Henry Dodge, Governor of the Original Territory of Wisconsin

From the preface:''BIOGRAPHIES are the life of history. Great men are the chief elements of a nation's power and renown. Plutarch's ''Lives'' furnish the best account extant of the old Greeks and Romans. He who has mastered the biographies of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, knows the chief parts of American history. When Thomas Carlyle had completed his ''Elucidation of Oliver Cromwell'' he wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson: ''I wish you would take an America hero and give us a history of him.''The settlement and growth of the territory northwest of the Ohio river is one of the marvels of American history; it cannot be better told than in the lives of its pioneers. Prominent among them, a heroic man, was Henry Dodge. Born in that territory at Post St. Vincents (Vincennes), October 12th, 1782, his life covered nearly the whole of the first century of its settlement. The Canadian French had been earlier upon the ground, but he was the first ''American'' child born in what is now the State of Indiana. He was a leader in putting an end to the Black Hawk war. One of the results of that war, ''partly as indemnity for the expense incurred, and partly to secure the future safety and tranquillity of the invaded frontier,'' was a cession to the United States of a tract lying along the west bank of the Mississippi, from which Black Hawk had gone to wage war in April 1832, and upon which the next year the first permanent settlements in what is now Iowa were commenced. He was governor of the original Territory of Wisconsin, when what is now Iowa was included therein. A sketch of his life and public services is appropriate to the IOWA ''