Early Native Americans had long used the Wisconsin as a highway through the forests, canoeing and fishing it, living along its banks and burying their dead there. At times they fought, but they also met to trade, and several tribes could share the same hunting grounds.
The river's name 's map, 1718 When Marquette's company entered the Wisconsin River in their two canoes, he wrote: The river on which we embarked is called
Meskousing. It is very wide; it has a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that rend its navigation very difficult. This is the first recorded mention of the name that evolved into "Wisconsin," which the state ended up taking.
Sieur de La Salle misread Marquette's elaborate 'M' as "Ou" and wrote the name as "Ouisconsin." In the 1800s Americans anglicized the spelling to "Wisconsin." Franci LeRoi ran a trading post on the portage from the Wisconsin River to the Fox, at modern Portage. In 1828 the U.S. Army bought LeRoi's building and built
Fort Winnebago at his strategic site - the army's third fort in what would become Wisconsin. To build the new fort, one of the officers from the fort led a party up the Wisconsin River, then up its tributary the Yellow to cut pine logs. In the spring of 1829 he and his men floated the logs down to Portage to use in building the fort. That officer was Lt.
Jefferson Davis - future president of the
Confederacy during the Civil War. This fort, and the river generally, played a role in the final campaign of the
Black Hawk War. Indian territories shifted over time, but just prior to European settlement, the
Ojibwe dominated the upper section above modern Wausau, the
Menominee the middle section from Wausau to Portage, and the
Ho-Chunk the lower section from Portage to Prairie du Chien.
Fox-Wisconsin Waterway Improvement (19th Century) The economic success of the
Erie Canal, completed in 1825, revived old ideas of how the Fox River and Wisconsin River, which Marquette and Joliet and their Indian guides had traversed 150 years before, could provide a shortcut between the Mississippi valley and the
Great Lakes. In 1839 some preliminary surveying was done to assess possibilities and cost. In the 1840s and 50s Congress approved
land grants to finance the improvement of the rivers. Work proceeded slowly, done by the government and a succession of private canal companies. In 1854, the first steamship, the
Aquila came up from the Mississippi, crossed the canal at Portage, and descended the locks of the Fox to Green Bay. But the upper Fox was shallow and winding. Even less fixable was the lower Wisconsin, with its shallow, shifting sandbars. A railroad executive observed wryly that "navigation could never be secured upon the Wisconsin river until its bottom had been fully lathed and plastered." And railroads finally finished the canal scheme, criss-crossing much of the state by the 1860s and providing a means of hauling freight that ran in winter when the rivers were frozen and in summer when they were low.
Lumbering (19th Century) In the mid-1800s the northern half of the Wisconsin watershed held large stands of virgin pine forest. Far to the south on the savannas of southern Wisconsin and the treeless prairies of Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, settlers needed lumber to build their barns and houses. In that era before trucks or even roads, the Wisconsin River offered a way to move lumber from the forests to markets downstream. and the
Helena shot tower on the lower Wisconsin around the same time. A few years later in 1836 the
Menominee ceded some of their land to the US government. Most of this land was in northeast Wisconsin, but the U.S. negotiator pressed them to also cede a six-mile-wide strip along the Wisconsin River from the future site of
Nekoosa up to Big Bull Falls (
Wausau). The lumber industry in the Wisconsin River valley was heavily dependent on the river system until the coming of railroads in the 1870s. In winter, logging camps out in the forests felled trees, cut them into logs typically 16 feet long, and sledded them over icy trails to streambanks where they stacked them in "rollways." In spring, when melting snow raised water levels, lumberjacks rolled the "banked" logs into the river and
log driving crews rode them downstream, breaking up log jams and retrieving those that got tangled in sloughs. In 1879 logs jammed the river near Wausau, backing up for four miles. The logging companies built special
splash dams to raise water levels when the natural spring floods weren't enough. As driven logs reached the sawmills,
log booms in the river were used to capture floating logs and sort them to their appropriate owners. Many rafts were wrecked and men drowned when someone misjudged the current, when a sudden breeze made a raft miss a slide, or by a poorly designed slide. It was reported that forty raftsmen drowned in 1872. The most notorious rapids were Big Bull Falls (future Wausau), Conant's Rapids (Stevens Point), and Grand Rapids (future Wisconsin Rapids), but many thought Little Bull Falls (future Mosinee) was the most dangerous, with a 16-foot ledge in the river starting a race down a narrow, quarter-mile gorge. dynamiting troublesome points of rock, These improvements were initially made by individual companies, along with splash dams and lumber booms, but it became clear that these investments affected everyone and the burden should be shared and coordinated. To address these concerns, the Little Bull Falls Boom Company was formed in 1852. In 1856 a larger Wisconsin River Boom Company was formed.
Industrialization and Tourism (20th Century) Later, in the first half of the 20th century, more dams were constructed to provide for flood control and
hydroelectricity. The dams also spurred tourism, creating reservoirs such as
Lake Wisconsin that are popular areas for recreational boating and fishing. Today, the Wisconsin River is the hardest working river in the nation. Twenty-five hydroelectric power plants operate on the upper part of the river, above Prairie du Sac. In total, these power plants use 645 feet of the river's drop to generate nearly one billion kilowatt-hours of renewable electricity a year — enough energy to power the homes of over 300,000 people. A 93-mile (150 km) stretch of the Wisconsin between its mouth and the
Prairie du Sac Dam is free of any dams or barriers and is relatively free-flowing. In the late 1980s, this portion of the river was designated as a state riverway, and development alongside the river has been limited to preserve its scenic integrity. The Wisconsin River goes through two state parks:
Wyalusing State Park (at its confluence with the Mississippi) and
Tower Hill State Park. ==Governance==