Stories of the Badger State Part 1

Stories of the Badger State.

by Reuben Gold Thwaites.

PREFACE

The student of nature lives in a broader and more interesting world than does he who has not learned the story of the birds, the streams, the fields, the woods, and the hedgerows. So, too, the student of local history finds his present interest in town, village, city, or State, growing with his knowledge of its past.

In recognition of this fact, these true stories, selected from Wisconsin's history, have been written as a means to the cultivation of civic patriotism among the youth of our commonwealth. It is not the purpose of the book to present a continuous account of the development of the State; for this, the author begs to refer to his larger work, "The Story of Wisconsin" (in the Story of the States Series). Rather is it desired to give selections from the interesting and often stirring incidents with which our history is so richly stored, in the hope that the reader may acquire a taste for delving more deeply into the annals of the Badger State.

Wisconsin had belonged, in turn, to Spain, France, and England, before she became a portion of the United States. Her recorded history begins far back in the time of French owners.h.i.+p, in 1634. The century and a third of the French regime was a picturesque period, upon which the memory delights to dwell; with its many phases, several of the following chapters are concerned. The English regime was brief, but not without interest. In the long stretch of years which followed, before Wisconsin became an American State, many incidents happened which possess for us the flavor of romance. The formative period between 1848 and 1861 was replete with striking events. In the War of Secession, Wisconsin took a gallant and notable part. Since that great struggle, the State has made giant strides in industry, commerce, education, and culture; but the present epoch of growth has not thus far yielded much material for picturesque treatment, perhaps because we are still too near to the events to see them in proper perspective. An attempt has been made to present chapters representative of all these periods, but naturally the earlier times have seemed best adapted to the purpose in hand.

R. G. T.

STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE

THE MOUND BUILDERS

In the basin of the Mississippi, particularly in that portion lying east of the great river, there are numerous mounds which were reared by human beings, apparently in very early times, before American history begins.

They are found most frequently upon the banks of lakes and rivers, and often upon the summits of high bluffs overlooking the country. No attempt has ever been made to count them, for they could be numbered by tens of thousands; in the small county of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, for instance, over two thousand have been found by surveyors. Most of the mounds have been worn down, by hundreds of years of exposure to rain and frost, till they are but two or three feet in height; a few, however, still retain so majestic an alt.i.tude as eighty or more feet. The conical mounds are called by ethnologists _tumuli_. Other earthworks are long lines, or squares, or circles, and are probably fortifications; some of the best examples of these are still to be traced at Aztalan, Wisconsin.

In many places, especially in Ohio and Wisconsin, they have been so shaped as to resemble buffaloes, serpents, lizards, squirrels, or birds; and some apparently were designed to represent clubs, bows, or spears--all these peculiarly shaped mounds being styled _effigies_.

The mounds attracted the attention of some of the earliest white travelers in the Mississippi basin, and much was written about them in books published in Europe over a hundred years ago. Books are still being written about the mounds, but most of them are based on old and worn-out theories; those published by the Ethnological Bureau, at Was.h.i.+ngton, are the latest and best. Many thousands of these earthworks have been opened, some by scientists, many more by curiosity seekers, and their contents have, for the most part, found their way into public museums. Many of the mounds have been measured with great accuracy, and pictures and descriptions of them are common.

Until a few years ago, the opinion was quite general, even among historians and ethnologists, that the mounds were built by a race of people who lived in the Mississippi basin before the coming of the Indians, and that the mound builders were far superior to the Indians in civilization. Many thought that this prehistoric race had been driven southward by the Indians, and that the Aztecs whom the Spaniards found in Mexico and Central America four hundred years ago were its descendants. We have in Wisconsin a reminder of the Aztec theory, in the name Aztalan, early applied to a notable group of earthworks in Jefferson county.

