Part 15 (2/2)
etc., was p.r.o.nounced in a variety of ways and had as many meanings.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
MADISON
THE CITY OF THE FOUR LAKES
BY REUBEN G. THWAITES
In 1836, that portion of Michigan Territory which lay west of Lake Michigan, was erected into the Territory of Wisconsin. Within the borders of the nascent commonwealth there lived at that time about twelve thousand whites and nine thousand Indians. Many of the sites of future cities of Wisconsin were already occupied by agricultural settlers, isolated or in tiny groups.
Green Bay, a straggling French-Canadian settlement, had come down from the seventeenth century, maintaining a sickly existence upon the fur trade and the coasting traffic of the upper Great Lakes; Forts Winnebago (at Portage) and Crawford (at Prairie du Chien) were surrounded by meagre hamlets, chiefly of French creoles; the lead-mining region in the southwest, although spa.r.s.ely settled, contained the bulk of the white population, with Mineral Point as its centre--a village having at the time an apparently brighter prospect than the new settlement at the mouth of Milwaukee River; there were also a few notches carved, at wide intervals, from the gloomy forest bordering the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan. Outside of the settlements just enumerated, Wisconsin was practically uninhabited by whites. Here and there was to be found an Indian trader, the Yankee successor of the _coureur de bois_ of the old French _regime_, or some exceptionally adventurous farmer; but their far-separated cabins only emphasized the density of the wilderness, through which roamed untrammelled the s.h.i.+ftless, gipsy-like aborigines,--the comparatively harmless Chippewas, Menomonies, Pottawatomies and Winnebagoes.
[Ill.u.s.tration THE STATE HOUSE, MADISON.]
On the 4th of July the territorial officers of Wisconsin qualified at Mineral Point, with Henry Dodge, a Black Hawk War hero, as Governor. In October following, the first Legislature a.s.sembled within a two-story battlement-fronted house in the little lead-region hamlet of Belmont. The highway which it faced bristled with stumps, while miners' shafts and prospectors' holes thickly dimpled the shanty neighborhood. A month was spent in selecting a capital for the infant Territory. There were seventeen applicants. Some of them were actual settlements, like Green Bay, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Racine, Portage, Belmont, Mineral Point, and Platteville; but others were ”paper towns,” existing only on maps made by real-estate speculators. Of such shadowy substance was Madison, the victor.
James Duane Doty, who had been United States Circuit Judge for the country west of Lake Michigan, had formed a town-site partners.h.i.+p with Stevens T.
Mason, then Governor of Michigan Territory. These gentlemen preempted several tracts of government land at presumably desirable spots in the wilderness. Doty advanced the respective claims of these tracts, giving them maps and attractive names. His favorite was an undulating isthmus between Lakes Monona and Mendota,[11] in the heart of Southern Wisconsin, midway between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. This claimant he named ”Madison,” after the third President of the United States.
It was freely alleged at the time that Doty presented choice lots in Madison to his legislative friends. However this may be, the ostensible arguments produced were: that the chief centres of settlement in the northeast (Green Bay), the southeast (Milwaukee), and the southwest (the lead region) were so widely separated and had such divergent interests that to select one would alienate the others and make it impossible to harmoniously conduct the territorial government; again, that to build up one corner of the Territory at the expense of the others would unequally distribute the population; it was also urged that the unsettled central portion of the Territory needed the incentive to growth which the capital would give it; and lastly, Doty, the only man in Belmont that winter who seems to have known Madison, declared the site to be the most beautiful spot in the Wisconsin forest. And thus Madison won.
Beyond the understanding that the centre of the Capitol Park was to be the common corner of four sections of land which met near the middle of the isthmus, there had as yet been no thought of how this projected town in the woods should be laid out. A French half-breed, Olivier Armel, who had a temporary trading shanty on the tract, half brush and half canvas, was the only man whom the surveyor found when he arrived in a blinding snowstorm in February (1837) to set the stakes in this virgin wilderness for the future State House of Wisconsin. The streets of the town were laid out, so far as possible, upon the lines of the national capital: wide avenues radiating from the Capitol Park upon the points of the compa.s.s were bisected by other highways paralleling the sh.o.r.es of the two princ.i.p.al lakes. For names of the thoroughfares, the patriotic surveyor had recourse to the list of signatures to the federal Const.i.tution, probably the only instance of a city's streets being exclusively named from this venerable body of lawgivers.
The first dwelling in Madison was a log house built in April by one Eben Peck, for the entertainment of the mechanics who were expected out from Milwaukee to construct the State House. It was June 10th before the building commissioner and his thirty-six workmen put in an appearance, after a toilsome overland journey of ten days through rain and mud, with no roads, and unbridged rivers which had either to be forded or swam. On the 4th of July the conerstone was laid ”with appropriate toasts and speeches”
by a small knot of territorial officials.
