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.

              HISTORY OF VERNON COUNTY.
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northward of the  Wisconsin  river.    Another tribe had, as it were, crowded them out.
During the war of the Revolution, the Sacs and Foxes continued the firm friends of the English. In 1804 they ceded their lands south of the Wisconsin river to the United States; so that they no longer were owners of any lands within this State. From that date, therefore, these allied tribes can not be considered as be¬ longing to thf* Indian Nations of Wisconsin. They were generally friendly to Great Britain during the War of 1812-15, but they soon made peace with the United States after that contest ended. A striking episode in their subsequent history, is the Black Hawk war, which will be narrated in a subsequent chapter. The exact date of the Foxes leaving the Wisconsin river country is unknown. They sold the prairie at the mouth of that stream, to some Canadian French traders in 1781, and subsequently va¬ cated their village. Probably about the begin¬ ning of the present century they had abandoned this region as their home, although they long after visited it for the purposes of trade.
THE  WINNEBAGOES.
The Nation which displaced the Sacs and Foxes upon the Wisconsin river and its contig¬ uous territory, including what is now Vernon county, was the Winnebagos. It is now 250 years since the civilized world began to get a knowledge of the Winnebagoes—the "men of the sea," as they were called, pointing, possibly, to their early emigration from the shores of the Mexican gulf, or the Pacific. The territory now included within the limits of Wisconsin, and so much of the State of Michigan as lies north of Green bay. Lake Michigan, the Straits of Mackinaw and Lake Huron were, in early times, inhabited by several tribes of the Algon¬ quin race, forming a barrier to the Dakotas, or Sioux, who had advanced eastward to the Mis¬ sissippi. But the Winnebagoes, although one of the tribes belonging to the family of the latter, had passed the great river, at some un¬ known  period, and  settled  upon   Winnebago
lake. Here, as early as 1634, they were visited by John Nicolet, an agent of France, and a treaty concluded with them. Little more was heard of the Winnebagoes for the next thirty- five years, when, on the 2d of December, 1669, someof that Nation were seen at a Sac village on Green bay, by Father Allouez.
As early at least, as 1670, the French were ac¬ tively engaged amongthe Winnebagoes trading. "We found affairs," says one the Jesuit mission¬ aries, who arrived among them in September of that year, " we found affairs there in a pretty bad posture, and the minds of the sava¬ ges much soured against the French, who were there trading; ill treating them in deeds and words, pillaging and carrying away their mer¬ chandise in spite of them, and conducting themselves toward them with insupportable in¬ solences and indignities. The cause of this disorder," adds the missionary, " is that they had received some bad treatment from the French, to whom they had this year come to trade, and particularly from the soldiers, from whom they pretended to have received many wrongs and injuries." It is thus made certain th it the arms of France were carried into the territory of the Winnebagoes over 200 years ago.
The Fox river of Green bay was found at that date a difficult stream to navigate. Tw^o Jesuits who ascended the river in 1670, had "three or four leagues of rapids to contend with," when they had advanced " one day's ' journey" from the head of the bay, "more diffi¬ cult than those which are common in other rivers, in this, that the flints, over which" they had to walk with naked feet to drag their ca¬ noes, were so "sharp and so cutting, that one has all the trouble in the world to hold one's self steady against the great rushing of the waters." At the falls they found an idol that the savages honored ; "never failing, in pass¬ ing, to make him some sacrifice of tobacco, or arrows, or paintings, or other things, to thank him that, by his assistance, they had, in ascend-