July 2006 Odd Wisconsin
In the spring of 1838, Martin Rowney, a discharged soldier who had been trading with the Indians on Puckaway Lake in Green Lake County, returned to Portage for a drunken spree that lasted for two weeks or more. At the end of it he took an oath before fellow-trader John...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on July 30, 2006
Laws are the basis of society. The words in our statutes define what we must, can, and must not do. Our police make people comply with them, and our judges punish those who don’t, by refering to what the law says. That's why it's odd that for the first...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 27, 2006
On this day in 1834 a Wisconsin minister named Cutting Marsh was en route to a village of Meskwaki (Fox) Indians in southeastern Iowa, to see if they'd like a missionary to open a school at their town, show them how to farm, and teach them how to read the...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 24, 2006
Wisconsin had both real giants and mythological ones. The best known of the latter was Paul Bunyan, of course, but 1,000 years earlier the Ho-Chunk had crafted tales about the hero Red Horn battling a race of giants: "In the early days there were Giants tall as trees and their...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 19, 2006
On this day in 1832, General Henry Atkinson finished erecting at the junction of the Rock and Bark Rivers a temporary stockade known as Fort Koshkonong. He was hot on the trail of Black Hawk, who had retreated up the Rock River and was then about 60 miles away, just...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 15, 2006
Florida's governor recently signed a law requiring that in the state's public schools, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 13, 2006
Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, few American military men were as well-known as General William S. Harney (1800-1889). He served all over the country, from Louisiana north to Wisconsin and from Florida west to Utah and the Pacific Northwest. According to his biographer, he was bold,...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 8, 2006
When Wisconsin and its Historical Society were still young, citizens eagerly donated objects to its "cabinet of antiquities," hoping to build its collection into a rival of older and more prestigious East Coast institutions. Their enthusiasm, however, often outpaced their taste or judgment. Here's a very small selection of the...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 5, 2006
Summer is blazing in full force, and those winter days when it seems like one's breath could freeze in the air, fall to the ground, and shatter are just a vague memory. But summer, too, has its unpleasantness, notwithstanding this description from a popular 19th-century emigrant handbook: "... Summer seems...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 5, 2006
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 1, 2006
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