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                      TH[ STOIY OF ~1TXDISON
                                  CHAPTER I.
                               Gei~esis -1836-1838.
    The immediate and lasting effects of the Black Hawk War' (1832) were
not only the hi~m-
bling of the Indians of Northern Illinois and what afterwards became Southern
Wisconsin, but
Effects of    the wide advertising of the country through which the contest
had been waged.
Black Hawk During and soon after the war, the newspapers of the Eastern States
were filled
War.          with descriptions, more or less florid, of the scenic charms
of the Rock River Valley,
tbe groves and prairies on every hand, the park-like district of the Four
Lakes, the Wisconsin
River highlands, and the picturesque hills and almost impenetrable forests
of Western Wisconsin.
Books and pamphlets by the score were issued from the press, giving accounts
of the newly-dis-
covered paradise, and soon a tide of immigration set thither.  Then necessarily
followed, in
short season, the survey and Opening to. sale of public lands heretofore
reserved, and the purchase
of what hunting grounds were still in possession of Indian tribes.  The development
of th~
theatre of war thus received a sudden and enormous impetus, so that when
the country west of
Lake Michigan was divorced from Michigan Territory in 1836, and reared into
the independent
Territory of Wisconsin, there were about twelve thousand whites within the
borders of the nas
cent commonwealth; and many of the sites of future cities of our State were
already occupied
by agricultural settlers, isolated or in tiny groups.
    Green Bay, a straggling French-Canadian settlement, by this time hoary
with age, had come
down from the seventeenth century, maintaining a sickly existence on the
fur-trade and the lake
settlement    traffic; Forts Howard (at Green Bay), Winnebago (at Portage),
and Crawford (at
elsewhere     Prairie du Chien) were surrounded by meagre hamlets, chiefly
of French Creoles;
Wisconsin.    the lead-mining region in the southwest, although sparsely
settled~, contained the
bulk of the population, with Mineral Point as its center-a village having
at the time an ap-
parently brighter prospect than the new settlement at the mouth of Milwaukee
River; there were
a few notches carved, at wide intervals, from the gloomy forest bordering
the western shore of
Lake Michigan; but outside of the settlements just enumerated, Wisconsin
was practically unin-
habited by the whites.  Here and there was to be found an Indian trader,
the Yankee successor
of the courier de bois of the old French regime, or some exceptionally adventurous
farmer; but
their far-separated cabins only emphasized the density of the wilderness,
through which roamed
untrammeled the shiftless, gipsy-like aborigines - the comparatively harmless
Chippewas,
Menomonees, Pottawatomies, and Winnebagoes.
    In the lummer of 1836 there were, so far as is i~ow known, but five White
men residing
within the region comprised in the present county of Dane: Ebenezer Brigham,
the original
Dane county settler, at the East Blue Mound; Eben Peck, who lived with Brigham,
boarding the
ID 1886.      latter and his farming and lead-mining hands, and entertaining
chance travelers
along the military highway between Forts Crawford and Winnebago; Berry Haney,
a ranchman
Squatting on the military road at what is now Cross Plains; a Frenchman named
Olivier Armel,
who maintained a temporary trading shanty, half brush and half canvas, near
what we call
Johnson street, on the wooded isthmus between Lakes Monona and Mendota; and
Abel Rasdall,