Proceedings of the Society at Its Sixty-Eighth Annyual Meeting (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921. Excerpt: ... THE RUMP COUNCIL INTRODUCTION The territory of Wisconsin was created by an act of Congress approved April 20, 1836, which went into effect July 3 of the same year. The boundaries of the new territory on the east, and on the south as far west as the Mississippi, were the same as those of the present state. Beyond the Mississippi they embraced the present Iowa, Minnesota, and most of the Dakotas, regions which in 1834 had been attached to Michigan Territory for administrative purposes. President Jackson appointed Henry Dodge governor and John S. Horner secretary. The new government began to function July 3, 1836, and Wisconsin thereafter went its way independently of the Michigan peninsula to which it had been attached since 1818. The first legislative assembly of the new territory was convoked by Governor Dodge at Belmont, in the present Lafayette County, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1836. All this time, however, Michigan was still technically in the territorial stage, and her affairs for some years back, owing largely to the struggle with Ohio over the southeastern boundary, were in a disturbed, not to say chaotic, condition. The peninsula claimed by 1834 a population of more than 80,000; and inasmuch as under the Ordinance of 1787, 60,000 qualified for statehood, there should have been no difficulty in the way of her admission into the Union. The boundary dispute, however, which raised up against the territory the powerful political enmity of Ohio, rendered abortive the effort for statehood which began in the United States Senate as early as May 9, 1834, and was continued unavailingly for nearly three years. Meantime, the people of Michigan, falling back upon the supposed sanctions of the Ordinance of 1787, the overruling law of the Northwest, decided...