EXPLORING WISCONSIN'S WATERWAYS: THE PEOPLE AND THE WATERWAYS  121

to upper Mississippi waters, just as troop movements brought steamboats to
Green Bay and to Fort Dearborn in Chicago in the 1820s. Also the Missis-
sippi and 2 of its tributaries, the Wisconsin and the Fever Rivers, carried
millions of pounds of lead pigs from the mines of southwest Wisconsin and
adjacent Illinois to St. Louis and New Orleans prior to the coming of the
railroad in 1856. The railroad spelled the doom of the lead trade on the
Mississippi, though it had been challenged earlier. By 1840 an overland route
using freight wagons, teamsters, and sweating oxen put Milwaukee on Lake
Michigan in contention with Galena, Potosi, Cassville, and Dubuque as a
lead exporter. Lead could get to Eastern markets more cheaply by the Great
Lakes than through the Mississippi-New Orleans route.
  In the 1850s, steamboats also carried incoming settlers and goods into
de-
veloping communities like La Crosse, Prescott, and Hudson, and Wiscon-
sin's western counties generally as far north as St. Croix Falls. From New
Orleans the river steamers brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants to
Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota locations. Immediately following the Civil
War, when the railroads bridged the Mississippi, the golden age of the steam-
boat on the Great River faded away. But in the period 1825-60, steamboats
had been critical in the development of the upper Mississippi Valley as schoo-
ners and Great Lakes steamboats were to the Lake Michigan shoreline and as
lumber schooners and ore carriers would become to Wisconsin's Lake Supe-
rior region in the late 19th century. Agriculturally, the Mississippi River
served Minnesota and Iowa in a far more important way than it did western
Wisconsin because of the poor navigability of Wisconsin rivers emptying into
the Mississippi. Yet it was commercially important to Wisconsin communi-
ties along its banks as a carrier of logs, lumber, merchandise, and people.
Some of the river towns which attained commercial glory during the steam-
boat era, like La Crosse, Winona, and Dubuque, remained as significant cen-
ters for manufacturing, commerce, and service. They retain a splendid archi-
tectural record from their early years. The fabulous, colorful, dangerous
stern-wheelers and side-wheelers remain forever part of the Great River leg-
acy. So do their captains.
  Wisconsin's natural waters furnished the major source of power for pio-
neer industrial development, 1830-60. Typically when settlers moved into
a
frontier region, the more enterprising among them quickly occupied and de-
veloped waterpower sites, for gristmills and sawmills were essential. In
Wis-
consin, New York-New England entrepreneurs and military personnel oper-
ating out of Mackinac Island, Green Bay and Prairie du Chien as early as
the
1820s began identifying such locations in advance of Indian land cessions,
federal surveys, and the arrival of settlers. Also in the lead fields of
the south-
west, where miners from Missouri and the upper South made an illegal and
disorderly push into Indian tribal land in the mid- 1820s, mill sites were
highly
prized.
  Wisconsin was well endowed with waterpower. In the southern part of the
region which attracted settlement first, waterpower was widely and uniformly
distributed. While individual southern Wisconsin rivers and streams did not
have the potential for generating a truly large horsepower, rivers like the
Rock, the Milwaukee, the Sheboygan, the Manitowoc, and the Fox-Illinois