No definite information about the fur trade at English Prairie, aside from the record in Lansing’s case, has come down to us. Tradition has it that Laurent Rolette, brother of the famous Prairie du Chien trader, Joseph Rolette, traded there for some years, going later to the Portage. It appears also that some time before the arrival of white settlers a trader named Armstrong operated in that neighborhood. But no details have been preserved and we can only infer from the fact that Indians were still numerous when settlers came that the trade at English Prairie in earlier times was probably important. It was the Black Hawk War and the treaties following it that produced the revolutionary change in the life of the natives in this region. From that time forward Indians could live south of the river only on sufferance, though they were permitted to roam the forests to the northward for about a quarter of a century longer. During the Black Hawk War a detachment of Colonel Henry Dodge’s Mounted Volunteers went to English Prairie, another detachment going at the same time to Prairie du Chien. Between them these two bodies of troops scoured both sides of the Wisconsin from the mouth to the Portage, dislodging all natives. English Prairie was also the camping ground for a military company composed of friendly Indians recruited at Green Bay and led to Prairie du Chien by Samuel C. Stambaugh in July, 1832. The route of march was from Green Bay to the Portage, thence to Sugar Creek (near Blue Mounds), thence to Fort Dodge (Dodgeville), thence to English Prairie, thence to Prairie du Chien “with one other camping between.” RELATION TO THE LEAD MINES History repeats itself in making the Indian War of 1832 the impulse to a great new expansion movement among American pioneers. Just as the Pequod War of 1638 by familiarizing the coast settlers of Massachusetts with the rich lands of the interior enticed them westward, and as the Seven Years’ War destroyed the last obstacle to western and northern expansion in New England, so in a very real sense this war made the beginnings of the agricultural settlement in Wisconsin. Immediately after the Black Hawk War the survey of the lands in southern Wisconsin began. In the four years, 1832 to 1836, the entire region from the Illinois line north to the Wisconsin, the Fox, and Green Bay, and from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan, was checked off into townships and sections. Hardy, resourceful government surveyors, with their crews (usually two chainmen and one axman) traversed every square mile, whether prairie, forest, valley, or bluff. In 1834 a land office was opened at Mineral Point for the sale of lands in the western portion of Michigan Territory (as it was then).