La Crosse - The River City
Origins
As the real estate agents say, it's "location, location, location." La Crosse was able to develop into one of Wisconsin’s largest cities because of a favorable conjunction of geographical facts. First is the breadth of fairly level ground between the river channel and the bluffs. It is wider here than in most places on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi and, although divided by the La Crosse River and extensive wetlands, the prairie had room for a city to grow.
The Mississippi River did its part by making a bend in front of the prairie and scouring a channel deep enough for riverboats to safely navigate. The deep channel was protected by wetlands and wooded islands that made La Crosse a natural harbor.
Rivers flowing into the Mississippi also helped. The Black River, with its pine-laden banks winding one-hundred-fifty miles into the state, entered the Mississippi a few miles upstream and ran in a side channel parallel to the main river. Logs could be easily floated down to mills built on the Black River channel, especially after 1865, when lumberman Cadwallader Washburn and his partners diverted the Black away from its ancient marshy outlet and into the cleared channel that flowed past La Crosse.
A few years before Washburn "improved" the Black, in 1857-58,
the builders of one of the first two railroads to cross Wisconsin used
the reasonably flat La Crosse River Valley to skirt the hills and vales
of the Driftless Zone to reach the Mississippi. Had the La Crosse River
not flowed to La Crosse city, neither would the tracks and all the development
they brought with them.
The prairie, the Mississippi, the Black and the La Crosse, all came together
to create a favorable location, location, location, for a city.
Prairie La Crosse
The name of the city is derived from the traditional Native American ball and stick game we know as lacrosse. Since it was not unusual for hundreds of players and spectators to participate, the wide prairie at La Crosse was a favorite playing field for the Sioux and other tribes. French visitors saw the game and called it la crosse because the bent stick with webbing attached used to catch and hurl the ball resembled le crozier, the stylized shepherd's staff of the Roman Catholic bishop. The wide field on the river became known as Prairie La Crosse and more than one pre-settlement river traveler reported on its popularity as a playing field.
City Founder
The prairie prefix was dropped by the first American settler and postmaster, Nathan Myrick.
A New York native, eighteen-year-old Myrick came west to Galena, Illinois in 1841. He traveled to Prairie du Chien, where he formed a partnership with a frontiersman named Eben Weld who had recently returned from a horseback trip upriver. Weld thought that prairie la crosse would be a good place for a post to trade with the Indians. The partners acquired trade goods, borrowed a United States government keelboat, poled upstream and, after five days, arrived at prairie la crosse. Since the prairie was devoid of trees, Myrick and Weld crossed over to wooded Barron's Island, built a log shack and set up a trading bench. They were ready when the Indians returned from a treaty annuity payment session in Minnesota, pouches filled with silver coins. The traders did well and decided to spend the winter, but in better quarters and on the mainland.
They felled trees on the island, skidded them across the ice, and built a trading post and dwellings. They were able to obtain milled boards from a lumber raft headed downstream to fashion a roof and furnishings. Sited on what became the corner of State and Front Streets, the Myrick-Weld cabins were the first American buildings in La Crosse.
Weld moved on in 1842, but Myrick stayed to make a home on the riverfront prairie. In the summer of 1843, he returned to New York where he met Rebecca Ismon. They were married at her family's home in Vermont and immediately set out for Wisconsin. The trading post the Myricks returned to was a busy little place, with Indians, traders, loggers and settlers moving up and down the rivers. Among the loggers was a crew of Mormons headed up the Black River to cut pine timbers for their new temple on the Mississippi at Nauvoo, Ill. When the Mormons were forced to abandon Nauvoo in 1844, one group fled upriver and settled about five miles south of La Crosse in the valley that became known as Mormon Coulee.
Myrick became the leading citizen in La Crosse. On his own and in partnerships he purchased the property that became the heart of the city and, along with Harmon Miller and Timothy Burns, filed the first village plat in 1851. He was named postmaster in 1843 and was elected county commissioner. He fared less well in personal and business affairs. The Indian trade was dying out and an investment in Black River logging failed. Rebecca gave birth to their first child in 1844, but the boy died soon after. Twins were born in 1847 and survived, but Myrick soon decided that La Crosse was no longer the right place for him. Still an Indian trader at heart, he moved to St. Paul, Minn. in 1848 and developed an extensive trading company in Minnesota and the Dakotas. He held onto much of his downtown real estate and occasionally visited the La Crosse, but no longer played a significant role there.