquently for his people, whose progress, he said, would be "greatly hampered by being connected politically with a country from which they are separated by nature, cut off from communication by immense s.p.a.ces of wilderness between." A memorial from the settlers themselves stated the case with even more vigor, a.s.serting that they were "widely separated from the settled parts of Wisconsin, not only by hundreds of miles of mostly waste and barren lands, which must remain uncultivated for ages, but equally so by a diversity of interests and character in the population."

All of this reads curiously enough in these days, when the intervening wilderness resounds with the hum of industry and "blossoms as the rose."

But that was long before the days of railroads; the dense forests of central and western Wisconsin then const.i.tuted a formidable wilderness, peopled only by savages and wild beasts.

Unable to influence the Wisconsin legislature, which stubbornly contended for the possession of the original tract, the St. Croix people next urged their claims upon Congress. The proposed State of Superior found little favor at Washington, but there was a general feeling that Wisconsin would be much too large unless trimmed. The result was that when she was finally admitted as a State, the St. Croix River was, in large part, made her northwest boundary; Minnesota in this manner acquired a vast stretch of country, including the thriving city of St.

Paul.

Wisconsin was thus shorn of valuable territory on the south, to please Illinois; on the northeast, to favor Michigan; and on the northwest, that some of her settlers might join their fortunes with Minnesota. The State, however, is still quite as large as most of her sisters in the Old Northwest, and possesses an unusual variety of soils, and a great wealth of forests, mines, and fisheries. There is a strong probability that, had Congress, in 1848, given to Wisconsin her "ancient limits," as defined by the Ordinance of 1787, the movement to create the proposed state of "Superior" would have gathered strength in the pa.s.sing years, and possibly would have achieved success, thus depriving us of our great northern forests and mines, and our outlet upon the northern lake.

LIFE IN PIONEER DAYS

So long as the fur trade remained the princ.i.p.al business in Wisconsin, the French were still supreme at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien; and, until a third of the nineteenth century had pa.s.sed away, there existed at these outposts of New France a social life which smacked of the "old regime," bearing more traces of seventeenth-century Normandy than of Puritan New England. With the decline of the fur trade, a new order of things slowly grew up.

There being little legal machinery west of Lake Michigan, before Wisconsin Territory was erected, local government was slow to establish itself. Nothing but the good temper and stout common sense of the people prevented anarchy, under such a condition of affairs. For many years, the few public enterprises were undertaken at private expense. At Green Bay, schools were thus conducted, as early as 1817. In 1821 the citizens of that village raised a fund by popular subscription, and built a jail; and eleven years later, they asked the legislature of Michigan Territory to pay for it. There were some Territorial taxes levied in 1817, but the gathering of them was not very successful. The first county to levy a tax was Crawford, of which Prairie du Chien was the seat, but considerable difficulty appears to have been experienced in collecting the money.

Finally, Wisconsin Territory was organized, and the legislature a.s.sembled (1838) in Madison, the new capital. The accommodations at that raw little woodland village were meager, even for pioneer times. The Territorial building of stone, and a few rude frame and log houses in the immediate neighborhood, were all there was of the infant city. Only fifty strangers could be decently lodged there, and a proposition to adjourn to Milwaukee was favored. But as the lakesh.o.r.e metropolis, also a small village, could offer no better accommodations, it was decided to stay at the capital, and brave it out on the straw and hay mattresses, of which, however, there were not enough to supply the demand.

This was long before railroads had reached Wisconsin. Travel through the new Territory was by boat, horseback, or a kind of snow sledge called a "French train." There were no roads, except such as had been developed from the old deep-worn Indian trails which interlaced the face of the country, and traces of which can still be seen in many portions of the State. The pioneers found that these trails, with a little straightening, often followed the best possible routes for bridle paths or wagon roads. It was not long before they were being used by long lines of teams, transporting smelted lead from the mines of southwest Wisconsin to the Milwaukee and Galena docks; on the return, they carried supplies for the "diggings," and sawmill machinery into the interior forests. Farmers' wagons and stagecoaches followed in due time. Bridges were but slowly built; the unloaded wagons were ferried across rivers in Indian "dugout" canoes, the horses swimming behind, and the freight being brought over in relays.

In 1837 there was a financial crisis throughout the country, and this checked Western immigration for a few years. But there was not enough money in Wisconsin for bank failures materially to affect the people; so, when the tide of settlement again flowed hither, the Badgers were as strong and hopeful as ever.

People coming to Wisconsin from the East often traveled all the way in their own wagons; or would take a lake boat at Buffalo, and then proceed by water to Detroit, Green Bay, or Chicago, thence journeying in caravans to the interior.

Frontier life, in those days, was of the simplest character. The immigrants were for the most part used to hard work and plain fare.

Accordingly the privations of their new surroundings involved relatively little hardship, although sometimes a pioneer farmer was fifty or a hundred miles from a gristmill, a store, or a post office, and generally his highway thither was but a blazed bridle path through the tangled forest.

Often his only entertainments throughout the year were "bees" for raising log houses or barns for newcomers, and on these occasions all the settlers for scores of miles around would gather in a spirit of helpful comradery. Occasionally the mail carrier, either afoot or on horseback, would wish accommodation over night. Particularly fortunate was the man who maintained a river ferry at the crossing of some much-frequented trail; he could have frequent chats with strangers, and collect stray shillings from mail carriers or other travelers whose business led them through the wilderness.

Often the new settler brought considerable flour and salt pork with him, in his journey to the West; but it was not at first easy to get a fresh supply. Curiously enough, although in the midst of a wild abundance, civilized man at the outset sometimes suffered for the bare necessaries of life. As soon, however, as he could garner his first crop, and become accustomed to the new conditions, he was usually proof against disaster of this kind; fish and game were so abundant, in their season, that in due time the backwoodsman was able to win a wholesome livelihood from the storehouse of nature.

Satisfactory education for youth was a plant of comparatively small growth. At first there was not enough money in the country to pay competent teachers. The half-educated sons and daughters of the pioneers taught the earliest schools, often upon a private subscription basis; text-books were few, appliances generally wanting, and the results were, for many years, far from satisfactory. As for spiritual instruction, this was given by itinerant missionary preachers and priests, of various denominations, who braved great hardships while making their rounds on horseback or afoot, and deserve to rank among the most daring of the pioneer cla.s.s. In due time churches and schools were firmly established throughout the Territory.

In addition to these farmer colonists, there came many young professional and business men, chiefly from New York and New England, seeking an opening in the new Territory for the acquisition of fame and wealth. Many of these were men of marked ability, with high ambition and progressive ideas, who soon took prominent part in molding public opinion in the young Wisconsin. There are, all things considered, no abler, more forceful men in the Wisconsin of to-day than were some of those, now practically all pa.s.sed away, who shaped her destinies in the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century.

The sessions of the legislature were the princ.i.p.al events of the year.