Highlights Archives
Treasures of Wisconsin Folklore Made Available
Ideas shape history as profoundly as wars or elections. The ideas of intellectuals in our past have found their way into books and magazines, but the vast majority of people didn't have an opportunity to create publications like those. Instead, what ordinary people believed, valued and desired was passed orally from generation to generation. Their tales and tunes, maxims and metaphors, place names and nursery rhymes preserved their view of the world. Charles E. Brown appreciated this. He tried to collect, preserve, and share Wisconsin's unique folklore, and now the most important of his collections is available for free on the Society's Web site.
Brown (1872-1946) is best remembered for professionalizing the state's archaeological work and the work of the Wisconsin Historical Museum. But from 1910 to 1945 he also gathered the indigenous tales, folklore and customs of Wisconsin's different ethnic groups. His archaeological work led to friendships among the Ho-Chunk and other tribes, and their elders shared ancient narratives wit him. His museum collecting brought him into contact with local characters across the state who shared their national customs, folktales and jargon. His office on the University of Wisconsin campus gave him easy access to anthropologists, linguists and literary scholars.
As Brown's reputation grew, elderly citizens who had perhaps worked long ago as railroad engineers, lumberjacks, ship captains, farmers and housewives shared their stories with him. From 1935 to 1938 he helped run the W.P.A. Wisconsin Folklore Project, and in 1939 he started the Wisconsin Folklore Society. His voluminous files contain hundreds of letters from informants and notes on folklore. Professor James P. Leary, director of the folklore program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has said, "It is hard to imagine a more dedicated and productive life in the service of Wisconsin's folklore than that of Charles Edward Brown."
In 1921 Brown began printing short pamphlets of the folktales he had collected. By the time he died in 1946 he had issued nearly 50 of them, totaling 444 pages. Some he issued for the Wisconsin Archaeology Society or the Wisconsin Folklore Society. Others he used during University of Wisconsin summer sessions or simply gave away for the amusement of his friends and colleagues. All of these have recently been added to Turning Points in Wisconsin History.
Nine of the booklets collect Native American folklore, including "Moccasin Tales" (1935) and "Winabozho, Hero-God of the Indians of the Old Northwest." (1944). A dozen collect tales related to lumbering and logging, especially a huge corpus of Paul Bunyan stories; these concern not only the famous lumberjack and his big blue ox but also his helpers Johnny Inkslinger, Ole Olson and Sourdough Sam. Other titles print Wisconsin ghost stories, river rafting tales, and legends of lost treasure, or record folk beliefs under headings such as "Cloud Lore" (1935), "Gypsy Lore" (1935) and "Flower Lore" (1938).
Because they were collected in the early 20th century from people who had heard them in the 19th, the stories don't reflect our modern tastes and sensibilities. For example, Brown cleaned out sexual and scatological comments that would be tolerable today, but he retained racial slurs that, although commonplace a century ago, are widely offensive today. History is not always comforting.
Brown also did this collecting, editing and publishing before modern scholarly standards in folklore had been created. He did not usually print the names of his informants or claim to record their contributions word-for-word. Often he did not even cite his sources for the tales. Luckily, his correspondence and research notes in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives (boxes 2-10 of Wis Mss HB) help academic investigators fill these gaps and trace his sources.
The rest of us can simply discover hundreds of unique Wisconsin stories, such as this Paul Bunyan anecdote:
"THE DINNER HORN: All members of Paul's logging crew were very hearty eaters. Eating was a real business to them. When the men came in from their day's work in the woods, they would rush into the cook shanty in a mad scramble and seat themselves at the tables like a lot of wild men. Their bad table manners didn't please Paul Bunyan. To bring about a better order of things, he had a big dinner horn made. It was a hundred and thirty feet in diameter at the noisy end. The first time that Joe Muffraw, the cook, blew this horn, he held it out straight and knocked down several sections of timber. Some of the men were blown so far away that they did not get back to camp until breakfast time. Some men never returned to camp; they were later located in Nova Scotia.
"Paul didn't like to have his timber ruined. It was money out of his pocket. He told Joe to blow the horn up in the air the next time. Joe followed his orders the next day, and the men came running in from the woods. All seemed to work out well. But the next day Paul got complaints from the U.S. Weather Bureau and from shipping companies. Blowing the big dinner horn had caused cyclones, a hurricane, and other storms. Paul then decided to junk the horn and finally sold it to an eastern railroad whose officers made it into a roof for a union depot."
:: Posted January 31, 2007
|
