Wisconsin in America at 250: A look at the early peoples

Wisconsin’s story did not start with statehood in 1848. It did not start in 1776 either.

It started with the people who were here first. Sovereign Indigenous nations hunted, farmed, traded, fought and made deals on this land for thousands of years before a European ever saw it.

It is believed humans have lived here for more than 12,000 years. The first hunters followed the retreating glaciers into the region.

They left their mark on the land. About 2,000 years ago, people in southwestern Wisconsin took part in what archaeologists call the Hopewell tradition, from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 400. They built burial mounds and traded over long distances. Copper from Lake Superior went out. Shells from the Gulf Coast and obsidian from what is now Wyoming came in.

Later, Wisconsin became the heart of effigy mound country. People built earthen mounds in the shapes of birds, bears and panthers, mostly between A.D. 700 and 1100. Wisconsin has more effigy mound sites than anywhere else in the world. You can still walk among them in Madison.

Under the water, too. Since 2021, Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists have pulled two dugout canoes out of Lake Mendota, one about 1,200 years old and one about 3,000 years old. They have found 16 canoes there in all. The oldest was likely carved around 3000 B.C., before the Great Pyramid.

Much of that ancient world is lost to us. The period from 1600 to 1848 is different. It is written down. It is a record of migration, shifting alliances and war. It is not folklore. It is not a story of unbroken peace. It is people competing for land and trade and trying to survive. In other words, history.

The Beaver Wars and the refugees who followed

The makeup of Wisconsin’s tribes changed for good in the mid-1600s. The trouble started hundreds of miles east.

The Iroquois Confederacy wanted control of the fur trade with Europeans. Armed with Dutch guns, and later English ones, Iroquois war parties drove other nations out of the eastern Great Lakes in what became known as the Beaver Wars. Thousands of people fled west.

Many of them landed in Wisconsin. The Potawatomi came from Michigan’s Lake Huron shore to the Door Peninsula and the islands off its tip. Over time they spread down the Lake Michigan shore into southeastern Wisconsin.

The Sauk and Meskwaki reached the Fox and Wolf rivers around 1640, most likely from lands east or southeast of Lake Michigan. The Menominee and Ho-Chunk were already here. Now they had crowded neighbors. They adjusted their territory, changed their alliances or fought.

The Fox Wars

French fur traders did not bring peace. They brought a nonstop demand for pelts, and that made old rivalries worse.

Take the Meskwaki, whom the French called the Fox. They held the Fox-Wisconsin waterway, the main route from Green Bay to the Mississippi River. They charged French traders tolls and kept rival tribes from passing. The French saw it as a blockade. The fighting started in 1712 and went on, off and on, until 1737.

The French did not fight alone. They recruited allies from other nations, including the Potawatomi, Menominee, Huron and Ottawa.

The Meskwaki were nearly wiped out. In 1733 the survivors took refuge with the Sauk near Green Bay, and the Sauk refused French demands to hand them over. The two nations grew so close that the United States later treated them as one, the “Sac and Fox.”

Up north, the Ojibwe moved south from Lake Superior into land the Dakota held. That set off decades of on-and-off fighting over hunting grounds and wild rice beds (manoomin) across the northern forests.

Bad Axe

By the early 1800s, the fight over land was with the United States.

It started with the Treaty of St. Louis in 1804. A Sauk man was being held for killing settlers. A handful of Sauk and Meskwaki men went to St. Louis to deal with that. They left having signed away about 50 million acres to William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory. The land covered parts of what is now Missouri, Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin. Black Hawk and other Sauk leaders said the men had no authority to sell it. That dispute led to the Black Hawk War of 1832.

In April 1832, Black Hawk led roughly 1,000 Sauk, Meskwaki and Kickapoo people, many of them women, children and elders, back across the Mississippi into Illinois. Americans called them the British Band. Gen. Henry Atkinson and frontier officials saw an armed invasion that broke the 1804 treaty and an 1816 treaty that reaffirmed it.

Settlers and lead miners panicked. Raids on farms and small forts like Apple River Fort in Illinois made it worse. U.S. Army regulars and militia from Illinois and Michigan Territory, which then included Wisconsin, chased the band across southern Wisconsin to the Mississippi.

On Aug. 1, 1832, Black Hawk’s people raised a white flag near the mouth of the Bad Axe River. The crew of the armed steamboat Warrior thought it was a trick and opened fire.

The next day, the soldiers caught up. They killed men, women and children on the riverbank and in the water. Many who made it across were killed by Dakota warriors allied with the Army. Survivors and many historians call it a massacre. It ended the British Band.

Giving up the land, 1829 to 1848

After the war, Washington moved from the battlefield to the treaty table. Between 1829 and 1848, a string of treaties took most of the land in Wisconsin from the Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Menominee and Ojibwe.

The Ho-Chunk were removed again and again, to Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and finally Nebraska. Families kept walking back to Wisconsin anyway. Many stayed by taking 40-acre homesteads.

The Menominee signed an 1848 treaty that would have moved them to Minnesota. Chief Oshkosh refused to go. In the Treaty of 1854, signed at the Falls of the Wolf River, they traded the Minnesota land for a permanent reservation on part of their old homeland along the Wolf River. It is still there.

The cost was steep. These nations lived through smallpox, war, the loss of their land and federal policy built to move them out of the state.

They did not disappear. Wisconsin has 11 federally recognized tribal nations today. They are governments. They manage land and water, run businesses and make law inside the state’s borders. You cannot tell Wisconsin’s story without them.

Brutal. Honest. History.

Here is the truth: Before it was “our land,” someone else claimed it. Before them, someone else. And before the written record, likely someone else again.

The same fights over land played out in dozens of states as the country moved west.

America is not unique here. Look back far enough and the founding of nearly every nation involves conquest, moving borders and things we would not defend today.

Saying so is not an apology. And being proud of our state and our country in this 250th year does not mean every old policy, broken promise or battle was a simple case of good versus evil.

But you cannot understand how Wisconsin fits into America’s 250 years without knowing how it began. Before we get to 1848, we have to look honestly at the people who were here first. It’s part of OUR history.

Up next: Jean Nicolet and the early explorers reach Wisconsin.

For further information

Wisconsin DNR, Burial Mounds UW-La Crosse Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, Hopewell Wisconsin Historical Society, The Mendota Canoes Wisconsin Historical Society, Historic Indians (State Historic Preservation Office cultural resource plan) Milwaukee Public Museum, Ho-Chunk Treaties and Treaty Rights Treaty with the Sauk and Foxes, 1804 (text) Treaty with the Menominee, 1854 (text) Wisconsin DPI, Ho-Chunk Nation Wisconsin DPI, Tribal Nations of Wisconsin Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, historical timeline Wisconsin First Nations, tribal histories The Sacs and Foxes (The Palimpsest) The Mississippi Was Our River How the West Was Stolen: A Closer Look at the St. Louis Treaty of 1804