A more hopeful clue to the origin of the name occurs in the journal of Willard Keyes, a young New Englander who passed down the river with a party in 1817. He writes, under date of August 29, 1817: “pass a place called ‘English meadow’ from an English trader and his son, said to have been murdered there by the savages, 20 Leagues to Prairie du Chien.”[76] Now, the fact of “an English trader and his son” being murdered at some point on the Wisconsin River between the Portage and Prairie du Chien is well established. In the journal of Lieut. James Gorrell, the first English commandant at Green Bay after the ejection of the French, we read, under date of June 14, 1763: “The traders came down from the Sack [Sauk] country, and confirmed the news of Landsing and his son being killed by the French.” When all the Sauk and Foxes had arrived at Green Bay a few days later they told Gorrell that their people were all in tears “for the loss of two English traders who were killed by the French in their lands, and begged leave ... to cut them [the French] in pieces.”[77]

In the following summer, 1764, Garrit Roseboom testified, that “about the latter end of April, 1763, he was going from the Bay [Green Bay] to the Soaks [Sauk] to look for his Partner Abrah[a]m Lancing who had been up there, being told that he was killed, that on his way he met some Indians coming down with some Packs [of furs], which he knew to be his, and which they said he could have for paying the carriage. That both the French and Indians told him, Mr. Lancing and his son were killed by two Frenchmen” who were servants of Mr. Lansing and who afterwards escaped to the Illinois Indians.[78]

When we reflect how persistent is the memory of great tragedies and recall that some of the French traders and voyageurs who were on the river when the murder took place remained there for many years and handed down the traditions of the river to their successors, it is not hard to believe that it was the story of Abraham Lansing and his son, slightly altered, which Willard Keyes heard from the rivermen as his boat drifted along the “English meadow” in 1817. The French traders in whose company he was would not be likely to ascribe the murder to their own people so long as there were “savages” who might just as well serve as scapegoats. We may consider it almost certain, then, that the place came to be called English Prairie from the gruesome crime of 1763, which had occurred almost three-quarters of a century before the postoffice of that name was established, and more than half a century prior to the voyage of Willard Keyes. Jonathan Carver, who visited a village of the Fox Indians at that place in 1766, does not use the name; but neither does he mention the story of the murder which occurred only three years before.

No definite information about the fur trade at English Prairie, aside from the record in Lansing’s case, has come down to us. Tradition has it that Laurent Rolette, brother of the famous Prairie du Chien trader, Joseph Rolette, traded there for some years, going later to the Portage. It appears also that some time before the arrival of white settlers a trader named Armstrong operated in that neighborhood. But no details have been preserved and we can only infer from the fact that Indians were still numerous when settlers came that the trade at English Prairie in earlier times was probably important.

It was the Black Hawk War and the treaties following it that produced the revolutionary change in the life of the natives in this region. From that time forward Indians could live south of the river only on sufferance, though they were permitted to roam the forests to the northward for about a quarter of a century longer. During the Black Hawk War a detachment of Colonel Henry Dodge’s Mounted Volunteers went to English Prairie, another detachment going at the same time to Prairie du Chien. Between them these two bodies of troops scoured both sides of the Wisconsin from the mouth to the Portage, dislodging all natives. English Prairie was also the camping ground for a military company composed of friendly Indians recruited at Green Bay and led to Prairie du Chien by Samuel C. Stambaugh in July, 1832. The route of march was from Green Bay to the Portage, thence to Sugar Creek (near Blue Mounds), thence to Fort Dodge (Dodgeville), thence to English Prairie, thence to Prairie du Chien “with one other camping between.”

RELATION TO THE LEAD MINES

History repeats itself in making the Indian War of 1832 the impulse to a great new expansion movement among American pioneers. Just as the Pequod War of 1638 by familiarizing the coast settlers of Massachusetts with the rich lands of the interior enticed them westward, and as the Seven Years’ War destroyed the last obstacle to western and northern expansion in New England, so in a very real sense this war made the beginnings of the agricultural settlement in Wisconsin. Immediately after the Black Hawk War the survey of the lands in southern Wisconsin began. In the four years, 1832 to 1836, the entire region from the Illinois line north to the Wisconsin, the Fox, and Green Bay, and from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan, was checked off into townships and sections. Hardy, resourceful government surveyors, with their crews (usually two chainmen and one axman) traversed every square mile, whether prairie, forest, valley, or bluff. In 1834 a land office was opened at Mineral Point for the sale of lands in the western portion of Michigan Territory (as it was then).

The ranges of townships numbered 1 W and 1 E, of which the townships numbered eight (Muscoda and Pulaski) bounded by the Wisconsin, were for some years the northernmost, were surveyed by Sylvester Sibley in 1833. The next year those lands were offered for sale and some tracts along the river were actually sold to private individuals. Among the purchasers were Thomas Jefferson Parrish and Charles Bracken, who were well-known lead miners and smelters living farther south. Others among the early land owners of Township 8-1 W have been identified as mining men.

THE LEAD REGION
After Owens’ Geological Chart, 1839; drawn by Mary Stuart Foster