MUSCODA, 1763-1856
Joseph Schafer
The light which local inquiry can shed upon general history is well illustrated from a variety of viewpoints in the story of the Wisconsin village which is the subject of this sketch.
Muscoda as a present-day railway station is inconspicuously located on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul line, Prairie du Chien division, at the distance of fifty-six miles almost due west from Madison, one hundred and fifty-two from Milwaukee; it is forty-two miles east from Prairie du Chien. The village was begun at the river bank on the south side of Wisconsin River, in section 1, township 8 north, range 1 west of the fourth principal meridian. It stretches south from the river toward the flanking hills about three-fourths of a mile, the main portion now clustering about the depot, whereas the “Old Town” lay farther north and hugged the river bank.
The ground on which Muscoda stands is a portion of the sandy plain, the outwash of the erosion process by which the Wisconsin and its larger tributaries worked their way through the sandstone stratum. The upper courses of these tributaries and the smaller streams which feed them have laid down flood bottoms of rich alluvium. Often, too, the bench land of their valleys is a fertile limestone soil intermingled with clayey patches and occasional streaks of sand. These are all characteristics of the “Driftless Area,” as the geologists have named this region, because the various primordial movements of glacial ice, so influential in modifying the topography elsewhere, passed around instead of over it, leaving no “drift” upon it. The terrain is just what the eroding waters in the course of countless ages made it—a system of regular valleys perfectly drained and bounded by symmetrically sculptured hills or bluffs, which exhibit a level sky line and decrease in altitude steadily till at the heads of the streams they merge in the great plateau or “prairie” of southern Wisconsin. The valleys make natural and not ill-graded highways from the prairie to the Wisconsin River, while the ranges of bluffs separating them appear like promontories running out fingerwise from the main plateau and terminating either where two smaller streams converge or at the edge of the lower plain laid down by the Wisconsin.
The principal stream entering the Wisconsin from the south, in the neighborhood of Muscoda, is Blue River—the “Riviere Bleu” of the French traders. It has several head streams rising in township 6-1 E, and a large affluent named the Fennimore rising in 6-1 W, the Six Mile Creek, rising in 7-1 E and Sandy Branch which heads in 8-1 E. There are also several small branches entering the Fennimore from 7-2 W. In its lower course the Blue River swerves to the west, entering the Wisconsin near Blue River Station, in Township 8-2 W, but its rich upper valleys and those of its tributaries have always been mainly within the trade area of Muscoda. North of the Wisconsin the valleys most intimately associated with Muscoda are Indian Creek, Eagle Creek, and Knapp’s Creek in Richland County. The “Sand Prairie,” by which name the sandy plain along the Wisconsin on the south side has long been known, and a narrow tract of shelving land between the river and the hills on the north are also within the Muscoda area.
Since the bluffs are mostly rough land, with only limited areas on their summits where the soil is deep, free from stones, and sufficiently even for cultivation, and the sand prairie comparatively infertile, Muscoda as a trade center suffers from the low average productivity of her territory. Still, from pioneer days the long valleys beyond the sand prairie have yielded abundant harvests; the roads through them from the high prairie to the south opened to Muscoda’s merchants for some years a great trade in livestock and grain beyond her legitimate boundaries; while the cross ranges which run out from the high prairie northward approximately fifteen miles forced the only rival railway,[75] when it came, back upon the great ridge, leaving the north trending valleys still as a whole tributary to Muscoda.
THE BACKGROUND
According to Father Verwyst, a distinguished authority, the name Muscoda is a corruption of the Chippewa word “Mashkodeng” which means “prairie.” A similar corruption occurs in the name “Muscatine,” a town in Iowa, and there was a tribe of Indians on the Upper Fox River called Mascouten (prairie Indians).
The earlier name of the place was English Prairie, and while it is clear that geography suggested “Prairie” (or Savannah), there are various traditions to explain the association of the word “English” with it. One is that some English families were settled there as early as 1812 and that they were massacred by the Indians. Another, that the place was so named from the fact that Colonel McKay, who descended the river in 1814 with a regiment of British troops to capture Prairie du Chien, encamped at this place which thereafter was called English Prairie.