Memoirs of Waukesha County. From the earliest historical times to the present with chapters on various subjects, including each of the different towns, and a genealogical and biographical record of representative families in the county, prepared from data obtained from original sources of information.

              22 INTRODUCTORY   SKETCH
ing with all else within the castle, until the right prince arrived to waken her.
That there was still another population here, as elsewhere in Wis¬ consin, before the advent of the modern Indian tribes is a fact which needs no further demonstration than is afforded by the record of the artificial mounds which used to be counted by the hundred by the early white settlers at short intervals all the way from the Menomonee river at the northwest of the present county to the Eagle prairies in the southwest, and from the region of the Oconomowoc lakes to that of the "Big Muskego." But the builders of these mounds (a few of which are still preserved at Waukesha), have-not left even a tradition of their history, and none of the published theories in relation to their sojourn here has any solid foundation. The mounds themselves in their various forms with rude resemblance to the shapes of living crea¬ tures do not yield any intelligible answer to the inquiries of anti¬ quarians, and for the present the moundbuilders must be permitted by the historian to repose in their primeval mystery or else be presented in the clothing of modern imagination.
The four white men who were the first to visit Waukesha with the intention of staying there had probably no sentiment of poetry, ro¬ mance or anything else of an esthetic character in connection with their enterprise. Southern Wisconsin had been lately cleared of hos¬ tile Indians, and no personal danger from them was longer to be ap¬ prehended, so that the attraction of the setting sun which had drawn their remote ancestors over the German oceans to Great Britain and their later ancestors over the Atlantic to New England, then into the wildernesses of western New York and Ohio, and finally to northern Indiana, was free to exert its influence upon the young men of the generation then in being.
The people of New England lineage from the advent of "the Pil¬ grims" down to the middle of the nineteenth century might properly have been thought of as consisting of two great classes; the one class including those who found it difficult to break away from the ties of home and the associations of childhood, and the other comprising such as found those ties and associations unendurable, or at least very hard to sustain. The members of the first mentioned class remained among their native hills and valleys when it was practicable to do so, and by the usual processes of natural selection their descendants in and near the eastern states are not now, and have not been for the past half cen¬ tury, greatly inclined towards migration; while the spirit of restless enterprise has seemed to work upon the latter with an ever increasing force.
Washington Irving, in his "Knickerbocker's ^History," gives a graphic picture of the migratory New Englanders of the closing years of the eighteenth century; of their canvas-covered wagons and their flaxen-haired progeny; of their log huts in the wilderness succeeded by later "shingle palaces;" of the sales of the lands thus improved, and the re-embarking for the farther west, which was then in the re¬ gion of the lakes of central New York. The canvas-covered wagons have now faded away into tradition; but during the period of their