There were many reasons why, in an earlier and more imperfect stage of our knowledge concerning Indians, this theory seemed plausible. It was argued that to build all these mounds required a vast deal of steady labor, which could have been performed only by a dense population, working under some strong central authority, perhaps in a condition of slavery; that these people must have long resided in the same spot; and must have been supported by regular crops of grain, vegetables, and fruit. It was shown that Indians, as we found them, lived in small bands, and did not abide long in one place; that their system of government was a loose democracy; that they were disinclined to persistent labor, and that they were hunters, not farmers. Further, it was contended that the mounds indicated a religious belief on the part of their builders, which was not the religion of the red men. The result of these arguments, to which was added a good deal of romantic fancy, was to rear in the public mind a highly colored conception of a mythical race of Mound Builders, rivaling in civilization the ancient Egyptians.

But we are living in an age of scientific investigation; scientific methods are being applied to every branch of study; history has had to be rewritten for us in the new light which is being thrown upon the path of human development. This is not the place to set forth in detail the steps by which knowledge has been slowly but surely reached, regarding the history of the once mysterious mounds. The work of research is not yet ended, for the study of ethnology is only in its infancy; nevertheless, it is now well established that the Indians built the mounds, and we may feel reasonably certain for what purpose they used them.

Indian population was never dense in North America. The best judges now agree that the entire native population consisted of not over two hundred thousand at the time when the Pilgrim Fathers came to Plymouth.

Of these, Wisconsin probably had but nine thousand, which, curiously enough, is about its present Indian population. But, before the first whites came, many of the American tribes were not such roamers as they afterward became; they were inclined to gather into villages, and to raise large crops of Indian corn, melons, and pumpkins, the surplus of which they dried and stored for winter. We shall read, in another chapter, how the white fur trader came to induce the Indian agriculturist to turn hunter, and thereby to become the wandering savage whom we know to-day. Concerning the argument that the modern Indian is too lazy to build mounds, it is sufficient to say that he was, when a planter, of necessity a better worker than when he had become a hunter; also, that many of the statements we read about Indian laziness are the result of popular misunderstanding of the state of Indian society. It is now well known that the Indian was quite capable of building excellent fortifications; that the most complicated forms of mounds were not beyond his capacity; and that, in general, he was in a more advanced stage of mental development than was generally believed by old writers.

Modern experiments, also, prove that the actual work of building a mound, with the aid of baskets to carry the earth, which was the method that they are known to have employed, was not so great as has been supposed.

It has been recently discovered, from doc.u.ments of that period, that certain Indians were actually building mounds in our southern States as late as the Revolutionary War. In the north, the practice of mound building had gone or was going out of fas.h.i.+on about a hundred and twenty-five years before, that is, in the days when the French first came to Wisconsin. It is thought that some of our Wisconsin mounds may be a thousand years old; while others are certainly not much over two hundred years of age, for skeletons have been found in some of them wearing silver ornaments which were made in Paris, and which bear dates as late as 1680.

It is easy to imagine the uses to which the Wisconsin mounds were put by their Indian builders. We can the more readily reason this out, because we know, from books of travel published at the time, just what use the southern Indians were making of their mounds, in the period of the Revolutionary War. The small tumuli were for the most part burial places for men of importance, and were merely heaps of earth piled above the corpse, which was generally placed in a sitting posture; he was surrounded with earthen pots containing food, which was to last him until his arrival at the happy hunting ground, and with weapons of stone and copper, to enable him there to kill game or defend himself against his enemies. The larger tumuli were, no doubt, the commanding sites of council houses or of the huts of chiefs. Each Indian belonged, through his relations.h.i.+p with his mother's people, to some clan; and each clan had its symbol or _totem_, such as the Bear, the Turtle, the Buffalo, etc. The Indians claimed that the clan had descended from some giant animal whose figure, or effigy, was thus honored. Many white people place their family symbol, or crest, or coat of arms on their letter paper, or on the panels of their carriage doors, or upon their silverware; so Indians are fond of displaying their respective totems on their utensils, weapons, canoes, or wigwams. In the mound building days, they reared totems of earth, and probably dwelt on top of them. As in each village there were several clans, so there were numerous earth totems, many of them of great size. This, no doubt, is the origin of the so-called effigies. Add to these the mystic circles of the medicine men, the fantastic serpents, and the fortifications necessary to defend the village from the approach of an enemy up some sloping bank or sharp-sided ravine, and you have the story of the mounds. An Indian village in those old mound building days must have presented a picturesque appearance.

