=Wisconsin.=—­Across Lake Michigan to the west lay the territory of Wisconsin, which shared with Michigan the interesting history of the Northwest, running back into the heroic days when French hunters and missionaries were planning a French empire for the great monarch, Louis XIV.  It will not be forgotten that the French rangers of the woods, the black-robed priests, prepared for sacrifice, even to death, the trappers of the French agencies, and the French explorers—­Marquette, Joliet, and Menard—­were the first white men to paddle their frail barks through the northern waters.  They first blazed their trails into the black forests and left traces of their work in the names of portages and little villages.  It was from these forests that Red Men in full war paint journeyed far to fight under the fleur-de-lis of France when the soldiers of King Louis made their last stand at Quebec and Montreal against the imperial arms of Britain.  It was here that the British flag was planted in 1761 and that the great Pontiac conspiracy was formed two years later to overthrow British dominion.

When, a generation afterward, the Stars and Stripes supplanted the Union Jack, the French were still almost the only white men in the region.  They were soon joined by hustling Yankee fur traders who did battle royal against British interlopers.  The traders cut their way through forest trails and laid out the routes through lake and stream and over portages for the settlers and their families from the states “back East.”  It was the forest ranger who discovered the water power later used to turn the busy mills grinding the grain from the spreading farm lands.  In the wake of the fur hunters, forest men, and farmers came miners from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri crowding in to exploit the lead ores of the northwest, some of them bringing slaves to work their claims.  Had it not been for the gold fever of 1849 that drew the wielders of pick and shovel to the Far West, Wisconsin would early have taken high rank among the mining regions of the country.

From a favorable point of vantage on Lake Michigan, the village of Milwaukee, a center for lumber and grain transport and a place of entry for Eastern goods, grew into a thriving city.  It claimed twenty thousand inhabitants, when in 1848 Congress admitted Wisconsin to the union.  Already the Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians had found their way into the territory.  They joined Americans from the older states in clearing forests, building roads, transforming trails into highways, erecting mills, and connecting streams with canals to make a network of routes for the traffic that poured to and from the Great Lakes.