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Green Bay Intelligencer

Page one of the Green Bay Intelligencer of December 11, 1883. View the original source document: WHI 50492

Printing presses were not something that pioneer settlers wanted to carry west. They were made of cast iron and weighed as much a winter's worth of provisions. To be useful, they had to be accompanied by an equally heavy load of lead type. Hauling them overland was impossible and shipping them down the Great Lakes was problematic. So it was not until 1831 or 1832 that a printer tried to bring one into the wilderness of Wisconsin.

Albert Ellis

That printer was Albert Ellis, who had apprenticed in a print shop in New York before coming west with the Oneida Indians as a teacher. In the winter of 1830-1831 he accompanied a delegation of them to Washington, D.C., for treaty negotiations. On the way back he ordered a press and type while passing through Detroit. Raising the necessary capital and having the equipment shipped to Green Bay took longer than anticipated, so it was not until the fall of 1833 that Ellis and his partner produced the inaugural issue of "The Green Bay Intelligencer," Wisconsin's first newspaper.

Father Samuel Mazzuchelli

Earlier that year, the region's only Catholic priest, Samuel Mazzuchelli, had been forced to travel all the way to Detroit to have a little prayer book in Ho-Chunk printed. But his principal missionary work lay among the Ojibwe, so he set about compiling a liturgical almanac that listed and explained the Catholic holy days in the Ojibwe language. The almanac appeared in Green Bay in 1834, and typographic analysis proves that it was printed on Ellis' press, making it the first book printed in Wisconsin — if it really qualifies as a book at all.

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Fr. Mazzuchelli

Portrait of Father Samuel Mazzuchelli. He would oversee the creation of over twenty four churches in Wisconsin. View the original source document: WHI 2787

Kikinawadendamoiwewin

"Kikinawadendamoiwewin or Almanac, wa aiongin obiboniman debeniminang Iesos," as it's called, is tiny  —about 4 x 6.5 inches — and only 14 pages long. Each page is printed on just one side, and the whole thing was bound in plain paper covers. Mazzuchelli had Ellis print only 150 copies, most of which were quickly distributed to his Indian parishioners. Only a single copy survives today, in the Library of Congress, but you can examine a reproduction of the whole book among the Native American language materials at Turning Points in Wisconsin History and learn more about it in the "Wisconsin Magazine of History" archives.

Mazzuchelli went on to oversee the creation of more than 24 churches in the region, and to found schools in New Diggings, Sinsinawa and Benton in southwestern Wisconsin. At Sinsinawa he also established a community of Dominican Sisters who went on to start more schools and colleges for women, including Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois and Edgewood College in Madison. He taught at the St. Clara Female Academy in Benton, Wisconsin until his death.

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Samuel Mazzuchelli

See more images, essays, newspapers and records about Father Samuel Mazzuchelli.