May 2006 Odd Wisconsin
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking," wrote Henry Thoreau in the fall of 1854. One of them could have been the anonymous Milwaukee resident who set out in July of 1858 to walk across the...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 28, 2006
Memorial Day began as a day to decorate the graves of all soldiers who had fought in American wars. In 2005 we traced here the origins of the holiday. This year we open the doors to original documents about Wisconsin's role in America's wars. Perhaps the only unusual thing about...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 24, 2006
Last week we mentioned the Ho-Chunk chief Dandy, who appealed to the Bible in an argument with Gov. Henry Dodge about 1837. A few years earlier, he had called on Juliette Kinzie in Portage along with a relative (and another chief) named Four-Legs, while the white family was observing their...
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Posted in Odd Lives on May 24, 2006
Last Thursday, while debating its immigration reform bill, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to it that would declare English the "national language" of the United States (it was watered down a little while later to "common and unifying language"). The House is considering a similar proposal advocating an amendment...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 20, 2006
This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of the settlement of the long treaty rights case between the U.S. and the Ojibwe, which reaffirmed tribal rights to off-reservation hunting and fishing. Under treaties from the 1840s and 1850s, the Ojibwe managed to hold onto rights that other Wisconsin tribes had been...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 19, 2006
333 years ago this week, two unlikely explorers set out on a four-month voyage through the heart of America. They were Father Jacques Marquette, a studious Jesuit priest two weeks shy of his 36th birthday, and Louis Joliet, a 27-year-old former philosophy student who had taken up fur trading. They...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 17, 2006
One summer evening many years ago, hundreds of new recruits to a local militia sat around campfires swapping tall tales and making brave claims. For 21 cents a day, these young men from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois had agreed to leave their farms and mines to pursue a band...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 12, 2006
The philosopher Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, but that apparently didn't apply to a lumberjack in need of a drink. The logs of the Wisconsin River pinery were among the first harvested. As early as 1853, 20 mills running more than 100 saws...
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Posted in on May 12, 2006
On May 10, 1865, the Civil War ended when Wisconsin soldiers captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis. When Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9th, Davis fled south with his family. Madison lawyer Henry Harnden, commanding the Wisconsin First Cavalry at Macon, Ga., was ordered to scour the countryside for him....
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Posted in Curiosities on May 9, 2006
A century ago the Price Co. town of Phillips was best-known for a devastating forest fire, but today it's remarkable for folk art. Its "Wisconsin Concrete Park" is an outdoor museum with more than 200 embellished concrete and mixed media sculptures. These fantastic creatures were built between 1948 and 1964...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 8, 2006
Most of our northwoods villages began life as crude log structures that rose out of the primeval forest to house lumberjacks and the businesses loggers needed. Where two rail lines came to a junction or a waterfall made possible a lumber mill, a tiny hamlet might spring up. In the...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 5, 2006
No, not the UW's Red Gym but a real castle. In 1861, a melancholy Englishman named Benjamin Walker brought his family across the Atlantic to settle on what were then the outskirts of Madison. No one seems to know why he left home or why he chose our capital, but...
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Posted in Madison on May 4, 2006
When Tom Ruger was growing up in Rock Co., he could never have imagined that his name would be enshrined atop Hawaii's most famous peak. Ruger (1833-1907) arrived in Wisconsin from New York in 1854, and as a teenager went back to West Point for schooling. After a year he...
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Posted in Curiosities on May 1, 2006
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