I am not able to fix the exact date when Abraham Wood came
to Baraboo. What is the opinion of the staff as to the time?
He was supposed to be the first permanent settler. A line
will be appreciated.
H. E. COLE,
_Baraboo, Wisconsin_.
We appreciate your difficulty in determining the time of the advent of
Abraham Wood on your river, because of the conflict in the
authorities. So far as we can determine, the account in the _Wisconsin
Historical Atlas_ seems to be the most authoritative. The sketches in
this volume were carefully written, and were obtained from survivors
then alive. According to that statement the first man who attempted
settlement at the Baraboo Rapids in 1837 was Archibald Barker, who
then lived at Portage. He was driven off by the Indians. Meanwhile the
treaty at Washington had been negotiated, and there seemed more hope
that a settlement might be made. In the spring or early summer of 1839
a man named James Alban discovered Devil’s Lake, and he went back to
Portage and told Eben Peck, first settler at Madison. Peck had just
sold out at the latter place to Robert Ream, and he and Alban set out
up the Baraboo and marked out a site at the Rapids, including the
water power. As Peck was going back (after a stay of some weeks),
apparently he met Wallace Rowan and Abraham Wood, whom he had known
well at Madison, coming up from Portage. They staked out their claim
at Lyons, where Wood spent the winter.
In the meanwhile James Van Slyke came up from Walworth County in the
fall of 1839 and determined to jump Peck’s claim. Van Slyke had had
his claim at Lake Geneva jumped by other parties, and was in a bitter
and retaliatory frame of mind. After staking out his claim to the
rapids of the Baraboo he went back to Walworth and interested James
Maxwell in a plan for a mill and persuaded him to furnish the irons
and equipment. Van Slyke went up in the spring of 1840 and built a dam
which was carried out by the freshet of June. Meanwhile, Peck had
brought his claim before the court at Madison and obtained judgment
against Van Slyke. The latter had already abandoned the enterprise.
Van Slyke sold his irons to Wood and Rowan, who during the summer
started a sawmill at the upper rapids.
There seems to be every evidence that the source of this account was
the Peck family, who were in a position to know the facts. If this
account is true, we suppose Wood might be called the first settler,
since he remained in the vicinity during the winter of 1839-40; but no
doubt he lived as the Indians did, if not with them, since his wife
was a squaw. He was thus not much more of a first settler than Barker,
Alban, Rowan, Peck, or Van Slyke.
To return to Wood. We are unable to discover when or how he came to
Wisconsin. He was probably a free trapper or trader, one of the rough
frontiersmen of Scotch descent from the backwoods of Canada. In the
course of trade he came in contact with the Decorah chiefs and took to
wife one of the daughters of the tribe. He had probably been on the
Baraboo often before 1839, since his squaw’s native village was near
its mouth, and there her father died in 1836. Wood was not then at the
Baraboo, since he was wintering near Madison. He was not at this site
in 1832, so sometime between that date and 1836 he set up his wigwam
at Squaw Point on Third Lake opposite the modern city of Madison.
His neighbor at this place was Wallace Rowan, a rough, good-hearted
frontiersman from Indiana with a white wife. There is a good account
of Rowan in _History of Dane County_ (Chicago, 1880), 382-83. Rowan
seems to have permitted Wood to place his wigwam, or whatever kind of
dwelling he had, on his claim, which he entered with William B. Long
in 1835.
Wood was on Third Lake during the winter of 1836-37, and during the
summer of 1837 he aided in building Madison, being employed as a
mechanic on Peck’s log house. It seems probable that Wood spent the
winter of 1837-38 at the same place, as there is no record of him at
Portage before the spring of 1838. Probably he moved away from Squaw
Point because Rowan that spring sold his claim and improvements to
William B. Slaughter. Rowan moved to Poynette and opened his noted
tavern. Wood went to Portage, where, no doubt, he had often been
before with the relatives of his squaw.
In 1838 work was begun on the Portage canal, and Wood opened a house
of liquid refreshment just below Carpenter’s on the Wisconsin River.
There, probably in the spring of 1839, Wood killed Pawnee Blanc, a
noted Winnebago chief. Wood’s brother-in-law, John T. La Ronde, tells
the sordid story in _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, VII, 360. He
does not give the date of the murder; Moses Paquette says (_idem_,
XII, 431) that it was in 1837. Paquette probably remembered that it
was after his father’s death in 1836; but it could hardly have been in
1837 since Wood was then at Madison. Our inference is that the death
of Pawnee Blanc occurred in 1838 or 1839. Wood was probably anxious to
leave Portage at this time; moreover in 1839 Winfield Scott went to
Portage and held a council with the Winnebago concerning their removal
from Wisconsin. Wood knew the Baraboo Valley would soon be open for
settlement. He persuaded his old friend, Rowan, to go prospecting with
him. But on their way out they found Peck and Alban had been there
before them. Wood, not wanting to go back to Portage, spent the winter
in the Baraboo woods; and the next autumn (1840) with Wallace Rowan
began a sawmill, as La Ronde states (_Wis. Hist. Colls._, VII, 360).
The foregoing hypothesis appears to reconcile all the accounts except
Moses Paquette’s date of the killing of Pawnee Blanc. The record of
Wood’s trial may sometime come to light. Possibly it may be preserved
in the records of the court of Brown County, still kept at the
courthouse at Green Bay.