[Ill.u.s.tration THE FIRST EXECUTIVE RESIDENCE (STILL STANDING) IN USE BY GOVERNOR DOTY.]
It was January, 1839, before the territorial Legislature could be accommodated at Madison; and even then the situation brought little comfort. Says a pioneer of those days: ”With the session came crowds of people. The public houses were literally crammed--shakedowns were looked upon as a luxury, and lucky was the guest whose fortune it was to rest his weary limbs on a straw or hay mattress.”
The little village was charmingly situated in the primeval forest. One of Madison's early teachers thus wrote of the hamlet of his young manhood:
”Those who only know of Madison now, have but a feeble conception of its wonderful and fascinating beauty at the beginning. In 1839 it had the look of a well-kept lawn, shaded by fine white-oak and burr-oak trees, with a fragrant fringe of red cedar all about the lake sh.o.r.es. There was then no underbrush and thicket such as sprung up soon, when the semi-annual fires ceased to do the duty of the rake and mower; but the eye had a stretch quite uninterrupted, except as the surface rose in beautiful green knolls on either lake. The lakes then lay in natural silver beauty, prettily framed in pebbly beach. For simple, quiet beauty, Madison in 1839 was unequalled by anything I remember.”
Despite its natural attractiveness, and its presumably favorable location, Madison was a plant of slow growth. In the summer of 1838 the census revealed the presence here of only sixty-two people, and it is recorded that there were at that time ”not more than a dozen houses, built and in process of erection, counting every cabin and shanty within three miles of the Capitol,” while Indian wigwams were frequently set up within sight of the doors. Four years later there were but 172 people, and in 1846 but 632.
By the close of 1850, however, the population had, largely as the result of a mild ”boom” in that year, grown to 1672. Five years later Horace Greeley and Bayard Taylor paid the place a visit, and in letters to the New York _Tribune_ highly extolled its beauties. As a result there was an almost immediate increase of population and a considerable advance in the price of real estate; so that at the outbreak of the Civil War there were 7000 Madisonians.
[Ill.u.s.tration PROFILE ROCK ON LAKE MENDOTA.]
Notwithstanding the general prevalence of financial stringency, Madison prospered during the war. The State's troops were largely mobilized here, and constantly enlivened the streets; a great deal of money was necessarily spent by the State and nation for supplies and salaries, as well as by the soldiers themselves, so that throughout it all the town grew substantially.
In 1870 there were 10,000 citizens, but the next decade only slightly advanced this census. About 1882, however, a variety of causes led to the commencement of a stronger growth--chiefly the rapid development of the State University, the expansion of the State's administrative affairs, the bettering of railroad facilities, and an enlargement of local manufacturing interests. During the past eighteen years there has been a steady gain, with every indication of permanency; the census of 1900 revealed the presence at the Wisconsin capital of 20,000 residents, while an additional 5000 dwell in closely ab.u.t.ting suburbs.
Frequent attempts to remove the capital to Milwaukee were long a potent factor in r.e.t.a.r.ding the development of Madison. In 1870 the effort was nearly successful. The fact, however, that the State had by this time invested large sums of money in public buildings in and around Madison, particularly in the State University,--which inst.i.tution must, by the terms of the const.i.tution, be situated ”at or near the seat of State government,”--has of late years cooled the ardor of advocates of removal, so that no fear of renewed agitation is now entertained.
In the early annals of this peaceful little city in the undulating oak grove between Monona and Mendota,--surrounded on every hand by far-stretching lakes and marshes, and thus in a measure isolated from her rural neighbors,--the historian finds little of stirring interest; and that little almost always the reflex of the Legislature, which annually until 1882, when the sessions were made biennial, came and went with much bustle and sometimes brawl. The legislative sessions were, in ante-bellum days, the events of the year, and attracted prominent men from all quarters of Wisconsin. The crude hotels were filled each winter with legislators, lobbyists and visiting politicians. The humors of the time were often uncouth. There was a deal of horse-play, hard drinking, and profanity, and occasionally a personal encounter during the heat of discussion: as in 1842, when Charles C.P. Arndt, of Brown, was killed on the floor of the council chamber by his fellow-member, James R. Vineyard, of Grant, an event to which d.i.c.kens alluded in his _American Notes_, and which gained for Wisconsin an unenviable notoriety the country over. But an undercurrent of good nature was generally observable, and strong attachments were more frequently noticeable than feuds.
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