A more hopeful clue to the origin of the name occurs in the journal of Willard Keyes, a young New Englander who passed down the river with a party in 1817. He writes, under date of August 29, 1817: “pass a place called ‘English meadow’ from an English trader and his son, said to have been murdered there by the savages, 20 Leagues to Prairie du Chien.”[76] Now, the fact of “an English trader and his son” being murdered at some point on the Wisconsin River between the Portage and Prairie du Chien is well established. In the journal of Lieut. James Gorrell, the first English commandant at Green Bay after the ejection of the French, we read, under date of June 14, 1763: “The traders came down from the Sack [Sauk] country, and confirmed the news of Landsing and his son being killed by the French.” When all the Sauk and Foxes had arrived at Green Bay a few days later they told Gorrell that their people were all in tears “for the loss of two English traders who were killed by the French in their lands, and begged leave ... to cut them [the French] in pieces.”[77] In the following summer, 1764, Garrit Roseboom testified, that “about the latter end of April, 1763, he was going from the Bay [Green Bay] to the Soaks [Sauk] to look for his Partner Abrah[a]m Lancing who had been up there, being told that he was killed, that on his way he met some Indians coming down with some Packs [of furs], which he knew to be his, and which they said he could have for paying the carriage. That both the French and Indians told him, Mr. Lancing and his son were killed by two Frenchmen” who were servants of Mr. Lansing and who afterwards escaped to the Illinois Indians.[78] When we reflect how persistent is the memory of great tragedies and recall that some of the French traders and voyageurs who were on the river when the murder took place remained there for many years and handed down the traditions of the river to their successors, it is not hard to believe that it was the story of Abraham Lansing and his son, slightly altered, which Willard Keyes heard from the rivermen as his boat drifted along the “English meadow” in 1817. The French traders in whose company he was would not be likely to ascribe the murder to their own people so long as there were “savages” who might just as well serve as scapegoats. We may consider it almost certain, then, that the place came to be called English Prairie from the gruesome crime of 1763, which had occurred almost three-quarters of a century before the postoffice of that name was established, and more than half a century prior to the voyage of Willard Keyes. Jonathan Carver, who visited a village of the Fox Indians at that place in 1766, does not use the name; but neither does he mention the story of the murder which occurred only three years before.