History of Vernon County, Wisconsin. Together with sketches of its towns and villages, educational, civil, military and political history; portraits of prominent persons, and biographies of representative citizens.

              34
HISTORY OF WISCONSIN.
The survey of public lands to which the In¬ dian title had been extinguished; the erection of Milwaukee county from the southern part of Brown; the changing of the eastern boundary of Iowa county to correspond with the western one of Milwaukee county; the attaching, for judicial purposes, of all the country west of the Mississippi river and north of the State of Mis¬ souri to the territory of Michigan in 1834, and the division of it into the two counties of Des Moines and Dubuque, were the important events following the close of the Black Hawk war. The   prospective   admission  of   the  State  of
Michigan into the Union, to include all that part of the territory lying east of Lake Michi¬ gan, caused, on the 1st of January, 1836, a ses¬ sion (the first one) of the seventh territorial council, to legislate for so much of the terri¬ tory as lay to the westward of that lake, to be held at Green Bay, when a memorial was adopted, asking Congress for the formation of a new territory, to include all of Michigan ter¬ ritory not to be admitted as a State. This re¬ quest, it will now be seen, was soon complied with by the National Legislature.
CHAPTER     II
WISCONSIN AS A TERRITORY.
The Territory of Wisconsin* was erected by act of Congress of April 20, 1836, to take effect from and after the  3d day of July following.
 Wisconsin takes its name from its principal river, which drains an extensive portion of its surface. It rises in Lake Vieux Desert (which is partly in Michigan and partly in Wisconsin), flows generally a south course to Portage in what is now Columbia county, where it turns to the south- we'^t, and after a further course of 118 miles, with a rapid current, reaches the Mississippi river, four miles below Prai¬ rie du Chien. Its entire length is about 450 miles, descending, in that distance, a little more than 1,000 feet. Along the lower portion of the stream are the high lands, or river hills. Some of these hills present high and precipitous faces to¬ ward the water. Others terminate in knobs. The name is supposed to have been taken from this feature; the word being derived from mis-is, great, and os-sin, a stone or rock.
Compare Shea's Discovery and Exploration of the Missis- 8inpi, pp. 6 (note) and 268; Foster's Mississippi Valley, v. 2 (note); Schoolcraft's Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes, p. 3^0 and note.
Two definitions of the word are current—as widely differ¬ ing from each other as from the one just given. (See Wis. Hist. Soc. Coll., Vol. I, p. Ill, and Webster's Die, Unar- bridged, p.1633.) The first—"the gathering of the waters"— has no corresponding words in Algonquin at all resembling the name; the same may be said of the second—"wild rush¬ ing channel."   (See Otchipwe Die. of Rev. F. Baraga.
Since flrst used by the French the word ' 'Wisconsin" has undergone considerable • change, On the map by Joliet, re¬ cently brought to light by Oravier, it is given as ' 'Miskon- ping." In Marquette's journal, published by Thevenot, in Paris, 1681, it is noted as the "Meskousing." It appeared there for the flrst time in print. Hennepin, in 1683, wrote "Onisconsin" and "Misconsin;" Charlevoix, 1743, "Ouis¬ consin;" Carver, 1766, "Ouisconsin" (English—"Wiscon¬ sin"); since which last mentioned date the orthography has been uniform.—Butterfield's Discovery of the Northwest in 1634.
It was made to include all that part of the late Michigan territory described within boundaries "commencing at the northeast corner of the State of Illinois, running thence through the middle of Lake Michigan to a point opposite the main channel of Green bay; thence through that channel and the bay to the mouth of the Menomonee river; thence up that stream to its head, which is nearest the lake of the Desert; thence to the middle of that lake; thence down the Montreal river to its mouth; thence with a direct line across Lake Superior to where the territorial line of the United States! ast touches the lake northwest; thence on the north, with the territorial line, to the White Earth river; on the west by a line drawn down the middle of the main channel of that stream to the Mis¬ souri river, and down the middle of the main channel of the last mentioned stream to the northwest corner of the State of Missouri; and thence with the boundaries of the States of Missouri and Illinois, as already fixed by mt of