libraries for which a law of 1887 had made provision; since 1895 the formation of such libraries has been mandatory, and books, chosen by the county superintendent, are bought from a fund of 10 cents for every person of school age in towns, villages and cities of the fourth class. An act of 1901 permits county boards to establish county systems of travelling libraries. In 1908 the total expenditure for public education in the state was $12,547,574; of this sum $10,604,294 was spent for common schools, high schools and graded schools, $1,091,135 for the university, and $547,661 for normal schools. The total income for schools in 1907-1908 was $1,773,659, of which $1,379,410 was from the seven-tenths-of-a-mill tax, $200,000 was from licence fees and taxes upon corporations (for salaries of rural school inspectors) and $194,249 the income from the common school fund which in that year amounted to $3,845,929.
Educational institutions of collegiate rank are Beloit College (1846; originally Congregational, now undenominational) at Beloit; Carroll College (1846, Presbyterian), at Waukesha; Lawrence College (1847; Methodist Episcopal), at Appleton; Concordia College (1881; Lutheran), Marquette University (1864, Roman Catholic), and Milwaukee-Downer College (1895; non-sectarian, for women; an outgrowth of Downer College, Congregational and Presbyterian, founded at Fox Lake in 1853), all at Milwaukee; Milton College (1867; Seventh Day Baptist), at Milton; North-western University (1865; Lutheran) at Watertown; Ripon College (1851; originally under Presbyterian and Congregational control, now non-sectarian), at Ripon; Wayland University (1855; co-educational; Baptist), at Beaver Dam; and the following Roman Catholic schools: St Clara Academy (1847; Dominican) at Sinsiniwa, St Francis Seminaiy (1853) at St Francis, and St Lawrence College (1861, Capuchin) at Mt Calvary. There are also many private academies and trade or technical schools, and six industrial schools for Indians.
Charitable and Penal Institutions.—In the number and equipment of its reformatory, charitable and penal institutions, Wisconsin stands high. These institutions are under the general direction of a state board of control (established in 1905) of five members (one a woman), appointed by the governor for a term of five years. This, board has charge of the following institutions: a State Hospital for the Insane (1860) at Mendota; the Northern Hospital for the Insane (1873) at Winnebago, 4 m. N. of Oshkosh; a School for the Deaf (1852) at Delavan, Walworth county, in which the teaching is principally oral and which includes a high school; a School for the Blind (1849; taken over by the state in 1850) at Janesville; an Industrial School for Boys (opened in 1860, as a House of Refuge) at Waukesha, with a farm of 404 acres; the State Prison (1853) at Waupun; State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children (1886) at Sparta, with a farm of 234 acres; Wisconsin Home for Feeble Minded (1896) at Chippewa Falls; Wisconsin State Reformatory (1898), near Green Bay; and Wisconsin State Tuberculosis Sanatorium (1907) at Wales, Waukesha county. In addition the board has partial control over the Wisconsin Workshop for the Blind (1903) at Milwaukee, where there is a willow ware factory, and the Wisconsin Industrial School for Girls (1875) also at Milwaukee. Its powers of inspection extend over 5 semi-state institutions, 33 county insane asylums, 69 gaols, 48 poor-houses, 50 private benevolent institutions and 206 police stations and lockups. The board has also power of visitation and inspection over the Wisconsin Veterans' Home at Waupaca, founded in 1887 by the state department of the Grand Army of the Republic. In the state's treatment of the insane, chronic cases are separated and sent to the county asylums. The labour of convicts in the state prison is leased; until 1878 the state itself supervised manufacturing in the prison; then for twenty-five years the convicts were employed in making shoes for a Chicago firm; and since 1903 the state has received 65 cents a day for the labour of each convict, and at least 300 convicts are employed in the manufacture of socks and stockings, from which in 1906-1908 (two years) the income to the state was $156,890. In 1910 a binding twine factory was established in the prison. In the state reformatory the labour of some inmates is leased to tailors, and the others make brooms or bricks, or work in a cabinet shop or on the farm. Since 1907 a parole law has been in force for prisoners with a good record at the state prison. By a law of 1909 certain offenders are placed under probation under the supervision of the State Board of Control.
