We have seen that the northern peninsula was given to Michigan as a recompense for her loss of Toledo and Maumee Bay. But when it became necessary to determine the boundary between the peninsula and the new Territory of Wisconsin, now set off from Michigan, some difficulty arose, owing to the fact that the country had not been thoroughly surveyed, and there was no good map of it extant.
There were various propositions; one of them was, to use the Chocolate River as part of the line; had this prevailed, Wisconsin would have gained the greater part of the peninsula. But the line of division at last adopted was that of the Montreal and Menominee rivers, by the way of Lake Vieux Désert. This line had been selected in 1834, because a map published that year represented the headwaters of those rivers as meeting in Lake Vieux Désert; hence it was supposed by the congressional committee that this would make an excellent natural boundary. When, however, the line came to be actually laid out by the surveyors, six years later, for the purpose of setting boundary monuments, it was discovered that Lake Vieux Désert had no connection with either stream, being, in fact, the headwaters of the Wisconsin River; and that the running of the line through the woods, between the far-distant headwaters of the Montreal and Menominee, so as to touch the lake on the way, involved a laborious task, and resulted in a crooked boundary. But it was by this time too late to correct the geographical error, and the awkward boundary thus remains.
As originally provided by the Ordinance of 1787, Wisconsin, as the fifth State to be created out of the Northwest Territory, was, even after being shorn upon the south and northeast, at least entitled to have as her western boundary the Mississippi to its source, and thence a straight line running northward to the Lake of the Woods and the Canadian boundary. But here again she was to suffer loss of soil, this time in favor of Minnesota.
As a Territory, Wisconsin had been given sway over all the country lying to the west, as far as the Missouri River. In 1838, all beyond the Mississippi was detached, and erected into the Territory of Iowa. Eight years later, when Wisconsin first sought to be a State, the question arose as to her western boundary. Naturally, the people of the eastern and southern sections wished the one set forth in the ordinance. But settlements had by this time been established along the Upper Mississippi and in the St. Croix valley. These were far removed from the bulk of settlement elsewhere in Wisconsin, and had neither social nor business interests in common with them. The people of the northwest wished to be released from Wisconsin, in order that they might either cast their fortunes with their near neighbors in the new Territory of Minnesota, or join a movement just then projected for the creation of an entirely new State, to be called "Superior." This proposed state was to embrace all the country north of Mont Trempealeau and east of the Mississippi, including the entire northern peninsula, if the latter could be obtained; thus commanding the southern and western shores of Lake Superior, with the mouth of Green Bay and the foot of Lake Michigan to the southeast.
The St. Croix representative in the legislature was especially wedded to the Superior project. He pleaded earnestly and eloquently for his people, whose progress, he said, would be "greatly hampered by being connected politically with a country from which they are separated by nature, cut off from communication by immense spaces of wilderness between." A memorial from the settlers themselves stated the case with even more vigor, asserting that they were "widely separated from the settled parts of Wisconsin, not only by hundreds of miles of mostly waste and barren lands, which must remain uncultivated for ages, but equally so by a diversity of interests and character in the population." All of this reads curiously enough in these days, when the intervening wilderness resounds with the hum of industry and "blossoms as the rose." But that was long before the days of railroads; the dense forests of central and western Wisconsin then constituted a formidable wilderness, peopled only by savages and wild beasts.
Unable to influence the Wisconsin legislature, which stubbornly contended for the possession of the original tract, the St. Croix people next urged their claims upon Congress. The proposed State of Superior found little favor at Washington, but there was a general feeling that Wisconsin would be much too large unless trimmed. The result was that when she was finally admitted as a State, the St. Croix River was, in large part, made her northwest boundary; Minnesota in this manner acquired a vast stretch of country, including the thriving city of St. Paul.
Wisconsin was thus shorn of valuable territory on the south, to please Illinois; on the northeast, to favor Michigan; and on the northwest, that some of her settlers might join their fortunes with Minnesota. The State, however, is still quite as large as most of her sisters in the Old Northwest, and possesses an unusual variety of soils, and a great wealth of forests, mines, and fisheries. There is a strong probability that, had Congress, in 1848, given to Wisconsin her "ancient limits," as defined by the Ordinance of 1787, the movement to create the proposed state of "Superior" would have gathered strength in the passing years, and possibly would have achieved success, thus depriving us of our great northern forests and mines, and our outlet upon the northern lake.