Just why the Indians stopped building mounds is not settled; but it is noticeable that they were being built in various parts of the country about up to the time of the white man's entry. It may be that the coming of the stranger, with his different manners, hastened the decay of the custom; or perhaps it had practically ceased about that time, as many another wave of custom has swept over primitive peoples and left only traces behind.

The mounds, with which the forefathers of our Indians dotted our land, remain to us as curious and instructive monuments of savage life in prehistoric times. No castles or grand cathedrals have come down to us, in America, to ill.u.s.trate the story of the early ages of our own race; but we have in the mounds mute, impressive relics of a still earlier life upon this soil, by our primitive predecessors. It should be considered our duty, as well as our pleasure, to preserve them intact for the enlightenment of coming generations of our people.

LIFE AND MANNERS OF THE INDIANS

At the time when white men first came to Wisconsin, there were found here several widely differing tribes of Indians, and these were often at war with one another. The Winnebagoes, an offshoot of the Sioux, occupied the valleys of the Wisconsin and the Fox, and the sh.o.r.es of Green Bay as far down as Sturgeon Bay. If the theory of the ethnologists be correct, that most of the Wisconsin mounds were built by the Winnebagoes, then at times they must have dwelt in nearly every corner of the State. This is not unlikely, for the centers of Indian population were continually s.h.i.+fting, the red men being driven hither and thither by encroachments of enemies, religious fancies, or the never-ending search for food. We know only that when the whites found them, they were holding these two valleys, between Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. A broad-faced people, with flat noses, they were in personal appearance, habits, and morals the least attractive of all our tribes. Their cousins, the wild and das.h.i.+ng Sioux, were still using northwest Wisconsin as a hunting ground, and had permanent villages in Minnesota, and elsewhere to the west of the Mississippi River. The Chippewas (or Ojibways, as the name was originally spelled), the best of our Wisconsin aborigines, were scattered through the northern part of the State, as far south as the Black River, and perhaps as far eastward as the Wolf. East of them were the Menominees (Wild-Rice Eaters), a comparatively gentle folk, who gathered great stores of grain from the broad fields of wild rice which flourishes in the bayous and marshy river bottoms of northeast Wisconsin. The Pottawattomies, with feminine cast of countenance, occupied the islands at the mouth of Green Bay, and the west sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan, down into Illinois. The united Sacs (or Saukies) and Foxes (Outagamies) were also prominent tribes. When first seen by whites, the Sacs and Foxes were weak in numbers, but, being a bold and warlike people, they soon grew to importance, and crowded the Winnebagoes out of the Fox valley and, later, out of much of the Wisconsin valley, becoming in their pride and strength bitter enemies of the French.

Scattered elsewhere through the State were some smaller tribes: the Mascoutins (Fire Nation), chiefly in the neighborhood of the present city of Berlin; the short-limbed Kickapoos, in the Kickapoo valley; and, at various periods, bands of Hurons, Illinois, Miamis, and Ottawas, none of whom ever played a large part here. The Stockbridges, Oneidas, Brothertowns, and Munsees, now numerous in northeast Wisconsin, are remnants of New York and Ma.s.sachusetts tribes who were removed hither by the general government in 1822 and later.

No two tribes spoke the same language. In Wisconsin, the Indians were divided by language into two great families, the Algonkin and the Dakotan. The Sioux and the Winnebagoes belonged, by their similar speech, to the Dakotan family, just as the English and the Germans belong to the great Teutonic family. All the others were of the Algonkin group, just as the French, the Spanish, and the Italians belong to what is called the Latin family, and speak languages which have the same origin. The Indian history of Wisconsin is the more interesting, because here these two great families or groups met, clashed, and intermingled.

Despite the diversity of tongues, they were, with certain variations, much the same sort of people; and for our present purpose, the description of one tribe will serve for the description of all.

In size, Indians resemble Europeans; some are shorter than the average white man, some taller; the Kickapoos were among the short men. Indians have black eyes and coa.r.s.e, black hair. Most of them wear no beard, but as the hairs appear, pluck them out with tweezers of wood or clam sh.e.l.l.