History.—Politically Wisconsin has been under French domination (from 1634 to 1760); under British domination (from 1760, formally 1763, to 1783); and under that of the United States since 1783. But the British influence on the community was negligible, and British rule was never more than nominal and was confined to the military posts. When American troops occupied the posts at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien in 1816, thirty-three years after it had become a part of the territory of the United States, the region was still almost exclusively French in manners, customs and population; and so it remained for nearly two decades.
The region comprised in the present state of Wisconsin, when first explored by Europeans, was a favourite hunting-ground for the Indians who constantly crossed this region between the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi. The Indian population of Wisconsin in the first half of the 17th century was probably larger than that of any region of similar size east of the Mississippi. Among the many different tribes were the Sioux, Chippewa, Kickapoo, Menominee, Mascoutin, Potawatomi, Winnebago, and Sauk and Foxes. In the eastern and southern portions of the region there are still numerous mounds, the relics of an earlier Indian civilization.[1] In the lead regions in the S.W., with the help of Pawnee slaves, the Indians worked the lead diggings in a rough way. The whole course of the early history of Wisconsin was profoundly influenced by these racial and geographic considerations. The French adventurers, bent on finding either a “North-west passage” or some land route to the Pacific (which they believed to be no farther west than the Mississippi), naturally went west by the water routes of Wisconsin; as a fine field for their bartering and trading with water-courses by which they could convey their pelts and skins back to Montreal, the region attracted the coureurs de bois and fur traders; and it seemed promising also to the zealous French Catholic missionaries. The impelling influences on the French settlement of the region were the love of exploration and adventure, the commercial instinct and religious zeal.
Jean Nicolet, an experienced explorer, was sent west by Samuel de Champlain, the governor-general of New France, in the summer of 1634 to investigate mysterious rumours of a people known as “the men of the sea” who were thought by some to be Tatars or Chinese.[2] After a long and difficult journey into a region which he seems to have been the first white man to enter, Nicolet landed on the soil of Wisconsin at a point on Green Bay about 10 m. below the present city of Green Bay. Near what is now known as Red Banks there was a populous village of Winnebago, which welcomed and entertained him. He made a treaty with the Indians, went up the Fox river to a point somewhere near the present city of Berlin (Green Lake county) where he found another large village, and returned to Green Bay and thence to his post on Lake Huron.
Twenty years later Pierre Esprit, Sieur de Radisson, and Medard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, started (1654) from Quebec, crossed Lakes Huron and Michigan, wintered in Wisconsin, ascended the Fox, crossed to the Wisconsin and possibly reached the Mississippi river eighteen years before Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet. In 1659-1660 they were again in the West, but the opposition of the French authorities prevented their further explorations.
The first of the missionary pioneers was the Jesuit, Father René Ménard, who in 1661 lost his life on the upper Wisconsin river. In 1665 Father Claude Allouez established the first permanent mission in Wisconsin on the shores of Chequamegon Bay, near the first trading post established by Radisson and Groseilliers. In 1669 he was succeeded by Father Jacques Marquette (q.v.) and went to the Fox River Valley; there he established the mission of St Francis Xavier at the first rapids[3] on the Fox river near a populous Indian village. About this mission, one
- ↑ One of the most famous of these mounds is the so-called Elephant Mound, 4 m. S. of Wyalusing, in Grant county in the S.W. corner of the state, near the Mississippi river; it is an effigy mound, and a drifting of earth changed its original shape, that of a bear, so that it roughly resembled an elephant; see pp. 91-93 of the Twelfth Annual Report (1894), Bureau of American Ethnology.
- ↑ These “gens de mer” were the Winnebago Indians; the name “ouinipegou,” meaning “men of the fetid water,” was interpreted by the French to apply to salt water, whereas it probably referred to sulphur springs near Lake Winnipeg, from which the Winnebago came to Green Bay.
- ↑ It was from these “rapides des pères” (rapids of the fathers) that De Pere was named.
