To return to Wood. We are unable to discover when or how he came to Wisconsin. He was probably a free trapper or trader, one of the rough frontiersmen of Scotch descent from the backwoods of Canada. In the course of trade he came in contact with the Decorah chiefs and took to wife one of the daughters of the tribe. He had probably been on the Baraboo often before 1839, since his squaw’s native village was near its mouth, and there her father died in 1836. Wood was not then at the Baraboo, since he was wintering near Madison. He was not at this site in 1832, so sometime between that date and 1836 he set up his wigwam at Squaw Point on Third Lake opposite the modern city of Madison. His neighbor at this place was Wallace Rowan, a rough, good-hearted frontiersman from Indiana with a white wife. There is a good account of Rowan in _History of Dane County_ (Chicago, 1880), 382-83. Rowan seems to have permitted Wood to place his wigwam, or whatever kind of dwelling he had, on his claim, which he entered with William B. Long in 1835. Wood was on Third Lake during the winter of 1836-37, and during the summer of 1837 he aided in building Madison, being employed as a mechanic on Peck’s log house. It seems probable that Wood spent the winter of 1837-38 at the same place, as there is no record of him at Portage before the spring of 1838. Probably he moved away from Squaw Point because Rowan that spring sold his claim and improvements to William B. Slaughter. Rowan moved to Poynette and opened his noted tavern. Wood went to Portage, where, no doubt, he had often been before with the relatives of his squaw. In 1838 work was begun on the Portage canal, and Wood opened a house of liquid refreshment just below Carpenter’s on the Wisconsin River. There, probably in the spring of 1839, Wood killed Pawnee Blanc, a noted Winnebago chief. Wood’s brother-in-law, John T. La Ronde, tells the sordid story in _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, VII, 360. He does not give the date of the murder; Moses Paquette says (_idem_, XII, 431) that it was in 1837. Paquette probably remembered that it was after his father’s death in 1836; but it could hardly have been in 1837 since Wood was then at Madison. Our inference is that the death of Pawnee Blanc occurred in 1838 or 1839. Wood was probably anxious to leave Portage at this time; moreover in 1839 Winfield Scott went to Portage and held a council with the Winnebago concerning their removal from Wisconsin. Wood knew the Baraboo Valley would soon be open for settlement. He persuaded his old friend, Rowan, to go prospecting with him. But on their way out they found Peck and Alban had been there before them. Wood, not wanting to go back to Portage, spent the winter in the Baraboo woods; and the next autumn (1840) with Wallace Rowan began a sawmill, as La Ronde states (_Wis. Hist. Colls._, VII, 360).