page_title: Black River (Wisconsin)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Black River (Wisconsin) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Black River in central Wisconsin freezes over in winter, and snomobilers ride on the ice.
context_page_description: The Black River is a river in west-central Wisconsin and tributary of the Mississippi River. The river is approximately 190 miles long. During the 19th century, pine logs were rafted down the Black, heading for sawmills at La Crosse and points beyond.
context_section_description: The earliest mention of the Black River may be in 1661, when a French Jesuit priest reported that a band of Huron Indians had taken refuge near its headwaters, where they were starving. The priest tried to reach them from Lake Superior by canoe, but disappeared somewhere in the wilderness.
  At the time of the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters, the Ojibwe dominated the upper Black.  The lower Black generally formed the border between the Lakota to the west and the Ho-Chunk to the east. That treaty opened up northern Wisconsin for logging. At that time, the lower Black flowed through a mosaic of oak and other hardwood. But the upper Black flowed through prime pinelands, particularly in what would become Clark County. Before lumbering, the Black River is estimated to have drained 7% of Wisconsin's pinelands.
  In 1839 Jacob Spaulding and Robert and Andrew Wood led an expedition from Prairie du Chien up the Mississippi and the Black into the forest and built a sawmill at the future site of Black River Falls. In 1841 a group of Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois came up the Black and began cutting logs around Black River Falls. In 1842 they floated a raft of their logs down the Black and Mississippi to Nauvoo, demonstrating the feasibility of this transport. The lumber was used to construct the Nauvoo Temple and the Nauvoo House.  By 1847, thirteen mills on the Black River produced over 6 million board feet of lumber. Sawmills on the Black contributed to the growth of Neillsville, Black River Falls, and La Crosse.  By 1872 the Black produced 300 million board feet of lumber per year.
  The river has also been used to transport coal and petroleum products.
caption: The Black freezes over in winter and snowmobilers run on the ice. (Looking downstream from the highway 64 bridge in the Chequamegon National Forest west of Medford.)
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