Walking Home Ground

by Robert Root

  On the other side of the path near the north entrance was a stand of red pines, easy to identify by their single straight trunks, absence of lower branches, and broad round crowns. We both know white pine well, a favorite tree when we lived in Michigan and notable for its five-needle clusters, and I eagerly showed her how the brittle two-needle clusters of red pines break cleanly, to demonstrate how well I could distinguish between them.

  Near the river overlook we stopped by a shagbark hickory, a tree easy to identify by its, well, shaggy bark, all those gray strips curling at the end, and hard to confuse with anything else. I knew that northern red oak and bur oak could also be found in the woods—I’d found the distinctive red oak leaf with its deep lobes and sharply pointed tips—and I was eager for spring, when I’d get deeper into the woods and gain a deeper understanding of what we’ve been walking through.

  The wind was beginning to pick up, increasing the cold. We didn’t linger long on the observation deck. Snow had fallen enough in the past few weeks to coat the ground without covering the hummocks of marsh grass along the river. Ice was creeping out from the bank on the inside of the bend, but the river still flowed quietly, its surface dark and gleaming, like smoked glass, reflecting barren trees and gray skies and, in the distance, just a hint of sunshine. If it hadn’t been for some ripples on the water, we might have thought the river had stopped moving.

  We turned back. From different locations we could hear woodpeckers in the woods, hammering away. Despite the cold, the sound of life around us was cheering, as was our sense that we’ve furthered our acquaintance with where we live. As we passed them again on our way home, silently I named the trees I knew.

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  One traveler who came to Prairieville from Milwaukee in 1836 reported passing through dense forest all the way until he crossed Poplar Creek, an eastern tributary of the Fox River, and “came into the oak opening. I thought it the most lovely sight I had ever beheld. The country looked more like a modern park than anything else.” His enthusiasm reminds me of an N. C. Wyeth illustration for an edition of The Deerslayer, where Hurry Harry March breaks out of the forest into a clearing, flings his arms into the air, and exults, “Here is room to breathe in!” The Wisconsin traveler might well have re-enacted that moment at Poplar Creek.

  However, the terrain that traveler saw was not unpopulated, and I remind myself not to imagine postglacial Wisconsin as an empty wilderness. Paleo-Indians traveled through the landscape as long as twelve thousand years ago, making the most of what was then a very northern habitat: spruce and fir forests, tundra, a cold climate. Archaeologists divide the precontact history of Native Americans in Wisconsin into several overlapping but varied periods: the Paleo-Indian beginning around 10,000 BCE, the Archaic roughly from 8500 to 1000 BCE, the Woodland from 1000 BCE to 1100 CE, and the Mississippian, 900 to 1600 CE. Distinctive technology and customs—projectile points, tools, pottery, ornaments, burial processes—mark each period. By the time Wisconsin began to be “settled,” descendants of thousands of years of North American residents already occupied the territory, and European Americans had been encountering—and displacing—Native Americans for more than three hundred years. On the site that would become first Prairieville and then Waukesha, specifically on the hill where Carroll College would soon be established, Potawatomi had established a village estimated to have a thousand occupants. It was a site long familiar to Native Americans.

  The Woodland period was marked by the development of clay pottery and a movement away from an earlier hunter-gatherer lifestyle into a more permanently settled tradition. By the beginning of the Woodland period, Native Americans had already begun to construct burial mounds, as early as 5600 BCE in Labrador, and 4000 BCE in areas along the Gulf of Mexico. When Europeans began exploring the Northwest Territory, between 15,000 and 20,000 Indian mounds were scattered across Wisconsin. “More Indian mounds were built in the territory now called Wisconsin than in any other equivalent area of land in midwestern North America,” Birmingham and Eisenberg say, at more than 3,000 locations. Dane County, two counties west of Waukesha, had more than 1,500 mounds, and Grant County, on the Mississippi across from what is now Effigy Mounds National Monument, had more than 1,000. Sauk County, home to both August Derleth’s Sac Prairie and Aldo Leopold’s shack, had more than 900 mounds—one new resident claimed to have been “rather irked by the large number of Indian mounds we had to plow down,” more than 25 on his land alone. In Marquette County John Muir played on a mound on Fountain Lake Farm. Waukesha County had as many as 500.

