Grant County, Wisconsin - Chapter 5: Grant County in the Forties, 1900

Statistics Of 1840

In 1840 the population of the county was 3926. There were 2474 males and 1452 females. Excluding children and colored people, there were 1788 men and 548 women. Of the men, 927, or more than half, were between twenty and thirty years old. This indicates a large number of unmated miners and adventurers. The report of the several school districts in April, 1840, showed the following number of pupils: Menomonee district, 24; Platteville, 149; Blue River, 29; Snake Hollow, 68; Lancaster. 74; Cassville, 28; Wisconsin (Patch Grove), 37; total, 409.

The census of 1840 show's that there were then 17 furnaces in Grant County, producing annually 6,020,350 pounds of lead and giv¬ ing employment to 86 men. There w'ere 5,735 horses and mules, 4,197 neat cattle, 463 sheep, 8,645 swine, 32 stores and groceries, 2 lumber yards, 1 brewery, 2 flouring mills, 3 grist mills, and 11 saw" mills. The products were 10,796 bushels of w'heat, 3,246 bushels of barley, 65,400 bushels of oats, 13 of rye. 1,059 of buckwheat, 100,- 055 of Indian corn, and 74,629 of potatoes; 3,912 tons of hay, 100 pounds of tobacco, 1,355 pounds of maple sugar, 63,647 pounds of soap, and 9,742 pounds of tallow candles.

The dominating element, giving a tone to the whole, of the early population of Grant County came from Missouri, Kentucky, and Vir¬ ginia, may of them having sojourned for a time in southern Illinois, and the customs w'ere mostly those of Southern Border States, At first their cabins were of the rudest sort-*of rough stones, sods, dug- outs, or rough logs chinked with sticks and stones and daubed with mud. Even in the more substantial buildings, although the broad fireplace was of stones, the chimney was built of sticks built up like a rail p?n, covered thickly with clay mud to protect the sticks from the fire. Later on houses were built of hewn logs, the interstices neatly chinked with stone and plastered with lime mortar - much more cleanly than the primitive mud daubing. The interior was usually white¬ washed. They were of one story, The attic, with a floor of rough boards (sometimes even puncheons hewn from split logs), sometimes but not always lighted by a little window in the gable, was used as a storage room and a sleeping room for the children, usually numerous, while the "old folks" slept below in the living room. Later on set¬ tlers with considerable means built substantial stone houses, but al¬ ways with the wide fireplaces and large chimneys, and queer little windows in little gables projecting from the roofs. Many houses of this style may yet be seen in the South, but very few in Grant County, and these only in the old mining towns - Platteville, Potosi, Beetown, etc. The ordinary house of the settler of moderate means was a double log house - two houses built twelve or fifteen feet apart and covered with one roof leaving a space between which was roofed but not floored and open at the sides. In this space in warm weather the famil\' ate and the old folks smoked their cob pipes and gossiped with their neighbors. It was a style of building better suited to the Border States, whence it was introduced, than to Wisconsin with its short summers.

The settlers lived in rude plenty with moderate exertion, at least on the part of the men. With the produce of their mineral they bought the necessary groceries: coffee, tobacco, and (last but by no means least) whisky, which was very cheap then. Little sugar did they have to buy ; the wild bees of the woods had laid up in many a hollow oak an abundant store of sweets gathered from the incredible profusion of prairie flowers, and the maple tree offered its delicious juice every spring. The quantity of game was enormous. Deer were to be found everywhere and were even a nuisance in the settlers' grain fields. The rivers and creeks swarmed with fish in numbers hardly credible in this day. That old pioneer, D. R. Burt, is responsible for the following fish story: "With a seine twenty feet in length I have caught a wagon-load in thirty minutes, some of them weighing thirty pounds apiece. From the ford up to the mill-dam the river would be literally filled with fish. To throw a stone into the river at the point named would seldom fail of killing one of more, and by striking a spear into the water, not aiming at any, you would bring out one or more fish."

