| Take Hwy. 35
north to Genoa, WI |
Victory and De Soto, Wisconsin |
Take Hwy 35 south to Ferryville, WI or Hwy 35 & 82 west to Lansing, IA |
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Victory is the general site of
the final battle of the Black Hawk War in which Chief Black Hawk and his band of Sac and
Fox Indians were defeated in Vernon County. Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and Zachary Taylor all served
in the war as young army officers. The this is known as the battle of Bad Axe.
To find more about Chief Black Hawk and the Battle of 1832, Click
here! Black Hawk was a leader of the Sac and Mesquakie Indians in northern Illinois during the period of westward expansion into the newly opened Louisiana Purchase. As an ally to the British during the War of 1812, Black Hawk had done his best to force American settlers off the western frontier. By the time war hero Andrew Jackson rode his Indian-fighter reputation into the White House 16 years later, Black Hawk had been reduced to vain protests against the swindling and starvation of his tribes, forced to leave their rich cornfields for unfamiliar Iowa plains. Under Jackson, Native American genocide became a national obsession; amid such blind inhumanity an act as simple as searching for some empty land back in Illinois on which to plant corn became an "invasion" and act of war. It was the spring of 1832 on the upper Mississippi River, and while women and children of Chief Black Hawk's tribe tried to plant their crops, newspapers demanded the annihilation of all Indians in the territory. Jackson sent in the army to gather the Sac-Mesquakie, but when Black Hawk tried to surrender he was fired upon. The war was on, and for the next three months Black Hawk's people were chased to the north. Indians who surrendered were killed. The war ended at the Battle of Bad Ax, near present-day Victory, on August 1, 1832. Black Hawk's tribe was stopped by a gunboat and the army as he tried to cross the Mississippi, Black Hawk and his men came forward under a white flag. When the Indians identified themselves, the gunboat promptly opened fire. For the next eight hours the volunteer militias used axes, guns, cannon, and clubs to cut down the Indian warriors while women and children who succeeded in swimming the river were slaughtered on the other side. Over 90% of Black Hawk's people were slaughtered and the Mississippi ran red with their blood. Black Hawk himself, captured and imprisoned, was paraded around the U.S. in chains; after he died his skeleton was displayed in the governor's mansion in Iowa, like a trophy. De Soto was started as a trading post after the Black Hawk War. It is located directly on the county line, with one half the town in Crawford county and the other half in Vernon County. From 1820 to 1854 this area was called Winneshiek Landing. The first settlers did not like the Indian name for the town and selected Formora or Formosa, but those names seemed to lack interest or spirit. Finally they chose De Soto after the Spanish explorer of the 16th century, Hernando De Soto, who discovered the Mississippi River. It was planned to establish a colony of wholly New England extraction; no foreigners were to be allowed to acquire property nor establish a business. This exclusiveness, however, combined as it was with a certain amount of New England shrewdness, could not withstand the opportunities offered when N. S. Cate established his large sawmill in 1857 and necessarily brought as employees several people who could scarcely boast of such pure extraction. Many of these bought homes and settled in De Soto, thereby frustrating the plan for a model New England village. As the settlers kept moving in more and more and the businesses prospered, the village was incorporated in July of 1886. Founders of De Soto were well-to-do New Englanders who invested their money in land, believing De Soto was to be a metropolis one day. But, this was not to be. At the peak of the grain buying season in De Soto, it was common to have 350 wagon loads delivered in a single day; the last wagons unloaded through the night. With the arrival of the railroad in Viroqua, river traffic dwindled to the zero point and De Soto became anther pleasant Mississippi River village. The Burlington Railroad came in 1882 which making De Soto a livestock market, but De Soto never fully regained her importance as a business place until around 1911 when she began to recuperate and take on something of her old prosperity. |
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