The War of the Bridges.

We hauled our old cannon to the  bluff and pointed it at Kilbourn's house across the river. No one knew where the cannon came from or how it got here in Jeuneautown. Our gunner, old Jacob, had been with Mad Anthony at Fallen Timbers back in '94 and was the only one of us who had ever fired a cannon. He promised the cannon would not blow up in our faces. We planned to knock down Kilbourn's house because he had knocked down our bridge and done lots of other crazy things. He was an evil man.

If you've ever been to Milwaukee, you've seen how the Milwaukee River comes down from the north and takes a sharp turn east into Lake Michigan. Back in 1818 our leader Solomon Juneau came down from Quebec  and started a trading village here between the river and the lake.  Solomon married an Métis woman which gave him an in with the Menomonee Indians. Everything was going fine till this Byron Kilbourn arrived on the west side of the river and started Kilbourntown.

Kilbourn was a surveyor from Ohio. When he laid out the streets for his town he set them at a different angle from the streets here in Jeuneautown. Since he was a surveyor he should have known better. We soon saw that he was doing everything he could to destroy our town. When Kilbourn made a map, our town appeared as a blank. And when steamboats came to his docks, he told the people our town was just a little Indian trading village.

In 1840, the Territorial Legislature ordered that a bridge be built joining the two towns. Solomon Juneau was in favor of this since it would give us an outlet to the west. Over the next few years Juneau had three more bridges built. These new bridges made Kilbourn mad. He said these bridges made it hard for ships to get to his docks.

In 1845, a bunch of westsiders took down the west side of one of the bridges causing the whole thing to collapse. That's when we pointed the cannon at Kilbourn's house. We had plenty of gunpowder but no cannonballs. Jacob found some old clock weights and said they'd serve well. We were all set to fire when we heard that Kilbourn's young daughter had just died. We hauled the cannon away out of respect for the little girl.

We learned the westsiders were going to take down one of our bridges so we took down their preferred bridges before they could act. Things got pretty tense for a few weeks. You didn't want to get caught on the wrong side of the river. As the fall came on, tempers cooled. The village councils got together and on this day in 1846 voted to merge the towns into the city of Milwaukee. Bridge building  started again. If you look at a map of Milwaukee you can see some of the bridges cross at a funny angle. You can thank Kilbourn for that.

Beautiful Downtown Milwaukee