The census, however, recognized a new county, Milwaukee, whose territory had been severed from the earlier Brown County. It was bounded east by Lake Michigan, south by Illinois, west by a line drawn due north from the Illinois line to Wisconsin River at the Portage, and north by a line drawn due east from the Portage to the lake. In terms of present-day divisions, the Milwaukee County of 1836 embraced all of Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Rock, Jefferson, Waukesha, and Milwaukee counties, nearly all of Ozaukee, Washington, and Dodge, a strip of eastern Green County, and most of Dane and Columbia. In that imperial domain the census takers found a grand total of 2900 persons, or almost exactly one-fourth of the population of the entire territory. Two significant facts distinguish the Milwaukee County census list from the lists of Brown, Crawford, and Iowa counties--the recency of the settlement and the distinctive local origin of the settlers. These people had only just arrived, most of them in the early months of 1836. One could almost count on his ten fingers the individuals who were there prior to the summer of 1835. In reality they were not yet “settled,” for most of the rude claim huts--mere shelters of the pre-log house stage--were haunted at night and shadowed at noonday by men only, resident families being still rare, though many were on the lakes, at the ports of Milwaukee and Chicago, or on the overland trail which was to end at the cabin door. It was the prophecy of new communities, not the actuality, that the census taker chronicled when he recorded the names of claim takers with the number of persons, of each sex, comprising their households. We have reason to believe that the numbers were inscribed almost as cheerfully when the persons represented by them were still biding in the old home or were en route west, as when they were physically present in the settler’s cabin or in the dooryard, eager to be counted. [Illustration: WISCONSIN TERRITORY 1836 Drawn by Mary Stuart Foster.] Unlike the other populations of Wisconsin at that time, the vast majority of Milwaukee County settlers were Northeasterners. Such evidence as we have indicates that New York supplied more than half, the New England states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan nearly all of the balance.[1] New York’s title to primacy in peopling Wisconsin is exhibited, most impressively, in the statistics of the 1850 census. At that time native Americans constituted 63 per cent of the total and New Yorkers had 36 per cent of the native majority. Native Americans predominated in all but three of the twenty-six counties, and in all but five those who were natives of New York, added to the natives of Wisconsin, were a majority of the American born. The exceptions were the four lead mining counties of Grant, Iowa, Lafayette, and Green, together with Richland, which, however, had so few inhabitants that its case is divested of any significance.