If one had no other evidence than the sales of land at the United
States Land Office, it would still be clear that in the years 1854 to
1856 something important was astir affecting the value of lands in
those townships (7, 8, and 9-1 W, and 7, 8, and 9-1 E) which pivot on
Muscoda as the trading point. For, while up to 1854 only scattering
tracts of land had been entered, and those largely by speculators using
military land warrants in making payment to the government, by 1856
nearly every forty-acre subdivision of first-rate land and much of the
second-rate land also was under private ownership. And the state lands
in the townships had also been purchased to the same extent. Besides,
the vast majority of the purchasers of government land during those
years were actual settlers, with only an occasional speculator.[87]
These facts challenge attention and call for an explanation. Wisconsin
had been in course of settlement for about two decades. The earliest
settlements were in the southeastern and eastern parts of the state
where the economic support was the market reached by the Great Lakes
and the Erie Canal; and in the southwestern section where the basis of
prosperity had been lead-mining. The lead found its market mainly down
the Mississippi, though increasingly the superiority of the route open
to the lake ports had impressed itself upon the people.
At the legislative session of 1841-42 a bill was introduced for the
chartering of a railroad from Milwaukee, via Madison, to Potosi.
Despite continuous effort, the first railroad bill to pass, in 1847,
provided only for a railroad from Milwaukee to Waukesha. In 1848 this
was by law extended to the Mississippi.
The agitation of plans for a railroad from Lake Michigan to the
Mississippi tended to give the lake route an overshadowing importance
in the popular mind. Actual construction work on the Milwaukee-Waukesha
section began in 1849; that portion of the road was completed by the
end of the year 1850, and in another year it was practically completed
to Whitewater on Rock River. It reached Madison in the year 1854.
The intention of the company had been to build to the Wisconsin River
so as to intercept steamboat transportation at or near Arena. Thence
the road might run along the river to its mouth, or it might run along
the ridge between the Wisconsin and the south flowing streams, reaching
the Mississippi at some point, like Potosi, lower down. By the year
1853 it had been determined to follow the Wisconsin Valley route to
the Mississippi, and during that summer the line was surveyed from the
mouth of Black Earth Creek to Prairie du Chien.
It can easily be imagined how the clangor of railway construction
echoed in the minds and hearts of intending settlers. That they should
have watched, with greedy eye, the reports of progress of the location
of the road and hurried away to the land office as soon as it was
definitely located, to buy the good lands adjacent to the right-of-way,
is a perfectly normal phenomenon. The township plats showing original
purchasers of the government land tell the story. In section 1,
township 7-1 W, four forty-acre tracts were bought in 1854; eleven in
1855; and one in 1856. In section 2, one in 1854; twelve in 1855; and
two in 1857. A single forty had been bought as early as 1847. The other
sections of that township show very similar dates and proportions in
the entries; the same is true of the other townships of the group. The
1854 entrymen were those who pursued the railway surveyors with keenest
determination. The slower ones came mainly in the two years following,
during which trains actually were put on the roadbed. In October, 1856,
the village of Muscoda, which had maintained a precarious existence
for twenty years, awoke to newness of life at the sound of the puffing
locomotive. And the beginning of permanent prosperity for the village
meant the beginning of prosperity for the rural neighborhood tributary
to it.