They have thin lips, high cheek bones, broad faces, and prominent noses; the Winnebago's nose is large, but much flattened.

In primitive times, the summer dress of the men was generally a short ap.r.o.n made of the well-tanned skin of a wild animal, the women being clothed in skins from neck to knees; in winter, both s.e.xes wrapped themselves in large fur robes. In some parts of North America, especially in the south, where the Indians were more highly developed than those in the north, they wove rude cloths of thread spun from buffalo hair, or of sinews of animals killed in the chase. It is not supposed that there was much of this cloth made in Wisconsin. What specimens have been discovered in our mounds, no doubt were obtained from the native peddlers, who wandered far and wide carrying the peculiar products of several tribes, and exchanging them for other goods, or for wampum, the universal currency of the forest. Moccasins of deerskin were in general use; also leggins, with the fur turned inward or outward according to the weather. Much of their clothing was stained red or black or yellow; some was painted in stripes or lace work, and some was decorated with pictures of birds and beasts, or with scenes which they wished to commemorate. One old writer quaintly speaks of "a great skinne painted and drawen and pourtrayed that nothing lacked but life." Their dress was also ornamented by beads and porcupine quills; in the fringed borders of their leggins and robes were often fastened deer's hoofs, the spurs of wild turkeys, or the claws of bears or eagles, which rattled as their wearers walked along. Around their necks were strings of beads, and their ears and noses were pierced for the hanging of various other ornaments. In their hair, the men tied eagle feathers, one for each scalp taken.

The "war bonnet," worn by the leading warriors, was a headdress of skins and feathers, which trailed down the back and often to the ground, and was highly picturesque. Add to this, the general habit of tattooing, or, on ceremonial occasions, of fantastically, often hideously, painting the face and neck and breast in blue, black, and red, and one can well imagine that an Indian village, on a fete day, or at other times of popular excitement, presented a striking scene.

Each tribe could be readily distinguished from others, by the shape and material of its wigwams or huts. The Chippewas, for instance, lived in hemispherical huts, covered with great sheets of birch-bark; the Winnebago hut was more of the shape of a sugar loaf, and was covered with mats of woven rushes; the Sioux dwelt in cone-shaped huts (_tepees_), covered with skins, the poles sticking out at the top. These huts were foully kept, and all manner of camp diseases prevailed; pulmonary complaints and rheumatism were particularly frequent, and both men and women looked old and haggard before they reached middle age.

In the old mound building days, the huts of the village leaders or chiefs were no doubt built upon the tops of the mounds, while the common people lived on the lower level. On top of a very large, conspicuous mound was the council house, where important events were discussed and action taken. Every warrior, that is, every man who had taken the scalp of an enemy, was permitted to be heard around the council fire; but the talking was for the most part done by the privileged cla.s.s of headmen, old men, wise men, and orators.

The political organization of the Indians was weak. The villages were little democracies, where one warrior considered himself as good as another, except for the respect naturally due to the chiefs or headmen of the several clans, or to those who had the reputation of being wise and able. The sachem, or peace-chief, whose office was hereditary through connection with his mother's family, had but slight authority unless his natural gifts commanded respect.

When war broke out, the fighting men ranged themselves as volunteers under some popular leader, perhaps a regular chief, or perhaps only a common warrior. When the village council decided to do something, any man might, if he wished, refuse to obey. It was seldom that an entire tribe, consisting of several villages, united in an important undertaking; still more unusual was it, for several tribes to unite.

This was, of course, a weak organization, such as a pure democracy is sure to be. The Indian lacked self-control and steadfastness of purpose, and the tribes and villages were jealous of one another; so they yielded before the whites, who better understood the value of union in the face of a common foe. The formidable conspiracies of King Philip, Pontiac, and some others were the work of Indians of quite unusual ability in the art of organization; but the leaders could find few others equal to their skill, and the uprisings were shortlived.

The Indian's strength as a fighter lay in his capacity for stratagem, in his ability to thread the tangled forest as silently and easily as the plain, and in his habit of making rapid, unexpected sallies for robbery and murder, and then gliding back into the dark and almost impenetrable forest. He soon tired of long military operations, and, when hard pressed, was apt to yield to the white men who were often inferior in numbers, but who soon learned to adopt the aborigine's skulking method of warfare.