  The significance of this information to someone striving to envision a landscape before pioneer settlement is simply this: the land had been occupied, by one Native American group or another, for centuries. It is a fact sometimes ignored in early histories of the county. For example, Theron W. Haight, in his introduction to Memoirs of Waukesha County written in 1907, hurries to recount the appearance of the first white settlers, Morris and Alonzo Cutler of LaPorte, Indiana, who “chose their place of settlement within hearing of the rippling waters of the Pishtaka river (later known as the Fox) where the descent from what is now the mill pond at Waukesha to the flats a mile below gave promise of a future development of waterpower.” Note how quickly Haight celebrates development. He pictures the area as essentially untouched, extolling “the most luxuriant flora to be seen in these latitudes,” “magnificent oak openings,” “marshes covered with heavy grasses and flowering plants,” and “a few patches of prairie . . . with their rank grasses swaying in the summer winds like the waters of the sea, and annually involved in the great fires which swept over the whole of the country.” He admits that the “evidences of conflagrations were also evidences, of course, that other human beings had preceded the white settlers in the occupancy of the land”—namely the Potawatomi, who were “still using the waters of the lakes and rivers here for fishing, while their squaws attended to a primitive gardening of maize and beans.” But their presence has no significance for him, since they “hardly wrought any change in the general appearance of the country,” which he thought resembled “the Sleeping Beauty of Tennyson’s poem and of the older legend, who lay year after year through the centuries, slumbering with all else within the castle, until the right prince arrived to waken her.” The analogy of the land to Sleeping Beauty and the European American settlers to Prince Charming is not one that leaps immediately to my mind, but it reveals how little the Indians counted in Haight’s starry-eyed history of the county. He attributes the mounds to “another population . . . before the advent of the modern Indian tribes” and, rather than speculate about them, prefers to let them “repose in their primeval mystery.” History in Waukesha County, according to Haight, begins with the arrival of the Cutler brothers.

  Luckily, Increase Lapham, a less myopic observer, was exploring the area in 1836, a couple of years after the Cutlers arrived. In Wisconsin: Its Geography and Topography, History, Geology, and Mineralogy, Lapham described Prairieville as “situated on the Pishtaka (or Fox) river, on the site of an old Indian village, sixteen miles west from Milwaukee. It is at the head of a beautiful prairie, occupying the valley of the river, which here has a descent of ten feet in the distance of half a mile.” In The Antiquities of Wisconsin as Surveyed and Described, his later book on Indian mounds, he tells us:

  Much of the ground around Waukesha was, in 1836, covered with “Indian corn-hills,” or remains of their recent culture of maize. In this locality, as at numerous others, the mounds occupy the highest ground and the points of hills and other places, whence the most extensive view, both above and below, can be obtained. The town of Waukesha stands on a slightly undulating plain, surrounded by hills, forming a fine amphitheatre, which, in ancient times, was doubtless crowded, as it is now, with numerous population.

  I strain my imagination to envision that beautiful prairie in the valley of the river, that slightly undulating plain surrounded by hills, but I try not to leave out, as Lapham did not, that numerous popu
lation with mounds abounding.

  When I view Plate XVIII in Antiquities, “Ancient Works at and Near Waukesha, Surveyed in 1836 & 1850 by I. A. Lapham,” I orient myself by the presence of the Pishtaka River and the location of Carroll College. The string of mounds off village streets near the river are the ones whose remnants still exist, three small conical mounds near the library, in Cutler Park, where Morris Cutler first lived. The flat prairie is evident in the plate, as well as surrounding elevations, including that near the college, and the location of fields of Indian corn are clearly marked. In Plate XIX Lapham shows two turtle-shaped mounds, one from the college grounds and the other close to what would become the center of the village. When he surveyed them in 1836, “the log-house near these mounds was the only evidence of civilization in the place; and the works were uninjured by the white man, except that the large mound was made use of for a root-house, or potato-hole.” It also had a recent grave marked by pickets, and a trail from the river to the Indian village ran across the top.

