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.

              214 MEMOIRS  OF WAUKESHA  COUNTY
who are in search of health, rest and recreation. The city of Wau¬ kesha presents the largest claims to notice, since the chief attraction at that point is the health-giving springs, and the sentiment expressed in the time of Job, "All that a mari hath will he give for his life," has not materially changed through all the intervening centuries.
The mineral springs which have made Waukesha famous through¬ out the whole country were probably known to the Indians for those same qualities that attract such multitudes of people to them at the present time. It was doubtless one reason why this vicinity was, from "prehistoric ages, a favorite village site for the native inhabitants. George W. Featherstonhaugh, son of the English geologist of the same name, who visited the country in 1837, is the authority for the state¬ ment that such knowledge was possessed by the Indians. Mr. Feather¬ stonhaugh was a surveyor by profession, a member of the constitutional convention of 1847, later a member of the legislature, and lived until June 10, 1900. His information was doubtless obtained from his father, who could not, however, have had personal knowledge of it, as the date given preceded by several years the arrival of the latter in the country. The story is that a party of surveyors, traveling west¬ ward in 1834 to Rock Island on the Mississippi, was detained near the mouth of the Fox river in Illinois, by the sickness of a riumber of the party, and they were directed by the Indians to the springs, near the upper part of the river—without doubt, the Waukesha group—which they found, and also found there large numbers of Indians who were using the water for medicinal purposes.
Nevertheless this knowledge was practically forgotten until recalled by the later discovery of these same qualities in 1868 by Richard Dun¬ bar. That discovery was accidental and for some time held to be of little account. The following scientific explanation given by Prof. I. A. Lapham, for many years state geologist, of the medicinal quali¬ ties of the mineral springs in the vicinity of Waukesha, is both inter¬ esting and satisfactory.   He says :
"These rocks are the limestone of the Niagara group (upper Silu¬ rian) so-called because they are of the same age or period as those • over which the water falls at Niagara. No other beds are found in their natural bed at Waukesha. They occur in two very distinct varie¬ ties; the lower compactly and evenly bedded is very much used for building and flag-stones for side-walks; the upper, more irregularly bedded, is quarried chiefly for the manufacture of quicklime, and cor¬ responds in many particulars with thehmestone found at Racine. The first has been named Waukesha limestone, and is generally known by that name. The long, jointed fossil, so common in Waukesha, often seen in the flagging of the sidewalks, is not a petrified snake, as many suppose, but a very old marine chambered shell, like the modern nauti¬ lus, except that it is straight instead of coiled (specifically called or- thoceras, or orthoceratite.—Editor.)
"These, like all other limestones, are marine deposits, as is clearly evinced by the shells and corals so abvmdantly found in the quarries. Hence we come to the strange conclusion that Waukesha was in the •old Silurian times the bottom of the sea.    Limestones are formed by