Lord of his own wigwam, and tyrannical over his squaws, the Indian was kind and hospitable to unsuspected strangers, yet merciless to a captive. Nevertheless, prisoners were often s.n.a.t.c.hed from the stake, or the hands of a cruel captor, to be adopted into the family of the rescuer, taking the place of some one killed by the enemy. The red man was improvident, given to gambling, and, despite the popular notion, was a jolly, easy-going sort of fellow around his own fire; but in council, and when among strangers, he was dignified and reserved, too proud to exhibit curiosity or emotion. He indulged in a style of oratory which abounded in metaphors drawn from his observations of nature. He was superst.i.tious, peopling the elements with good and bad spirits; and was much influenced by the medicine men, who were half physicians and half priests, and who commanded long fastings, penances, and sacrifices, with curious dances, and various forms of necromancy.

The Indian made tools and implements which were well adapted to his purpose; the boats which he fas.h.i.+oned of skins, of birch-bark, or of hollowed trunks of trees have not been surpa.s.sed. He was remarkably quick in learning the use of firearms, and soon equaled the best white hunters as a marksman. A rude sense of honor was developed within him; he had a nice perception of what was proper to do; he knew how to bend his own will to the force of custom, thus he overcame to some extent the natural evils of democracy. He understood the arts of politeness when he chose to practice them. He could plan admirably, and often displayed much skill in strategy; his reasoning was good. He knew the value of form and color, as we can see in his rock-carvings, in his rude paintings, in the decorations on his leather, and in his often graceful body-markings. In short, he was less of a savage than we are in the habit of thinking him; he was barbarous from choice, because he had a wild, untrammeled nature and saw little in civilized ideas to attract him. This is why, with his polite manner, he always seemed to be yielding to missionary efforts, yet perhaps never became thoroughly converted to Christianity.

When first discovered by white men, Wisconsin Indians were using rude pottery of their own make. Their arrowheads and spearheads, axes, knives, and other tools and weapons were of copper obtained from Lake Superior mines, or of stone suitable for the purpose. They smoked tobacco in pipes wrought in curious shapes from a soft kind of stone found in Minnesota, and ornaments and charms were also frequently made from this so-called "pipestone." Game they killed with arrows or sling-shots, and in war used these, as well as stone spears and hatchets and stone-weighted clubs. The bulk of their food they obtained by hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and cultivating the soil, although at times they were forced to resort to the usually plentiful supply of fruits, nuts, and edible roots. Indian corn was the princ.i.p.al crop. Beans were sown in the same hills, while sometimes between the rows were planted several varieties of pumpkins, water-melons, and sunflowers. Tobacco and sweet potatoes were grown by some tribes, but not in Wisconsin. In our State, wild rice (or oats) furnished a good subst.i.tute for corn, and was similarly cooked.

The whites wrought a serious change in the life and manners of the Indians. They introduced firearms among the savages, and induced them to become hunters, and to wander far and wide for fur bearing animals, the pelts of which were exchanged for European cloths, gla.s.s beads, iron kettles, hatchets, spears, and guns and powder. Thus the Indian soon lost the old arts of making their own clothing from skins, kettles from clay, weapons from stone and copper, and wampum (beads used both for ornament and money) from clam sh.e.l.ls. It did not take them long to discover that their labor was more productive when they hunted, and purchased what they wanted from the white traders, than when they made their own rude implements and utensils and raised crops. But the result was bad, for thereby they ceased to be self-sustaining; their very existence became dependent on the fur traders, who introduced among them many vices, not least of which was a love for the intoxicating liquors in which the traders dealt.

The Indian, at best, was never a lovable creature. He was dirty, improvident, brutal; he was, as compared with a European, mentally and morally but an undeveloped man. He is to-day, as we find him upon the reservations, pretty much the same as when found by the French over two and a half centuries ago, except that to his original vices he has added some of the worst vices of the white man. The story of the Indian is practically the story of the fur trade, and that is the story of Wisconsin before it became a Territory.

THE DISCOVERY OF WISCONSIN