Wisconsin became the Badger State because miners lived in holes
In the 1820s and 1830s, lead deposits in southwest Wisconsin drew fortune seekers from across America and Europe. Some sheltered in the very pits they dug, and people started calling them badgers. The nickname stuck to the whole state, which also claims the founding of the Republican Party.
People have lived here for about 14,000 years, since hunters arrived around 10,000 BCE during the last ice age and pursued animals such as the mastodon whose skeleton was found alongside spear points. Toward the end of the Woodland period the region was the heartland of the Effigy Mound culture, which raised thousands of earthworks shaped like animals. Between 1000 and 1500 CE, Mississippian and Oneota peoples built settlements including the fortified village at Aztalan.
The name itself is a puzzle. Jacques Marquette recorded the river as Meskousing in 1673, French writers turned it into Ouisconsin, and English speakers made it Wisconsin, official from 1845. One leading theory links it to a Miami word meaning 'it lies red', after the reddish sandstone of the Wisconsin Dells; a Menominee elder has proposed a word meaning 'good place'. The French explorer Jean Nicolet probably arrived first, canoeing west in 1634, and fur traders followed. Britain took control in 1763, and Joseph Roi's Tank Cottage of 1776 in Green Bay is the oldest building still standing from that era.
American rule brought lead mining, then conflict with Native nations over the influx of miners. Two wars, against the Winnebago in 1827 and then Black Hawk's forces in 1832, ended with most Native Americans forcibly removed. Congress created Wisconsin Territory on April 20, 1836, and statehood followed on May 29, 1848. Between 1840 and 1850 the non-Indian population leapt from 31,000 to 305,000, over a third of it foreign-born, with Germans the largest group.
Wisconsin was a free state from the start. In 1854 abolitionists freed Joshua Glover, a man who had escaped slavery in Missouri, from a Racine-area jail and helped him to Canada, and the state supreme court later declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional. That same year anti-slavery activists founded the Republican Party in Ripon. Today the state of about 6 million is known as America's Dairyland, prized for cheese, and holds a UNESCO site of two Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.
Source: Wisconsin