The number of wild fowl was astonishing. The still reaches of water in the rivers, sloughs, and creeks swarmed with wild ducks; every spring and fall countless flocks of wild geese tarried on their journeys long enough so that many fell victims to the settlers' rifles. The fields and prairies swarmed with prairie chickens. The men picked their heads off with their deadly rifles and the boys trapped them in great numbers. Even late into the fifties many a farmer boy pur¬ chased his red-topped Sunday boots, "store clothes, " and a great many other coveted notions with the proceeds of his trapped prairie chickens and quails. Wild pigeons passed over in such enormous num¬ bers that they darkened the sky for hours at a time.

There was no fairer country on earth than this when spring-time came and the groves were green (and in no other land is such vivid verdure) and the green carpet of the prairies was spangled with wild flowers of every hue in incredible profusion. Then, too, the wild fruits ! The woods were full of blackberries and the edges of the groves with plums, large, mellow ones, and the prairie and river bottoms scarlet with strawberries. What joy for the boy or girl, with basket or bucket on arm, to push aside the tall grass and see the crimson gleam of the great clusters against their bright green background ! No won¬ der the pioneers looked back on life in those days as the veritable Golden Age. All the hardships and privations were forgotten, or only vague and dim in the memory, while those pleasant things shone un¬ dimmed in the mist of that dear dead past. As Ben Taylor says :

But there were privations and hardships, and they fell especially* heavy on the women. The housewife had not only to knit the stock¬ ings and make the clothes for the whole family, but to card the rolls, spin the yarn, and weave the cloth. Then, indeed, she could say, "Woman's work is never done." Nearly all the old settlers kept in or close to the timber, and avoided the prairies, as well they might, for those broad fireplaces, with the great backlog and the high pile of long sticks, ate up a great amount of wood during the long winters. In a later day, when stoves came into general use, this cheerful, roar-

The early mills were so few and far between that often the house¬ wife made her meal by grating ears of corn on a grater made by punching holes with a nail in the bottom of a superannuated pan. The mills were rude affairs, the stones made of coarse native stone that left no little grit in the flour, which by no means rivaled in fine¬ ness and whiteness the product of the Minneapolis roller mills of to¬ day. By 1845 the millers were introducing French buhr-stones and the mills were much improved.

Oats were generally threshed by having horses or cattle tramp them out. Wheat and buckwheat were threshed with flails. A rude home-made thresher was built for Mr. Thomas Shanley, near Lancas¬ ter, in 1845. About 1848 threshing machines were introduced, con¬ sisting simply of a toothed cylinder run by a one-horse tread-mill. The grain, straw, and chaff all came out together. The grain was cleaned in fanning-mills. There were fanning-mill factories at Platteville and Potosi.

Beasts of prey and reptiles - "varmints" - were no small ills of pioneer life. Rattlesnakes were especially numerous until hogs became sufficiently numerous to clear them out. They were especially numer¬ ous in the harvest field. It was not uncommon to pick up an un¬ bound bundle of wheat and find a rattlesnake under it, or for the man loading bundles to find that a rattler had been pitched up to him along with a bundle. It is wonderful that so few persons were bitten by these reptiles.

Wolves and wildcats were numerous; bears were common; but only seldom was heard the scream of the much-dreaded panther or "painter." Bears were the first of these wild animals to disappear. The last one the editor knows of to be killed in the county was found in the fall of 1855, wandering in a cornfield on the lower part of Blake's Prairie. Pursued by men and dogs, it took refuge in the cellar of John Hickok's house (or that of some one in that vicinity), where it was shot. Wolf-baiting was a favorite sport. A large wolf being caught in a trap, he was brought to where a good many spectators were assembled and three or four dogs let loose on him. Though rather cowardly when retreat is possible, the large gray wolf is a ter¬ rible fighter when he has to fight or die. He is a match for four times his weight in dogs, especially the noisy but not very brave hound dogs of the Missourians. But the thrilling stories so often told of wolves attacking men are pure fiction. I do not believe that one (or many) ever attacked (although they often followed) a human being. I have seen one old sow "stand off" three large wolves that w-ere trying to get her pigs.

