A Standard History of Waupaca County, Wisconsin. An Authentic Narrative of the Past, with Particular Attention to the Modern Era in the Commercial, Industrial, Educational, Civic and Social Development.

              34 HISTORY OF WAUPACA COUNTY
150. There were a number of comfortable houses and small farms, and everything indicated contentment, if not marked prosperity. James H. Lockwood, a trader's clerk who was aboard the Washington, the com¬ mander's sloop, landed with the troops and thus describes the settlement: '' There then resided at Green Bay as a trader, John Lawe, and four or five at the Grignons. Augustin Grignon resided and traded at the Little Kaukalin. Those traders who pretended to make Green Bay their home resided generally but a small portion of the year there, as most of them wintered in the Indian country, and generally spent two or three months of the summer at Mackinaw. The traders of Green Bay mostly married, after the Indian manner, women of the Menominee tribe, there being no white women in the country. I saw at this time but one woman in the settlement that pretended to be white, and she had accidentally been brought there at an early day; but her history I do not recollect. There were at Green Bay some forty or fifty Canadians of French extraction, who pretended to cultivate the soil; but they were generally old, worn-out voyageurs or boatmen, w^ho, having become unfit for the hardships of the Indian trade, had taken wives, generally of the Menominee tribe, and settled down on a piece of land. As the land did not cost anything, all they had to do w^as to take up a piece not claimed by any other person, and fence and cultivate it. But they had generally been so long in the Indian tribQ that they had, to a great extent, lost the little knowledge they had acquired of farming in Canada, so that they were poor cul¬ tivators of the soil, although they raised considerable wheat, barley, peas and other crops. Green Bay was at that time a part of the Territory of Indiana, of which the seat of government was at Vincennes, which was also the county town of the county to which Green Bay was attached— between 400 and 500 miles distant by the tedious and circuitous route of the day.
Brown County, Judicially and Civilly
When Brown County was formed, two years after the founding of Fort Howard, Prairie du Chien was a tiny hamlet and Milwaukee was just emerging as a trading post. The personnel of its civil organization was formed by Governor Cass, who appointed Matthew Irwin, chief justice; Charles Reaume and John Lane, associate justices of the County Court; Matthew Irwin and John Bonver, county commissioners; Matthew Irwin, judge of probate ; Robert Irwin, Jr., clerk; George Johnson, sheriff; Charles Reaume, justice of the peace. These were the first county officials who had legal control over the territory of the eastern half of Wisconsin, including Waupaca County, which, for thirty years was to remain a