Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in De Soto, WI

De Soto is a village on the Mississippi River in Vernon County whose boundaries stretch into neighboring Crawford County, with 227 of its residents counted in the Vernon County portion at the 2020 census.

The village was first known as Winneshiek's Landing, a fur-trading post named for the Ho-Chunk chief Winneshiek, who came there to trade furs with French traders, and two French families named Godfrey settled at the point shortly after the Black Hawk War under the encouragement of Prairie du Chien trader Hercules Dousman.

De Soto was laid out in 1854 by three doctors — Simeon D. Powers, Euclid B. Houghton, and James Osgood — on a plat originally entered by Moses M. Strong.

The settlers renamed the village for Hernando de Soto, the Spanish explorer credited in 1541 as the first European to see the Mississippi River, even though he never traveled nearly this far north.

Chief Winneshiek died in 1848 and was reportedly buried atop a bluff just north of town that still bears his name.

Lacking a good steamboat landing, a few dozen De Soto men used the cover of night in 1867 to build a wing dam off Woodbury's Island — technically in violation of federal law — hoping the diverted current would dig a deeper channel near the village.

In its river-trade heyday De Soto prospered as a shipping point for grain and lumber, supporting hotels, breweries, sawmills, and general stores.

When the Mississippi River bridge washed out in 1946, the pastor serving congregations in Lansing, Ferryville, and De Soto crossed the river by rowboat for a time to reach his churches.

The 2020 census counted 309 people in De Soto, up from 287 in 2010, when the village had 129 households.