Odd Wisconsin Archives: Odd Lives
John Till was not your typical doctor. He wore farmer's overalls rather than a white lab coat, and he couldn't show you a college degree or even a medical license. But at the start of the last century, people came from far and wide to be healed by his miraculous treatment. Unfortunately, the medical profession and state regulators were not... :: Posted on May 2, 2012
We grow up with the idea that all our pioneer ancestors were church-going pillars of the community. That's because those were the people who wrote the histories. But they actually shared the world with disreputable bullies, gamblers, thieves, and drunks, just like we do. Like every frontier town, Madison attracted disreputable characters fleeing from civilized society back East. One of... :: Posted on March 21, 2012
It's the season for polar plunges, with fund-raising leaps into frozen lakes taken this week in Wausau, Whitewater, and Madison, among other cities. Here's a story about an unintentional plunge into icy Wisconsin waters taken by an unfortunate young lumberjack in 1878. Paddy Disappears John E. Nelligan (1852-1937) was the head of a logging crew in northeastern Wisconsin when a... :: Posted on February 24, 2012
"With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain, Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain..." - John Greenleaf Whitter in Voices of Freedom (1846, poem inspired by the acts of Captain Johnathan Walker). Soon after Whittier wrote those lines, the man with the branded hand moved to Wisconsin. He was Capt.... :: Posted on February 16, 2012
In 1906, Sarah Hardwick inherited five acres of remote woods alongside the Mississippi. No road led to the top of the bluff where she set up housekeeping. She came and went from the river to her crude shanty along a footpath worn through the brush. Caught Rattlesnakes Hardwick went into seclusion there, growing vegetables in clearings amidst the trees. She... :: Posted on January 26, 2012
Columbus has been much romanticized over the years, as in this 1893 catalog art and in annual parades on innumerable main streets like this one. Communities all around the nation even named themselves after him to celebrate his role as a great hero. But in recent years, the dark side of his career has become better known, and some communities... :: Posted on October 6, 2011
In 1842, a strange character could be found on the edge of Milwaukee village. A hermit named Carl Grotke had taken up residence on a spit of land about 100 yards south of the present-day Juneau Avenue bridge. He was remembered as "the Robinson Crusoe of Milwaukee" because he lived all by himself in what appeared to be a shipwreck.... :: Posted on August 18, 2011
After the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, patriotic fervor ran so strong in Wisconsin that many under-age boys tried to sneak into the army. 15-year-old William Chesbrough of Rock County was one of them. In February 1862, Chesbrough ran away from school and tried to enlist at Camp Randall but was rejected due to his... :: Posted on June 22, 2011
Fabian Streiff came to the Swiss colony of New Glarus as a child about 1860 and never learned English. One summer day in the 1880s, he was hunting in nearby woods when he came upon a cave. He thought it was a wolf's den and cautiously entered, hoping to collect a pelt and rid the community of a pest. Two... :: Posted on June 9, 2011
Medicine was far from an exact science on the Wisconsin frontier. Pioneer druggists, in particular, often invented their own concoctions to treat the ailments that settlers brought to them. George Howard (1832-1892) may have been a typical example. He briefly attended a pharmacy school in his native England before immigrating to Wisconsin. After arriving in 1850 as a teenager,... :: Posted on May 12, 2011
In honor of Earth Day, here's a story about an early Wisconsin tree-hugger and dirt-worshipper. By the 1850s, Wisconsin's lumber industry had begun to penetrate into the Chippewa and Wisconsin River watersheds. The forests seemed inexhaustible to most people, but Milwaukee scientist Increase Lapham (1811-1875) could see that unrestrained harvesting would cause irreparable damage to the environment. In 1854... :: Posted on April 21, 2011
As a boy, Peter Custis of Sturgeon Bay was a slave herding livestock on a plantation in Virginia. If he tried to learn to read or write, he was whipped. On every New Years Day, he and his family risked being split up and sold separately to new owners. The Civil War broke out when Custis was a teenager, and... :: Posted on April 14, 2011
The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin is a popular spot for visitors to hike, boat and swim among some of the nation's most remarkable natural beauty. One of the islands, Hermit's Island, did not always have such an idyllic feel. During the 19th century, a recluse who went only by the name of Wilson lived there and fiercely... :: Posted on July 6, 2010
We like to think that hippies invented free love, utopian communes, and health food in the 1960s, but as the author of Ecclesiastes remarked, there's nothing new under the sun. Like most others, those ideas have a history, and some of their proponents are part of our Wisconsin heritage. Whitewater physician Juliet Severance was born in western New York in... :: Posted on March 17, 2010
Judge William C. Frazier arrived in Milwaukee on a Sunday night in June of 1837. Newly appointed to the Eastern Judicial District of Wisconsin, he had time on his hands that evening and joined a friendly game of poker at his inn. The stakes were small at first, but the wagers increased over the course of the night until "small... :: Posted on January 23, 2010
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