GenGateway

The hills and valleys of Trempealeau County have made their striking appeal to the human mind since the far distant days of prehistoric man. The venerable heights have witnessed the coming and going of successive races and unnumbered generations. Its crags have watched the building of Indian mounds in the ages now dark with oblivion, and have heard the aboriginal legends told and retold — changing as they drifted through the centuries, until they have died away and been for- gotten. They have looked down on the haunt of the Indians whose hunting-ground abounded with game, and whose canoes were the only vessels on the waters of the Mississippi. And they have seen the early French explorers, driven by the restless spirit of adventure and the love of conquest, work their way through the wilderness into the remote regions of the unexplored country. They have beheld the self-sacrificing missionaries braving the perils of the savage-infested regions of the land, for the purpose of lifting the barbarous mind of the Indian to a religious plane; and they have witnessed the fur trader with his hunters, trappers and voyageurs penetrating the remote parts of the county in quest of furs. And at last they saw the coming of the pioneers, who clambered up their sides and broke the silence of the solitude by felling the scattered and scanty trees for cabin homes. These tillers of the soil established permanent homes, and today, far and wide over the surface of the county, are rich farms; thus has the favorite hunting-ground of the Indian been transformed by the march of our Western civilization.

Trempealeau County is in the western part of Wisconsin, on the Mississippi River. It is bounded on the east by Jack- son County, on the north by Eau Claire County, on the west by Buffalo County, and on the south by La Crosse County, as well as by Winona County across the Mississippi River in Minnesota.