  The mound impressed Lapham. “This turtle was then a very fine specimen of the ancient art of mound-building, with its graceful curves, the feet projecting back and forward, and the tail, with its gradual slope, so acutely pointed that it was impossible to ascertain precisely where it terminated.” He and his associate William Culley measured the mound, finding the body to be fifty-six feet long, the tail to be two hundred and fifty feet long, and the height to be six feet. When Lapham returned to examine the site in 1850, he found it “covered with buildings. A dwelling-house stands upon the body of the turtle, and a Catholic church is built upon the tail.”

  Just as, almost from the moment he arrived in Wisconsin, Lapham had urged conservation of forest trees, so he was the earliest to encourage preservation of Indian mounds. Plate XXI recorded a “very fine group” of mounds surveyed in 1850, which, he wrote, “is upon the grounds of Carroll College; and we may, therefore, hope it will be for ever preserved as a record of the past.” The turtle there measured thirty feet in the body and one hundred thirty feet in the tail. It and the other mounds have since been obliterated. Another group on a high hill east of town, consisting of “two round, four oblong, one turtle, and one bird-shaped mound,” was partly on cultivated land then and since has disappeared entirely. The three paltry conical mounds near the library alone inadequately represent what once could be found in Waukesha.

  It’s in the chapter about Waukesha, “Ancient Works Near the Pishtaka River,” that Lapham gives one of the earliest assessments of the connection between the mound builders and the recent Indian populations of Wisconsin. It’s an assessment that Haight, fifty years later, ignores in favor of “mystery.” Haight wasn’t alone; theories about the mound builders ranged widely and imaginatively, from the Aztecs—the Aztalan site in Jefferson County was so named because of that association, though the more accurate connection is with Cahokia, a Middle Mississippian site in southern Illinois—to an unidentifiable “Lost Race” or to one of “the lost tribes of Israel.” Such theories imply inferiority on the part of the “savages” the white culture displaced, which helped justify that displacement. But with his keen curiosity and analytical mind, Lapham, as Birmingham and Eisenberg point out, “saw links between the mound builders and the modern Native Americans in the types of artifacts recovered from the mounds,” particularly in his investigation of a mound in what is now downtown Waukesha. Lapham’s findings led him to declare that the “mound builders were none other than the ancestors of the present tribes of Indians.” With qualifications, his theory has since been generally accepted. Given the relentless destruction of Indian mounds in the past two centuries, where out of 15,000 to 20,000 original mounds only around 4,000 remain, the meticulous, prescient work of Increase Lapham is now the earliest primary evidence of what has been lost.

  In his wanderings to survey mounds, Lapham also witnessed one of those “great fires” Haight mentions sweeping across swaying “rank grasses.” Near Pewaukee, just north of Waukesha, Lapham encountered a prairie fire “raging through the woods about us, consuming the dry leaves and brush, and filling the air with smoke. . . . The peculiar noise made by the fire as it entered the marsh, caused by the bursting of the hollow stems of coarse grass and weeds, was very great.” It was the kind of fire that had kept the oak openings and the prairies open in the past, and would be yet another element of Wisconsin life that white settlement would eliminate.

  Settlement eliminated a great deal of Wisconsin life. Marlin Johnson notes that, prior to settlement beginning in the 1830s, the mixture of forests, prairies, oak openings, swamps, wet meadows, marshes, lakes, and streams harbored a wide variety of wild-life. Hunting, trapping, and loss of habitat swiftly reduced their numbers. The last bison in the state was killed in 1832; the last elk was seen in 1846; otter, beaver, prairie chicken, grouse, quail, wild turkeys, black bear, cougars, wolves, bobcats, lynxes—all were eliminated from the state; the passenger pigeon, which once thronged in the millions over Vernon Marsh, south on the Fox River, was slaughtered into extinction. As Johnson writes, “Most of this presettlement vegetation has now been replaced by agricultural and urban uses of the land.” It’s as if, to recall Theron Haight’s fairy tale allusion, Sleeping Beauty was awakened not by Prince Charming but by entrepreneurial hordes intent on ravaging and exploiting her.

