was formed two
years later to overthrow British dominion.

When, a generation afterward, the Stars and Stripes supplanted the Union
Jack, the French were still almost the only white men in the region.
They were soon joined by hustling Yankee fur traders who did battle
royal against British interlopers. The traders cut their way through
forest trails and laid out the routes through lake and stream and over
portages for the settlers and their families from the states "back
East." It was the forest ranger who discovered the water power later
used to turn the busy mills grinding the grain from the spreading farm
lands. In the wake of the fur hunters, forest men, and farmers came
miners from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri crowding in to exploit the
lead ores of the northwest, some of them bringing slaves to work their
claims. Had it not been for the gold fever of 1849 that drew the
wielders of pick and shovel to the Far West, Wisconsin would early have
taken high rank among the mining regions of the country.

From a favorable point of vantage on Lake Michigan, the village of
Milwaukee, a center for lumber and grain transport and a place of entry
for Eastern goods, grew into a thriving city. It claimed twenty thousand
inhabitants, when in 1848 Congress admitted Wisconsin to the union.
Already the Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians had found their way into
the territory. They joined Americans from the older states in clearing
forests, building roads, transforming trails into highways, erecting
mills, and connecting streams with canals to make a network of routes
for the traffic that poured to and from the Great Lakes.

=Iowa and Minnesota.=--To the southwest of Wisconsin beyond the
Mississippi, where the tall grass of the prairies waved like the sea,
farmers from New England, New York, and Ohio had prepared Iowa for
statehood. A tide of immigration that might have flowed into Missouri
went northward; for freemen, unaccustomed to slavery and slave markets,
preferred the open country above the compromise line. With incredible
swiftness, they spread farms westward from the Mississippi. With Yankee
ingenuity they turned to trading on the river, building before 1836
three prosperous centers of traffic: Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington.
True to their old traditions, they founded colleges and academies that
religion and learning might be cherished on the frontier as in the
states from which they came. Prepared for self-governm