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Before Wisconsin was settled, Eastern real estate speculators bought large tracts of land and mapped out imaginary cities in order to sell house lots. In 1835, a visiting British geologist tried to find some of them.

“I could not but occasionally reflect on the oddity of seven large cities,” he reflected as he rode along, “each capable of containing a population of half a million of people, congregated so close together. … Of each of these I had a beautiful engraved plan, with all its squares, streets, institutions and temples.”

Of course, there were no such cities yet but only prairie grass, as he discovered when he arrived hungry and tired at Madison.

After being lost for hours, he eventually reached “the shore of the Third Lake, having somehow or other missed the Second Lake, where Madison City was supposed to be … I pushed on in that direction, and at length found … a hastily patched up log hut, consisting of one room about twelve feet square. This was Madison City…

“Not another dwelling was there in the whole country, and this wretched contrivance had only been put up within the last four weeks. Having secured our horses, we entered the grand and principal entrance to the city, against the top of which my head got a severe blow, it not being more than five feet high from the ground.”