Excerpt from A History of Columbia County, Wisconsin, Vol. 1: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests

Every student of history knows that Interior America is the Greater America, and just as long as the Coming United States was crowded between the Eastern mountains and the Atlantic Ocean it was bound in Colonial chains. To the romantic, ambitious spirit of the Frenchman, whether he be cavalier or priest, is due the planting of the seed which has bloomed into a nation. He opened the gates to the Mississippi with all its tributary valleys, and it was the fiery genius of Napoleon which finally passed into our keeping that vast Louisiana beyond the Mississippi, which lured us even beyond to the Pacific.

It is by thus getting a perspective that one may weigh the relative importance of any locality as a necessary feature of the broad, historic landscape over which the events of the world have marched and which the student may calmly review as from an eminence, he is blind, except with the prophetic eye, as to what lies before him.

Those who know Columbia County, and have studied its relation to the development of the great heart of the United States, are proud of the part which Providence assigned to it in the making of the Nation. In the very center of the greatest of the four waterways, whose easy 'portages separated the vast basins of. The Great Lakes from the broad Valleys of the Mississippi system, the grand figures of Marquette and J oliet, the French fur-trader and voyageur, the really noble red man, the merchandiser of all nations, the soldier, the American statesman and finally the well-molded citizen of today's Republic - ih a word, this United States in the entire making - has been largely filtered through the County of Columbia. Although there have been some who would have had our home county known as Portage, rather than that other goodly section of Central Wisconsin, it is better as it is, since we are really entitled to the name and the fame.

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