The lead mines, while known and worked by Indians and a few traders
for many years, received the first large body of emigrants in 1828,
when several thousand came scattering out widely over the territory
which now constitutes Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette counties in Wisconsin,
together with adjacent parts of Iowa. These were the lead miners who
under Dodge and Hamilton fought the Black Hawk War. It was these hardy
pioneers who as troopers patrolled the Wisconsin River and who finally
delivered the coup de grace to Black Hawk’s band far to the north on
the banks of the Mississippi.
Many of the lead miners were shrewd business men always on the lookout
for good financial prospects. With the knowledge of new regions
gained during the war, either from personal observation or from
reliable report, with the sense of a new era opening to settlement and
expansion in the region dependent for transportation facilities on the
Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers, it is not strange that some of them
should have been interested in river points lying as far outside the
mineral belt proper as did English Prairie.