Although the early miners were rude and reckless, shooting and stabbing affrays were not common, considering the circumstances, as the practice of carrying weapons except for hunting, was not common. Men fought out their battles with fists and feet, teeth and nails. Most of them, especially the Kentuckians and Missourians, were men of large frame and great muscle, and there were some terrible struggles between them. The editor remembers one old one-eyed pioneer who, it is said, had the missing eye knocked out and a leg broken in one fight, and he was a powerful man himself. But generally they were not quarrelsome. As one of them said in later days, "The whisky was not so bad then as now." It was noted in 1835 that there was not a man from the lead mines in the penitentiary.

Petty larceny was unknown. Tools or clothing could be safely left lying anywhere. People would leave their houses alone and un¬ locked. Any person coming along was free to come in and eat or drink anything he could find ; but carrying away things from such un¬ guarded houses was unknown. Locks upon doors were unnecessary. As Schiller, in his Wilhelm Tell% says of ancient Switzerland :

As the number of miners in the county increased the number and size of the liquor shops increased. In an early day proper-speaking people called them "groceries," but in common slang they were called "light-houses." The word "saloon" was a later fashion. When the building of the liquor-seller was too small to contain the crowd of miners who canie in on Saturday afternoons, they would congregate on the shady side of the house in warm weather, and there play cards, tell stories, or witness wolf-fights. A necessary adjunct of every light¬ house was the bowling-alley, an athletic substitute for billiards. As this is so near extinct in the county, a description may not be amiss. It was of rough boards usually, with an alley or raised floor of smooth boards about fifty feet long and four or five feet wide. At the farther end were set up ten wooden pins in a wedge-shaped group. The players then endeavored to knock these pins down by rolling balls of wood about a foot in diameter. It was said that ten-pins were in¬ vented in England when it was made illegal to play nine-pins. In 1844 there were in the county ten tavern licenses and eleven "grocery" licenses for the retail of liquor. Five of these were in Potosi and four in Platteville.

Some time in the forties the prevalence of liquor-drinking roused a sentiment against it, and an organization called "Sons of Temper¬ ance" became very flourishing in the county. In the published lists of the officers of its "divisions" we find the names of very many of the prominent men of the county. About the same time an order called " 1001" flourished. It seemed to be, in its ritual and forms, a sort of burlesque on Freemasonry, and its object diverson, to a great extent by horse-play.

In 1844 the miners of this county heard that cents (the big old red ones) had reached Milwaukee and the next year Galena, but they would have none of such bass currency.

The census of 1846 showed a very great increase in the popula¬ tion from 1840. The county contained 7,189 males and 4,845 females - total 12,034; the females gaining on the males, but still greatly in the minority.

Though the Winnebagoes continued to leave their western reser¬ vation and wander through the county, particularly along the Wis¬ consin River, even to quite recent times, there has been no apprehen¬ sion of serious trouble with them since the "fuss" of February, 1846, at Muscoda. At that date and place a quarrel arose between a band of Winnebagoes and the settlers, when one of the Indians wounded a white by shooting. The whites "turned loose" and killed three In¬ dians. The affair created great alarm and caused the mustering of many volunteers ; but the Indians withdrew with their dead without further fighting.

