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Our Motto: Strange but true.
Our Mission: Amuse, surprise, perplex, astonish, and otherwise connect you with your past.
Our Method: Lower a bucket into the depths of Wisconsin history and bring to light curious fragments of forgotten lives.
Odd Wisconsin
Henry Thoreau claimed that "In wildness is the preservation of the world".* It's also true, though, that in wildness lies the destruction of civilization. This reflection struck young James Doty after he'd canoed and hiked from Detroit to Minnesota in the summer of 1820. Doty was stopping at a remote fur trading post on Sandy Lake when he noted in...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 15, 2008
If you ask most people about African-American history in Wisconsin, they're likely to think of Milwaukee's civil rights struggles in the 1960s. In fact, black settlers had been living here for nearly two centuries by then, and perhaps the best-known early African-Americans in the state were two generations of fur-traders in the Lake Superior region. Jean and Jeanne Bonga are...
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Posted in Odd Lives on July 8, 2008
In July 1854, John W. Quinney (1797-1855) returned home from Wisconsin. A leader of the Stockbridge (Mohican) Indians who helped organize the tribe's emigration to Wisconsin in the 1820s, Quinney had been invited to speak at July 4th celebrations in Reidsville, N.Y. In his speech there to 2,000 listeners, he described how to him the festivities marked "the triumphal days...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 3, 2008
Today we tolerate a wide range of domestic arrangements. Most families are simply too busy to sit down and eat together regularly, much less clean, dust, or do the laundry according to prescribed standards. In fact, most of us would object to having any authority try to tell us when and how we ought to perform our household chores. But...
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Posted in Curiosities on June 26, 2008
Although Wisconsin became legally part of the United States at the end of the American Revolution, in practice it remained a Canadian outpost for another generation. This only changed with the War of 1812, and after the war the U.S. sent an expedition across the northern lakes to make sure that Indian nations understood that their homelands were now being...
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Posted in Curiosities on June 19, 2008
When Lake Delton disappeared on June 9, 2008, questions naturally arose about where it had come from. This lake around which much of Dells tourism revolved was man-made, not natural, and has its own unique story. The town of Lake Delton was originally named Norris, after the surveyor who laid it out back in 1849. The village was soon re-christened...
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Posted in Curiosities on June 12, 2008
The philosopher Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, but his logic apparently didn't apply to Wisconsin lumberjacks in need of a drink. The trees of the Wisconsin River pinery were among the first harvested in the state. As early as 1853, 20 mills running more than 100 saws were floating 70 million board feet...
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Posted in on June 6, 2008
In late August 1862, a coalition of Sioux bands in Minnesota, angered by continuing white incursion and failure of the U.S. government to make payments authorized by treaties, attacked settlers and Indian Agencies southwest of the modern Twin Cities. In what came to be known as the Sioux Uprising, warriors of these bands attacked New Ulm and nearby villages, killing...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on May 28, 2008
No one did more to create modern American poetry than Ezra Pound (1885-1972). At a time when poetry in English had more in common with greeting card verses than with the intimate insights of Anne Sexton, Pound and a small group of confederates demanded reform in their 1913 Imagist Manifesto. Pound was the first, or nearly the first, to discover,...
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Posted in Odd Lives on May 22, 2008
After the Civil War, Belle Boyd was as famous as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are today. Boyd was a Virginia teenager when the war broke out, and her sympathies naturally lay with her homeland. Union troops soon occupied her town and tried to raise the stars and stripes over the Boyd family home. Her mother protested, and when one...
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Posted in Odd Lives on May 15, 2008
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