Highlights Archives
Earliest Wisconsin Documents Go Online
Stories of pioneer settlers, letters of French officers, and speeches by Indian leaders are just some of the riches now available for free thanks to a digitization project just completed by the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wisconsin Historical Collections is the title of a series of books published by the Society from 1855 to 1915 to share original records that it was collecting. These volumes form the single richest source of pioneers' memoirs, historical manuscripts, original journals, and similar materials about Wisconsin's early history. They contain more than 1,000 such items on more than 10,000 pages, all of which are now available on the Web for everyone curious about Wisconsin's past.
More than 100 pioneer reminiscences include not only those of Wisconsin's "founding fathers" but also memoirs by fur-traders, farm women, and Indian elders. These recollections total more than 2,000 pages and provide eyewitness accounts of hundreds of events in Wisconsin history. They reveal what life was like for the people who founded Green Bay or Janesville, describe Milwaukee when it was just an Indian village, and tell how Madison went from being a twinkle in the eye of a speculator to the state's captial.
These memoirs are complemented by printed versions of the diaries and journals of early explorers, soldiers, immigrants, missionaries and traders. French traveler Pierre Charlevoix described visiting Green Bay in 1721; Lt. James Gorrell kept a journal of his unit's posting to Wisconsin in 1760; Episcopal minister (later bishop) Jackson Kemper detailed his inspection of mission schools in 1834; and Swiss emigrant Mathias Duerst made daily entries as he crossed the Atlantic and traveled into the wilderness to found the colony of New Glarus.
The archives of earliest Wisconsin are presented in more than 600 documents occupying almost 4,000 pages in volumes 16-20. These manuscripts were copied and translated by Society experts from French, British, Spanish and American archives, then arranged in chronological order and annotated with explanatory notes. They form the most detailed record of Wisconsin during the Colonial era and begin with a French officer's description of eastern Indian nations fleeing into Wisconsin in the 1650s. Hundreds of other papers give the first evidence of French copper mining at Lake Superior, record in minute detail the daily activities of fur traders, or give similar information about French and British military, governmental and religious activities before Wisconsin was part of the United States.
In addition to those reminiscences, diaries and archival documents are dozens of newspaper reports, biographies, travel narratives, account books of fur traders, archaeological reports, and other descriptions and essays on topics in Wisconsin history, as well as the earliest institutional records of the Wisconsin Historical Society itself.
The work of presenting this storehouse of early Wisconsin history was divided between the two institutions. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Digital Collections Center scanned and provided basic data on each of the 10,000 pages in the collection. Historical Society staff then processed the scanned images for the Web, converted the image files to searchable text, and cataloged the documents by topic, location, decade, author, title, and other terms. The full text of all 10,000 pages is searchable, and documents about specific people, places, or subjects can be quickly found.
If your past matters to you, give it a try at www.wisconsinhistory.org/whc/ and see early Wisconsin history through the eyes of the people who made it.
:: Posted July 26, 2006
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