Land Troubles

In 1847 there was a culmination of the land troubles which had been growing many years. Much of the land which had been pre¬ empted by the settlers and paid for at the rate of $1.25 an acre was withdrawn by the Commissioner of the Land Office, on the ground that it was mineral land and ought to have been reserved as such, and he proposed to offer it for sale again. This decision was pub¬ lished in 1846. These lands occupied by the settlers were worth much more than $1.25 an acre and the principal value had been given to them by the settlers themselves by their labor and improvements, ex¬ posed to all the hardships and privations incident to settling in a new country, among the dangerous Indians. The settlers had cleared away the forests, broken up the prairies, constructed roads, opened mines and built school-houses, and thus much increased the value of the lands. Some of the settlers had purchased their lands in good faith from the original preemptors or buyers. For the government to take away these lands from the purchasers and offer them for sale to be snapped up by speculators was the height of injustice. The legisla¬ ture of Wisconsin Territory petitioned Congress, setting forth the facts as to these lands, and urging that the proper place to have al¬ leged fraudulent entries of lands tried was in the courts, and not in the Land Office, and asked Congress to provide for withholding from sale all lands in the Mineral Point District sold before that time, and for the issuing of patents for all lands purchased at that land office, except such entries as had been, or might be made after that time, de¬ clared by proper tribunals to be fraudulent entries.

But despite all petitions and remonstrances the Government per¬ sisted in its determination to sell the lands. Then the miners began to act. Indignation meetings were held in all the mining neighbor¬ hoods. One of them, reported in the Herald of that time, held at British Hollow December 19, 1846, was an example of many. The meeting passed a series of resolutions declaring that they were willing to pay $2.50 an acre for their claims and homes, but would resist by force any attempt to make them pay more ; that they would all be at Mineral Point on the first day of the land*sales and remain there until all the reserved lands west of Platte River had been offered for sale; that a committee of five be appointed by the meeting to hear the evi¬ dence in the case of all conflicting claims and render final decision in the matter, their jurisdiction to extend over Town 3, Range 3, and the whole of Section 12 in Town 2, Range 3 ; that the owners of claims in each section should appoint one or more of their number to receive the certificate of each forty-acre lot as it was bid off at the land sale and redeed it to the rightful owners ; that claimants should employ the County Surveyor to survey their claims and give certificates to the rightful owners, and make a plat of the whole survey for the set¬ tlers on the reserved lands ; that no committeeman should investigate the right of any claim in which he was interested ; that a committee

A meeting was held at Platteville, January 30, 1847, and a board of arbitrators consisting of Thomas Cruson, George I. Coates, Wm. Bull, A. C. Inman, Thomas Hugill, D. Hurlbert, John Newman, Wm. Davidson, Thomas J. Coates, Fred Hollman,and Henry Snowden was appointed. The board was not to grant more than a quarter section of land to any claimant, except land the claimant had already entered in Towns 2, 3, and 4 of Ranges 1 and 2; then he was to be allowed said claims.

The day before the first day of the land sale, which was May 1, 1847, there was a rousing meeting at Platteville in which the settlers all agreed to be present at the sale and see that every one had an op¬ portunity to bid in his own land at the minimum price, and they did so. Speculators took warning by this formidable determination of the settlers, and none of them tried to bid off a settler's home or a miner's claim. Thus the trouble ended forever.

Weather Extremes

The winter of 1843 was a very hard one on the old settlers. But for the farmers the year 1847 was worse, as there was frost every month in the year, doing great damage to corn and tender vegetables. As a compensation, the winter of 1847-48 was very mild.

The Mexican War And Other Events

In 1846 the Mexican War began and lasted through the next year. Though the people of Grant County were much interested, there was by no means the excitement that reigned in the South, and com¬ paratively few men from the county enlisted. Notice of these will be found in the division of Military History.

In 1848 Wisconsin became a State. Although there were excited discussions, particularly on the matters of the boundary and the con¬ stitution (which will be explained in the Political History of this work), the admission made little difference at the time with the mate¬ rial affairs of the county.

In 1849 the discovery of gold in California was announced, and a few of the adventurous spirits from the lead mines of Grant County started in quest of the more precious metal, but the great exodus did not begin till the next spring.