On July 4, 1828, deputy United States surveyor Lucius Lyon boarded a steamer in Detroit bound for Green Bay with a contract to make the first official government survey in what soon would be the Wisconsin Territory

A rugged frontiersman but a soft-spoken, handsome, New England gentleman, Lyon stood five feet ten and weighed nearly 200 pounds. At age 28, the Vermont-born surveyor was a veteran of seven years of mapping the Michigan wilderness who, in his spare time, composed poetry and wrote articles on surveying for technical publications.

In five years, he would leave Wisconsin to represent the Michigan Territory in the United States Congress. He would hobnob with presidents, dance at their balls, and help fashion the laws that shaped the north-central frontier. He would build ships and canals, found and develop cities and farms, own 25,000 acres of choice land and city lots, much of it in Wisconsin, and loose it all to return once more to surveying.

The impact this man made on Wisconsin in the short time he spent here is revealed in the map collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society and Lyon's original field notes, also, part of the state's historical records, preserved in the office of the Commissioners of Public Lands.

With chain and compass, Lyon made the five surveys which opened Wisconsin to the advancing tide of land-hungry settlers and speculators. He surveyed the French land claims at Portage and Prairie du Chien, the boundary of the first land in Wisconsin the United States took from the Native Americans, the fourth meridian north to the Illinois border, the Illinois-Wisconsin border, and the first townships to be mapped in Wisconsin.

On this, his first trip to Western Michigan Territory, Lyon stopped in Green Bay to hire a canoe and paddlers. He stepped ashore at the Fox-Wisconsin portage on July 19, and surveyed Augustine Grignon's 648-acre wedge-shaped claim between the two rivers. Two days later he started his survey of Prairie du Chien.

The French land claims were occupied by descendants of voyageurs and fur traders. Deeds were granted by United States in the early 1820s. Lyon's surveys established official boundaries for the first privately owned land in Wisconsin.

Frontier Prairie du Chien with its handful of shacks and old Fort Crawford, still water-soaked and stinking from the great flood of 1828, held little charm for Lyon. As soon as his survey was completed he and Morgan L. Martin, frontier lawyer, speculator and politician, went on to Galena, rip-roaring capital of lead country.

Here Lyon and Martin conducted a rough, unofficial survey that resulted in a surprisingly accurate map of the Wisconsin-Illinois lead region. They rented a horse and buggy and toured the area, recording locations of settlements, minds, Indian villages, roads, trails, traces, rivers, and landmarks.

Back in Galena, they gave their findings to R. W. Chandler who, the next year, published a map which served as a guide to hundreds of miners in search of a strike. The map locates many communities that still exist in Wisconsin such as Shullsburg, Dodgeville, Mineral Point, New Diggings, Cassville, Platteville, and Arena.

Lyon returned to Detroit in October. He came back to the lead county in 1830 to survey the Native American lands ceded to the United States in the 1829 Treaty at Prairie du Chien, the first land in Wisconsin other than fort locations acquired by the young nation.

Lyon and his brother, Orson, started ten miles north of Chicago village where they planted a six-inch square post at the lakeshore. They surveyed northwest to the Rock River and on to Blue Mounds, east to Lake Mendota, north to Portage, and northeast to the tip of the southernmost bay of Lake Puckaway. Their map, to which Lyon added features from the lead country map, shows all land from the survey line west to the Mississippi south of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers.

In 1831, Lyon was appointed United States Commissioner of the survey of the north boundary of Illinois. To establish the location of the 4 th meridian, he went to its known position at the Illinois rapids of the Mississippi and he ran a line north into Iowa, back into Illinois, and onto north of Galena.

The commission met in late October in Galena, agreed upon surveying methods, and, in early November, made camp across the Mississippi River from Dubuque. Here, for nearly a month, they waited through days and nights of rain and snow to "shoot" the sun and started to locate the legal boundary at 42° 30" north latitude. They hewed a five-ton stone monument and set it on the ground on the line at the high water mark of the river. On its south face they chiseled "Illinois" and on its north face, "Michigan."

From this point they ran a line east, across the bluffs and prairies for ten miles, 69 chains and 30 links where they crossed Lyon's meridian. Here, a few miles south of what is now Hazel Green, they built a mound, sic feet square and sic feet high, before quitting for the winter. All Wisconsin surveys started from this basemark.

Lyon was working on the border survey when he received a contract to start a township survey of western Michigan Territory. On February 16, 1832, he brought together a four-man crew including his brother and had them sign surveyors' oaths in his field book. Sow still covered the ground when they arrived at the meridian-border mound. Lyon took out is field book and wrote, "Baseline, T1N, R1W, NW Ter. Remeasured the boundary of Illinois for a baseline for the surveys of it, beginning on said boundary at the intersection of the 4 th principal meridian."

As spring came and the prairie turned green they measured the exterior lines of the townships they planned to survey, and, on May 23, entered Township 1, range 1W, the present township of Hazel Green in southeastern Grant County.

As Lyon started his internal survey, the Black Hawk War exploded and Black Hawk's 400 braves spread out through the lead country. When it became too dangerous to continue, the party returned to Galena. They were surveyors, not soldiers, and there is no record that any of them fought in the war.

When Black Hawk led his band back across the Mississippi after the Battle of Bad Axe, the surveyors returned to their work, and, by October, had completed ten townships.

The border commission resumed work in October. In December, at the short of Lake Michigan, they sank a 12-inch square post in the ground at the eastern terminus of the border.

Early in spring, Lyon completed the sixteen townships covered by his contract. He came down from the bluffs in mid-May to learn that in February he had been nominated the Democratic party's candidate for congressional delegate from Michigan Territory. He was elected in July by the territorial legislature.

Lyon left the lead country in mid-June, 1833, and never returned. His brother, Orson, remained and became a Deputy United States Surveyor. He also acted as agent for Lucius and purchased for him thousand of acres of choice land including large blocks of lots in Madison, Milwaukee, and Cassville.

In 1835, Lyon was elected one of Michigan's first two United States senators. He returned to Michigan in 1839 to develop his vast and diversified holdings. He operated several large firms and experimented in raising sugar beets. He sank thousands of dollars into a salt well, and he invested in a canal and steamboats on the Grand River.

None of his projects were successful, however, and when, in the early 1840s, land prices dropped and his mortgages fell due, Lyon lost his entire fortune. He was reduced to seeking a job again as a surveyor but, in 1843, was elected to the United States House of Representatives.

When his term expired, Lyon was appointed Surveyor General for Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. In 1846, he went with survey crews into upper Michigan in search of gold. They found, instead, what was then America's largest known deposit of rich iron ore.

Lyon was well started on a financial comeback when he died suddenly, in 1851, at the home of a nephew in Detroit. He never married.

In Wisconsin, Lyon's name is all but forgotten. Even in Michigan it lives on only in Lyons, a village of 645 people, which he founded in hopes that it would become a mighty metropolis.

The six-foot high border-meridian marker was obliterated long ago by a country road. The posts on the bank of Lake Michigan rotted and disappeared and the Burlington Railroad Line was built over the monument on the Mississippi.

But in the historical records of Wisconsin are the carefully written surveyor field books noting every distance measured, every direction traveled, every stake driven, and every witness tree blazed. In the books and maps are accurate descriptions of the frontier before the axes and plows of the white man changed the face of the earth, information of immense historic value.

Surveyors who have checked the lines Lyon ran are surprised at the remarkable accuracy he achieved with his only instruments, the crude chain and compass.