Turning Points
in Wisconsin History
Colonialism Transforms Indian Life
European microbes probably reached Wisconsin's Indians before European explorers. In the fifty years following Hernando de Soto's invasion of the lower Mississippi in 1539-1540, disease wiped out 90 percent of Indian villages in the middle Mississippi Valley - villages with whom Wisconsin's Oneota culture had traded for centuries. Some archaeologists therefore think it likely that epidemics of measles or smallpox may have swept through native communities here decades before Nicolet stepped ashore at Red Banks.
When the French arrived and began living in Indian villages, diseases once again broke out. "Maladies wrought among them more devastation than even war did,"... more...
Original Documents and Other Primary Sources
 | The Ho-Chunk recall 18th-century battles with the Meskwaki (Fox). |
| A French official summarizes Wisconsin tribes in 1736 |
| The diary of the British commander in Wisconsin during Pontiac's war in 1763. |
| The governor of New France surrenders to the English in 1760. |
| Speeches of Pontiac (1763) and Souligny (1848) against white incursions. |
| The Meskwaki (Fox) and Mascouten resist the French in 1712. |
| An 1818 War Department report describes early U.S. fur trade policies. |
| Indian Versions of Some Early Wisconsin Events |
| Menominee Vocabulary, 1893 |
 | Sex, drinking, and moral corruption on the Wisconsin frontier in 1702. |
| A French priest writes home in 1721 about Indians, beavers, and fur. |
| Smallpox decimates the Ojibwe in the 1770's |
| Memoirs of an Interpreter among the Ojibwe, 1840-1900 |
| Fr. Baraga's 1853 Ojibwe Dictionary |
| Report on the Menominee at Termination, 1958 |
 | View of Charles de Langlade's warriors at Braddock's defeat in 1755. |
 | A Long Ho-Chunk Vocabulary, 1880 |
| Brief Potawatomi Language Vocabularies, 1920-1932. |
| Alfred Bridgman's English-Menominee word list from the 1870s |
 | A popular French map of the Great Lakes in 1757. |
| An English view of No. America in 1754 |
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