These facts challenge attention and call for an explanation. Wisconsin had been in course of settlement for about two decades. The earliest settlements were in the southeastern and eastern parts of the state where the economic support was the market reached by the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal; and in the southwestern section where the basis of prosperity had been lead-mining. The lead found its market mainly down the Mississippi, though increasingly the superiority of the route open to the lake ports had impressed itself upon the people.
At the legislative session of 1841-42 a bill was introduced for the chartering of a railroad from Milwaukee, via Madison, to Potosi. Despite continuous effort, the first railroad bill to pass, in 1847, provided only for a railroad from Milwaukee to Waukesha. In 1848 this was by law extended to the Mississippi.
The agitation of plans for a railroad from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi tended to give the lake route an overshadowing importance in the popular mind. Actual construction work on the Milwaukee-Waukesha section began in 1849; that portion of the road was completed by the end of the year 1850, and in another year it was practically completed to Whitewater on Rock River. It reached Madison in the year 1854.
The intention of the company had been to build to the Wisconsin River so as to intercept steamboat transportation at or near Arena. Thence the road might run along the river to its mouth, or it might run along the ridge between the Wisconsin and the south flowing streams, reaching the Mississippi at some point, like Potosi, lower down. By the year 1853 it had been determined to follow the Wisconsin Valley route to the Mississippi, and during that summer the line was surveyed from the mouth of Black Earth Creek to Prairie du Chien.
