Charitable and Penal Institutions. The State charitable and penal institutions are under the control of a State Board of Control, which is appointed by the Governor. This board appoints superintendents, wardens, stewards, and general matrons, and a number of minor officials upon the nomination of superintendents or wardens. Staple supplies used by the institutions are purchased by the board. The State has originated a new system for caring for its chronic insane, namely, in county asylums which are supported by both State and county. In 1900 there were 27 of these institutions with inmates aggregating 3394. The building of two more county asylums has been authorized. The State insane asylums at Mendota and Winnebago and the Home for Feeble Minded at Chippewa Falls contained in the aggregate 1464 inmates (1900). In October, 1900, the School for the Deaf at Delavan had 190 pupils, the School for the Blind at Janesville 105 pupils, the Industrial School for Boys at Waukesha 328, and the State Public School (children's home) at Sparta 147. On the same date there were 1103 males and 430 females in the poorhouses of the State. Three Milwaukee institutions, an insane asylum, house of correction, and industrial school for girls, are semi-State institutions, as is also the Veterans' Home at Waupaca. There is a State reformatory near Green Bay, with 115 convicts, and a State prison at Waupun, with 496 inmates.
History. At the time the region now included within the State was first made known to Europeans it was the border land between the hunting grounds of the Algonquian tribes, which were gradually pushing westward, and the Dakotas or Sioux, the great body of whom already lay beyond the Mississippi. In 1634 Champlain, Governor of New France, dispatched Jean Nicolet, a coureur des bois, westward along the Great Lakes to make treaties with the remote tribes of Indians, and to encourage them to trade with the French. Nicolet first set foot upon what is now the State of Wisconsin late in 1634 or early in 1635. He landed first at Green Bay, where he found a large Indian settlement, thence ascended the Fox River to a point beyond its passage through Lake Winnebago, and then turned southward. He probably proceeded as far south as the site of Chicago, and returned east by way of Lake Michigan. The next white explorers in the Wisconsin region of whom we have any record were Radisson and Groseilliers, two fur traders, who reached the country in 1658-59. They followed in the track of Nicolet, but probably crossed the Fox-Wisconsin portage, and descended the latter river almost, if not quite, to its mouth. Recent investigations make it seem more than probable that they were actually the first discoverers of the Upper Mississippi. In the winter of 1661 they built a stockade on the south shore of Chequamegon Bay, near the present site of Ashland. On the same spot Father Allouez in 1665 established the La Pointe Mission—the first in Wisconsin. Subsequently (1669) he built the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier at the Rapides des Pères on the Fox River, on the site of the city of De Pere. Here was built the first church in Wisconsin and about this mission grew up the first white settlement of any permanence. In 1673 Louis Joliet and Père Marquette, setting out from the Saint Francis Mission, sailed up the Fox and descended the Wisconsin to the Mississippi. In 1674 Marquette made a canoe trip from Green Bay to the site of what is now Chicago along the shores of Lake Michigan. In the years that followed the region became one of the principal fields of activity of the coureurs des bois, prominent among whom were Nicolas Perrot and Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, from whom the city of Duluth takes its name. La Salle (q.v.) thoroughly explored the Wisconsin region before he attempted his remarkable trip down the Mississippi which ended in his tragic death. Although the region became dotted with trading posts and missions, there was no permanent settlement in Wisconsin until toward the middle of the eighteenth century, when the De Langlade family established themselves at Green Bay. In the French and Indian War Charles de Langlade led a body of coureurs des bois and Wisconsin Indians to the aid of the French, and commanded them in the battle which resulted in Braddock's defeat. After the Revolution, in which De Langlade and the Wisconsin Indians remained true to the British, although by the terms of the treaty Wisconsin became part of the United States, the British continued to exercise authority in the region. Nor did Jay's treaty of 1794, in spite of its provisions for the surrender of the outposts, result in a change of authority. During the War of 1812 the French and Indians took the field against the Americans, and an expedition starting from the British fort at Green Bay assaulted and captured an American garrison at Prairie du Chien.
For a decade after the close of the war the fur trade remained the principal business of the inhabitants of the region between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River and the growth in population was slow, the number of white inhabitants as late as 1824 being not more than 6000 or 7000. The authority of the United States was firmly established in 1816, when several detachments of the Regular Army were sent into the Territory, and forts built at Green Bay (Fort Howard) and at Prairie du Chien. In 1820-21 several bands of Oneida and Brotherton Indians from New York State were settled in the Territory. In 1822 the opening of the lead diggings in the southwestern part of the Territory was followed by an influx of immigrants, largely Southerners, many of whom brought their slaves with them. By 1828 the population of the lead region was over 10,000. An uprising of the Winnebago under Red Bird in 1825 was suppressed with little bloodshed, and no further trouble was experienced from the Indians until the outbreak of the Black Hawk War (q.v.) in 1832. After the defeat of Black Hawk a large immigration of agricultural settlers from New England and New York set in and the movement for the erection of Wisconsin as a separate Territory was begun in earnest. Wisconsin had formed a part of the old Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1800, of Indiana Territory from 1800 to 1805, of Michigan Territory from 1805 to 1809, of Illinois Territory from 1809 to 1818, and in the latter year was again placed under the jurisdiction of Michigan Territory. In 1836, on the admission of Michigan into the Union, Wisconsin—including then the present States of Iowa and Minnesota and parts of the Dakotas—was erected into a Territory. Belmont and Burlington were successively temporary Ter-
