Wisconsin Historical Collections

1,000 articles, memoirs, interviews, and essays on Wisconsin history and archaeology first published 1855-1915.

About This Collection

What Is "Wisconsin Historical Collections"?

How Was This Digital Edition Prepared?

1. What is "Wisconsin Historical Collections"?

A serial publication issued every two or three years between 1855 and 1915 by the Wisconsin Historical Society. During those decades, the Society periodically gathered a selection of important manuscripts on the state's early history into a printed volume. They called this publication Wisconsin Historical Collections, and its first appearance on January 2, 1855, was modestly described as containing a few manuscript documents "particularly worthy of notice and publicity."

That was the beginning of a 150-year effort to make the state's heritage easily available to citizens. In the 19th century this was done by painstakingly editing manuscripts and carefully printing ponderous tomes to ornament Victorian libraries. Today it is done by sending digital replicas of those volumes over the Internet. Although the method varies, the motive is the same -- to enrich people's lives by connecting them with their past.

Twenty volumes of pioneer memoirs, archival records, original journals, explorers' narratives, interviews, and other eyewitness accounts of Wisconsin's past ultimately flowed from the Society headquarters in Madison. Altogether, more than 1,000 articles were printed on more than 10,000 pages in [ital] Wisconsin Historical Collections, often accompanied by illustrations or maps.

For example, there are more than 100 pioneer reminiscences -- not only those by Wisconsin's founding fathers but also some by fur-traders, farm women, and Indian elders. These memoirs total more than 2,000 pages, providing firsthand accounts of major incidents in early Wisconsin history by people who were on the spot. These recollections are complemented by the diaries and letters of travelers, soldiers, immigrants, missionaries, and traders written while historical events were still unfolding.

The editors also assembled copies of more than 600 original handwritten documents, not just from the Society's holdings but also from archives in Washington, Montreal, New York and Paris. These papers -- all carefully translated into English, arranged in chronological order, and annotated with explanatory notes -- occupy almost 4,000 pages in volumes 16-20. They are the single most comprehensive record of life in Wisconsin during the colonial era.

Each volume opens with a section printing the annual reports and other records of the Historical Society itself. [ital] Volume 21 consists of an immense index to all the preceding ones. Its lists of topics such as "Forts" or "Rivers" and its thorough cross-referencing of obsolete tribal designations and variant spellings of people's surnames make it permanently useful.

Like every historical source, these 20 volumes need to be used with care. They contain many statements that later research proved to be inaccurate. They also reflect the values of their original authors and compilers: attitudes toward Indians and African-Americans, in particular, usually appear out-dated and are occasionally offensive. Similarly, the terminology employed by the original authors and by the editors often differs from the words we use today. The term "Ho-Chunk," for example, does not appear even once anywhere in the 20 volumes, but "Winnebago" is used more than 1,000 times. On the other hand, the editors were ahead of their time in some ways. For example, they sought out elderly Indians to interview, printed many documents by and about women, and published verbatim the crude texts of semi-literate fur traders such as Peter Pond.

2. How Was This Digital Edition Prepared?

This online edition of Wisconsin Historical Collections is a collaboration between the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Digital Collections Center.

The Society provided a clean set of the 20 volumes from its "official file" -- the master copies of works it has published. Volumes 1 and 2 page-by-page facsimiles issued by the Society in 1903, but volumes 3-21 were digitized from their original first printings. The facsimiles were chosen for the first two volumes in order to include supplementary editorial and bibliographical articles not found in the original printings of 1855 and 1856. Several volumes contained letters or clippings tipped in by Society staff, and these are included here in the online edition.

The UW Digital Collections Center disbound, scanned, and created basic metadata on each of the 10,000 pages in the 21 volumes. Text pages were scanned as bitonal TIFFs and illustrations in gray-scale; covers and any manuscript insertions were captured in color.

Historical Society staff then processed the scanned images for Web presentation, converted the image files to searchable text, and cataloged each of the individual documents by topic, location, decade, author, title, and other terms that facilitate searching. This process was done using CONTENTdm, a leading digital asset management application. Society staff then created this Web site and programmed its searches to take full advantage of CONTENTdm's features.

3. Searching

Text Search:

Searches the actual text only.
Exact Phrase will return pages that include the words you enter if they occur next to each other.
All Words will return pages that include all the words you enter, regardless of where they they occur on the page.
Any Words will return pages that include any of the words you enter, even pages that include only one of the words.
When searching for names, select 'All Words.' If this returns too much, use 'Exact Phrase' and try both 'firstname surname' format and, secondly, 'surname firstname' format.
If you don't find what you expect:
- try common misspellings and alternate forms such as plurals and synonyms
- add other words likely to occur in the same context as your search term
- use an Article Search instead
- browse to the original index printed as Volume 21

Article Search:

Returns articles that contain substantial information (at least two or three pages) devoted to specific people, places, or subjects.
select a field to search -- author, title word, subject term, etc. -- from the short drop-down list
in the adjacent box, begin to type a term
terms used in the index will pop up automatically (based on Library of Congress headings)
click on one to enter it in the search box
click on the "Search" button beneath all the boxes

Browse:

Returns the table of contents for individual volumes with links to the first page of each article:
select a specific volume from the drop down
scan its contents
click an article title to go directly to it
To use the comprehensive printed index, select volume 21
To see a list of all pictures or maps in all volumes, click those links

Once any volume is open on your screen, use the Search box at the upper left to perform a full text search of that specific volume. Each volume also has a general index at the end which can suggest appropriate terminology. For example, 18th-century fur trader and soldier Pierre Marin appears in various documents as Moran or Morand, and the Menominee Indians were called by seven other completely unrelated names by the authors of various documents. Volume 21, the printed index to the entire series, can help resolve these discrepancies.

4. Reading

Pages open on your screen in a viewer composed of a list of contents on the left, a masthead with links across the top, and an image of the original page on the right. Navigate by scrolling through the contents; click + to open up subdivisions, or "previous page" and "next page" to browse. Use the search box at the upper left to find words within the volume you have open. Use the drop-downs directly beneath it to display information about the volume or the page, or display the page and an electronic text of it side-by-side.

The links in the masthead carry you back to your search results, to the Wisconsin Historical Collections home page, and to our online Dictionary of Wisconsin History.

5. Printing

Printing directly from your Web browser may cut off part of the image. You can usually print a full, legible page by following these instructions:

Go the page that you want to print.
Right click on the image of the text and select "Copy"
- a. open your word processing program and create a new document; OR
- b. open an image editing program such as those that come with digital cameras
Paste the image of the text into the new document.
You should now be able to print the entire page.

6. Copying Text

This can only be done one page at a time:

Go the page that you want to print.
Locate at the upper left of the screen a box saying "document description".
Open the drop-down by clicking the arrow
Select "page & text" and click "go"
Block and copy the electronic text that appears next to the image of the original page.

Note that this electronic text is uncorrected. You will need to edit it to precisely match the original.

7. Additional Help

The online Dictionary of Wisconsin History defines archaic words, translates common French terms, sketches the careers of thousands of people, maps thousands of Wisconsin places, and contains short explanations of hundreds of topics. The Dictionary also includes a detailed timeline.

More than 100 longer essays on key people and events are available on our Topics in Wisconsin History page.

For a brief narrative of the state's early years, consult A Short History of Wisconsin.

Finally, at the bottom left of every page is a link titled "Contact Us." Post a question there for Society staff; we can usually answer within a few hours.

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