  It didn’t take long to alter what Lapham and the surveyor John Brink and that early traveler from Milwaukee saw when they reached Prairieville in 1836. In his 1846 history of Wisconsin, Lapham reported that, due to the “descent of ten feet in the distance of half a mile,” the Pishtaka River was being “used to propel one of the largest flouring mills in the Territory.” He estimated the population to be around several hundred and noted “many new and handsome dwelling-houses . . . three hotels, five churches, an academy, a saw-mill, several stores, and a weekly newspaper,” as well as the newly established Carroll College. He also gave the numbers of barrels of flour and pork and pounds of hides exported in 1841, “valued in all at thirty-eight thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars.” Prairieville was well on its way to becoming the city of Waukesha.

  Having gleaned some sense of what the landscape once was, I should make certain, as I wander contemporary Waukesha, that I remember historic Prairieville and what was here before it. I will also need a better understanding of what came after it. A great deal of obliteration has occurred in the nearly two centuries since.

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  The point at which the Fox River descended ten feet over half a mile attracted early settlers because it promised water power for a mill around which a community could grow. Certainly Increase Lapham appreciated the location’s potential. Though he had the foresight to recommend preservation of Indian mounds and conservation of forests, he was a man of his era who came to Wisconsin because of his engineering skills. In his early travels around the territory, surveying potential routes for the Milwaukee and Rock River Canal, he also considered the possibility of an east-west canal connecting the Menomonee and Pishtaka (Fox) Rivers. Of the Pishtaka he wrote of a proposal “to improve the navigation of this river, by means of dams and locks, so as to create a slack water from its mouth, where it is connected with the Illinois and Michigan canal, as far as the rapids at Prairieville.” Lapham saw “no practical difficulty in the way of accomplishing this important work.” Between Prairieville and Elgin, Illinois, he noted, the river made “a descent of ninety-six feet, or nearly one foot per mile, on an average,” and thus “would require twelve dams, of eight feet each, and the average length of each pond would be about seven or eight miles.” His remarks sound judicious, practical and objective.

  Today the Fox River of the Illinois, as it’s generally termed, has a total of eighteen dams, three in Wisconsin, at Waukesha, Waterford, and Rochester, and fifteen in Illinois. According to the environmental group Friends of the Fox River, thirteen dams in Illinois impede the river’s flow, and most of the dams no longer serve a purpose, as they did when they powered mill
s. The dam in Waukesha principally makes Frame Park more scenic and that stretch of river more navigable for canoes and paddleboats; it also helps to flood the riverbanks most springs.

  Waukesha County can be divided into four watershed areas. A narrow portion in the northeast feeds the Menomonee River, which empties into the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan; an even narrower portion in the southeast feeds the Root River, which empties into Lake Michigan in Racine (the French word for “root”). They are east of a subcontinental divide running through the county. West of that divide, in the county’s westernmost townships, the watershed belongs to the Rock River, which joins the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois—two of its tributaries are the Oconomowoc and Bark Rivers. The central portion of the county, the part of the county where I live, is drained by the Fox River and its tributaries. The Fox begins just over the northern county line in Washington County, runs 84 miles across Waukesha, Racine, and Kenosha Counties to the Illinois line, and flows another 118 miles to the Illinois River and then on to the Mississippi.

  Most communities in Waukesha County originally sprang up around water-powered mills, usually sawmills that eventually became flour mills. In time these communities and the growth of nearby farms diverted enough water from local rivers and streams that by 1880, less than fifty years after settlement began, longtime residents noted a major decrease in the flow of streams and, in some cases, the complete loss of fish populations.