Muscoda as a present-day railway station is inconspicuously located on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul line, Prairie du Chien division, at the distance of fifty-six miles almost due west from Madison, one hundred and fifty-two from Milwaukee; it is forty-two miles east from Prairie du Chien. The village was begun at the river bank on the south side of Wisconsin River, in section 1, township 8 north, range 1 west of the fourth principal meridian. It stretches south from the river toward the flanking hills about three-fourths of a mile, the main portion now clustering about the depot, whereas the “Old Town” lay farther north and hugged the river bank. The ground on which Muscoda stands is a portion of the sandy plain, the outwash of the erosion process by which the Wisconsin and its larger tributaries worked their way through the sandstone stratum. The upper courses of these tributaries and the smaller streams which feed them have laid down flood bottoms of rich alluvium. Often, too, the bench land of their valleys is a fertile limestone soil intermingled with clayey patches and occasional streaks of sand. These are all characteristics of the “Driftless Area,” as the geologists have named this region, because the various primordial movements of glacial ice, so influential in modifying the topography elsewhere, passed around instead of over it, leaving no “drift” upon it. The terrain is just what the eroding waters in the course of countless ages made it--a system of regular valleys perfectly drained and bounded by symmetrically sculptured hills or bluffs, which exhibit a level sky line and decrease in altitude steadily till at the heads of the streams they merge in the great plateau or “prairie” of southern Wisconsin. The valleys make natural and not ill-graded highways from the prairie to the Wisconsin River, while the ranges of bluffs separating them appear like promontories running out fingerwise from the main plateau and terminating either where two smaller streams converge or at the edge of the lower plain laid down by the Wisconsin.