James Allen Reed, born in Kentucky in 1798 to Scotch-Irish pioneers, became the first permanent settler in Trempealeau County and founder of Trempealeau after a frontier life as a renowned rifleman, soldier, scout, carpenter, fur trader, trapper, tavern keeper, and government farmer. He began military service in the War of 1812 at age 14, later served at Fort Crawford near Prairie du Chien, rose to sergeant, and was valued especially as a scout because of his woodcraft and knowledge of Indian customs and languages. He married three times, first in 1819 to a Potawotomi woman named Margaret, with whom he had five children before her death in 1830, then to Agatha, a Menominee mixed-blood widow, with whom he had two more children, and after her death to Archange, widow of Amable Grignon, with whom he had one son. After work with the American Fur Company and years of trapping and frontier service, he built a log house on the Mississippi in 1840 at what became James Reed’s Landing and eventually Trempealeau, and he later served as government farmer for the Wabashaw Indians at the site of present Winona, where in 1844 he and L.H. Bunnell erected the first house built there. Reed was elected justice of La Crosse County in 1851 while residing at James Reed’s Landing, sold his Trempealeau property in 1853, and died on his farm on June 2, 1873, at age 75. The broader history of Trempealeau began with Native traditions about Trempealeau Mountain, called Pah-had-dah by Sioux warriors and Hay-nee-ah-chah by neighboring Winnebago or Ho-Chunk, while French voyagers translated its meaning into La Montagne qui trempe a l'eau. Father Louis Hennepin is believed to have first seen the Trempealeau bluffs in 1680, Nicholas Perrot established a trading post nearby in 1685, Swiss missionaries arrived in 1731, and after the upper Mississippi passed from French to English rule by treaty in 1763, later landmarks included Zebulon E. Pike camping near Trempealeau Mountain in 1805, a fur trading camp there in 1820, and the steamboat Virginia passing in 1823. Settlement expanded after 1840 as Reed’s Place or James Reed’s Landing drew additional settlers and a flourishing fur trade, and in the 1850s the community alternated between the names Montoville and Trempealeau before permanently retaining Trempealeau in 1856. It grew with schools, churches, mills, a newspaper, incorporation, railroads, shipping, banking, electric lights, Perrot State Park, water works, and later civic development, reaching a population of 1,518 in 2010.