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         The first white occupant of any part of the territory included in the great State of Iowa, of which history gives any account, was Julien Dubuque, an adventurous Frenchman, who commenced working the lead mines in the vicinity of the site of the city that now bears his name and perpetuates his memory, in 1788. Dubuque is said to have been a Canadian Frenchman, and probably obtained his first knowledge of the Upper Mississippi country from the reports left by James Marquette and Louis Joliette, who were authorized by the French government of Canada, in 1673, to “start from the Straits of Mackinaw and find out and explore the great river lying west of them,” of which they had heard marvelous accounts from the Indians about Lake Michigan.

         Marquette and Joliette, accompanied by five boatmen, left the southern extremity of Green Bay and ascended Fox River in small canoes to the head-waters of that stream, and thence carried their canoes and provisions across to Wisconsin River. Again launching their canoes, they floated down that stream and entered the Mississippi on the 17th day of June, 1673. “When we entered the majestic stream,” wrote Marquette, “we realized a joy we could not express.” Quietly and easily they were swept down to the solitudes below, filled, no doubt, with wonder and admiration as they beheld the bold bluffs and beautiful meadows along the western bank of the Father of Waters, then revealed for the first time to the eyes of white men. This was the discovery of Iowa—the “Beautiful Land.”

         At this time, and until 1788, this newly discovered territory was inhabited only by tribes of Indians, of whom we have but a vague and unsatisfactory history. Marquette and Joliette left but a very brief statement concerning them, and that statement is summed up in a very brief paragraph. On the 21st day of June, 1673, the fourth day of their journey down the Mississippi, they landed on the west bank and “discovered footprints of some fellow mortals and a little path leading into a pleasant meadow.” They followed that trail a short distance, when they heard the Indians talking, and, making their presence known by a loud cry, they were conducted to an Indian village, the location of which, by some, has been conjectured was near the Des Moines River. Other authorities, with a reasonable degree of plausibility, have claimed that it was not far from the present site of the city of Davenport. The inhabitants of this Indian village are said to have been of the Illini*, who are supposed to have …

*Tribe of men. .

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. . . occupied a large portion of the country bordering on the Mississippi. The Illini were succeeded by the Winnebagoes, who in turn gave place to the Iowas. The Iowas, after having been defeated in a sanguinary conflict by the Sacs and Foxes,† yielded up their prairie homes to the victorious foe, and sullenly retired to more peaceful hunting grounds farther west, leaving the name as an unfading remembrance to the flourishing State that now occupies their aboriginal possessions.

         For a period of one hundred years following this discovery, or until 1763, France claimed jurisdiction over the country thus discovered by Marquette and Joliette, when that government ceded it to Spain, but in 1801 the Spanish Government ceded back to France all interest in the Mississippi Valley, and, under treaty dated April 30, 1803, the First Consul of the French Republic ceded these possessions to the United States.

         It was while under the dominion of the Spanish Government in 1788, that Dubuque found his way to the Galena section of Iowa and obtained from Blondeau and two other chiefs of the Fox tribe of Indians, what he claims was a grant of lands. His claim was described as “seven leagues (21 miles) on the west bank of the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Little Maquoketa River to Tete Des Mortes, and three leagues (9 miles) in depth. This grant from the Indian chief Bondeau was subsequently qualifiedly confirmed by Carondelet, the Spanish governor at New Orleans. Dubuque intermarried with the Indians among whom he had cast his fortunes, and continued to operate his mines (employing about ten white men), until the time of his death in 1810. In 1854, a case having been made, the United States Supreme Court decided that his grant from the Indian chief Blondean, qualifiedly confirmed by the Spanish Governor, Carondelet, was nothing more than a “temporary license to dig ore, and constituted no valid claim to the soil.”— [16 Howard Rep., 224.]

         March 16, 1804, the boundary line between Upper and Lower Louisiana was established. The lower country was called the Territory of New Orleans, and the upper country the District of Louisiana. The District of Louisiana embraced the present States of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota, and was attached to the Territory of Indiana for political and judicial purposes. In 1807 Iowa was organized with the Territory of Illinois, and in 1812, it was included in the Territory of Missouri, In 1821, when Missouri was admitted into the Union as a sovereign and independent State, Iowa was left, for a time, as a “political orphan,” in which condition she remained until attached to Michigan Territory, in June, 1834. Under an act of Congress, approved April 20, 1836, which went into effect July 3, of the same year, the territory now comprising the States of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota was organized as Wisconsin Territory, and Henry Dodge appointed Governor.

          “At the close of the Black Hawk war,” says Hon. C. C. Nourse, in this State Address, delivered at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, Thursday, September 7, 1876, “and on the 15th of September, 1832, General Winfield Scott concluded a treaty at the present site of the City of Davenport [on the grounds now occupied by the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad Depot.—Ed.] with the confederate tribes of Sac and Fox Indians, by which the Indian title was extinguished to that portion of Iowa known as the “Black Hawk Purchase.” This was a strip of land on the west bank of the Mississippi river, the western boundary of which commenced at the southeast corner of the …

†The Sauks or Saukies (white clay), and the Foxes or Outagamies (so called by the Europeans), and Algonquins, respectively, but whose true name is Mus-quak-ki-uk (red clay), are in fact but one nation. When the French Missionaries first came in contact with them in 1805, they found that they spoke the same language, and that it differed from the Algonquins, though belonging to the same stock.—Albert Gallatin.

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. . . present county of Davis; thence to a point on Cedar River, near the northeast corner of Johnson County; thence northwest to the neutral grounds of the Winnebagoes; thence to the Mississippi to a point above Prairie due Chien, and contained about six million acres of land. By the terms of this treaty, the Indians were to occupy this land until June 1, 1833.” Under the jurisdiction of Michigan Territory this strip was divided into two counties—Dubuque and Des Moines—being divided by a line commencing at the flag-staff at Fort Armstrong (Rock Island), and thence running due west forty miles.

         In 1836, when the first census of this district of country was taken, the population of the counties of Dubuque and Des Moines aggregated 10, 531.

         At the first session of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature, held in 1836, the counties of Des Moines, Lee, Van Buren, Henry, Muscatine and Cook, now called Scott, and Slaughter (now Washington) were organized out of the original Des Moines County. At the second session, which convened at Burlington, Des Moines County, in November, 1837, Dubuque County was subdivided, and the following counties erected therefrom: Dubuque, Clayton, Fayette, Delaware, Buchanan, Jackson, Jones, Linn, Benton, Clinton and Cedar.