[84] James Van Slyke made the first settlement near the Potawatomi Indian village in that place which later became the town of Walworth. He built a cabin and moved his family there from Geneva in the fall of 1836. Mrs. Van Slyke is supposed to have been the only white woman who spent that winter there. Many stories are told of the courage she displayed in this frontier community.
[85] Matthias Mohr was one of the earliest residents of Walworth County, settling on part of the Van Slyke claim at the head of Lake Geneva in 1837. He later went to Kansas where he died in 1887. Glenwood Springs Park now stands on the site of his farm.
[86] Marcus and Robert Russell settled at the west end of Lake Geneva in 1837. Robert Russell later moved to Iowa. Marcus Russell died in 1875.
[87] Christopher Douglass was born in Connecticut in 1797 and moved to Wisconsin in 1837, settling on Big Foot Prairie. In 1842 he moved to the town of Walworth, where he kept a hotel for several years. In 1857 he took up his residence at the head of Lake Geneva where he died in 1866.
[88] C. L. Douglass, son of Christopher Douglass, was born in New York November 4, 1827, and came to Wisconsin with his father in 1837. In 1857 he built and equipped Big Foot Mills which he continued to operate for thirty years. He died January 6, 1898.
[89] Fontana, a summer resort at the head of Lake Geneva, covers the site of the old Potawatomi village and is part of the old Van Slyke claim. It was purchased of Van Slyke in 1838 by Matthias Mohr, Amos Bailey, and Dr. Henry Clark, who platted and named the village.
[90] Mrs. John H. Kinzie, Wau Bun, the early day in the North-west (New York, 1856), 318-22. Mrs. Kinzie in company with her husband, U. S. sub-Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, was making the trip from Chicago to Fort Winnebago (Portage) in 1831 when she visited Big Foot’s village. She describes the chief as a “large, rawboned, ugly Indian with a countenance bloated by intemperance, and with a sinister, unpleasant expression.”
[91] This was Big Foot’s son, who died about 1830. The body was encased in a rude coffin and fastened to the limbs of a tree overlooking the lake. Big Foot is said to have given as his reason for this mode of burial that his son had been unusually fond of lake scenery, and he would thus enjoy a fine view of it from the land to which he had gone.
[92] Big Foot was the last chief of his band to rule his people in their own land. In 1827, when the Winnebago were on the war path, Big Foot, a sturdy hater of the whites, tried to incite the Potawatomi to join the northern Indians. He was prevented by measures taken by Gov. Lewis Cass which culminated in the treaty of September 15, 1827. Being bound by former treaties, Big Foot remained neutral during the Black Hawk War. By the treaty of 1832 the territory of the Potawatomi and their allies, the Chippewa and the Ottawa, comprising southeastern Wisconsin, passed to the United States government. Big Foot refused to sign the treaty until the other chiefs had done so.
[93] Elbridge Gerry Ayer, born in Haverhill, Mass., July 25, 1813, came to Wisconsin in 1836. In 1847 he moved to Walworth, going from there to McHenry County, Ill. in 1857, where he founded the town of Harvard. There for eighteen years he and his wife conducted one of the best hotels in the state. During the Civil War they gave without pay food, lodging, and other assistance to the wounded Union soldiers detained in that vicinity. On the occasion of their golden wedding in 1885 Gov. James Lewis of Wisconsin, on behalf of the Wisconsin soldiers, presented to Mr. and Mrs. Ayer a gold cup, now in the museum of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The inscription is as follows: “Presented to Mr. and Mrs. E. G. Ayer by the Wisconsin soldiers as a token of remembrance and appreciation of the many acts of kindness toward them during the dark days of the Rebellion, from 1861 to 1865, Oct. 29, 1885.”