What is now Grant County was largely uninhabited prior to contact with Europeans, as it was a border region between the territories of the Kickapoo, Menominee, and Illinois tribes.

The only Native Americans to have a permanent settlement in the area were the Meskwaki people, who had a temporary village in what is now the extreme northeast of the county during the mid-1700s.

Between 1520 and 1620 this area was nominally ruled by Spain, although the lack of explorers left the region completely untouched by Spanish authority.

The first Frenchmen to reach what is now Grant County were Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, who explored the region in the spring of 1673, after setting out from what would later become Green Bay.

After the abandonment of Marin's trading post, the region went unvisited until the expedition of Jonathan Carver, a New England Yankee who passed through what is now Grant County in 1766 during an attempt to discover the Pacific Ocean.

In 1783, the British government acknowledged the jurisdiction of the United States over the land east of the Mississippi River, including what is now Grant County.

Fair play was founded by a prospector, rather than a farmer or logger, and within two years the prospector found ore, the settlement was built on the corner of Hwy 11 and Sandy Hook Road, the place was rather rowdy and fights based in greed was not uncommon, the place got its moniker when a violent fight broke out and one contender did not carry weapon, but the other man did, and thus the crowd started chanting 'Fair Play!

until the fight ended, and thus the village formerly known as 'Hard Town' was redubbed as 'Fair Play', in 1846, the last threatened duel took place and afterwards the settlement was abandoned.

[16] Paris was a settlement 1/8th of a mile South of 'Dickeyville' near Hwy 151/61 between 1838 and 1843, a small settlement built on the Platte River, the founder had malaria and he named the place after his homelands capital, Paris, (France), he built a bridge across the river that proved the counties first one made, the founder, Detantabaritz, had started experiencing financial issues, and he ended up facing a creditor, choosing swords as dueling weapons as he was himself a Dragoon, the creditor backed down, and later the founder took his own life due to debt anxieties, and now only a tavern remains, selling ribs.