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.
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.”