- Today we are pleased to introduce Matthew J. Prigge
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters
and are not necessarily those of
the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees.
Matthew J. Prigge is a freelance author and historian
from Milwaukee and the host of What Made Milwaukee Famous,
a weekly local history segment on WMSE 91.7.
His work has been featured in both local
and national publications and has won multiple awards
including the 2013 William Best Hesseltine Award
from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Since 2011, he has led sightseeing historical tours
of Milwaukee's rivers and harbor
for the Milwaukee Boat Line.
In 2013, he created the Mondo Milwaukee Boat Tour
an evening historical tour of some
of the city's most infamous sites.
The Milwaukee Mayhem is his second book.
He writes a history blog for Milwaukee Shepherd Express
and has also authored several articles
for the Wisconsin Magazine of History.
Here today to tell some strange, engaging,
and chilling tales from the early
and often forgotten times in Milwaukee history.
Please join me in welcoming Matthew J. Prigge.
(audience applauding)
- Thanks.
All right, good afternoon, everyone.
The sound is good?
All the corners? Oh, okay, well.
My name is Matthew J. Prigge and I'm here
to talk about my book, Milwaukee Mayhem.
It just came out a couple of months ago.
I'm going to get into some of the stories here.
I'll also talk a little bit about the process,
just talk about the book a little bit.
First off, has anybody gotten it yet?
Has anybody read it?
Oh right, my publisher. Awesome.
(audience laughing)
She's very familiar with it.
Okay, well, to let everybody else know...
This is a collection of short historical stories,
some of the stranger events in Milwaukee's history.
They're organized into categories of murder,
accidents, disaster, and vice.
So why do this, I guess, would be a good question
to start off with.
I've always been very interested in Milwaukee's history.
I've gotten a lot of things written, a lot of pieces on it
and over the last several years, I was always
coming across these odd items in the newspaper
and I didn't really know what to do with them.
So I just was kind of collecting them for a while.
And I guess really the nexus of this book
was the Mondo Milwaukee tour
that was mentioned a couple moments ago.
'Cause I do boat tours, sightseeing tours,
of the city on the rivers and the lake
and there are always these things that I looked at,
these sites, and I knew all this strange stuff that had
happened there but it really wasn't appropriate to drop
into the middle of a sightseeing tour.
So I put them all together
and I put together this weird tour talking about
famous murder sites and the red light district
and things like that and that kind of birthed
this idea here to try to put these together.
And I open up the book talking about the bridge war
in Milwaukee and some of you might be familiar with that.
That was basically the way Milwaukee is situated
there was an eastern ward and a western ward
on each side of the river.
Solomon Juneau founded the eastern ward,
a guy named Byron Kilbourn founded the western ward
and they had this really odd and intense rivalry
early on and it ended up, when they started actually
building bridges, there was this couple month period
where each side sort of took turns sabotaging
the bridges the other side preferred and after a couple
of weeks four of the five bridges in Milwaukee
had been destroyed and the people on the east side
had commandeered a cannon and pointed it
at Byron Kilbourn's home.
And the story is, anybody who's familiar
with Milwaukee's history knows this story,
and it's always told from the point of view
of east versus west and I always understood
why the two ward founders wanted to go to war
with each other, 'cause they had a lot at stake over this.
It got me thinking in terms of these stories here
was just the rabble, the people on each side.
The people who were actually destroying these bridges
and mounting canons at each other.
They'd only been there a few years.
This wasn't the Montagues and the Capulets.
All the people who'd come to this place just happened
to end up on one side of the river or the other
but it got so fevered that they were ready
to actually spill blood over these loyalties
that had just kind of developed.
And I got interested in just that rabble
'cause there's these histories of Milwaukee, either
they tell the stories of the specific founding fathers
and the business leaders or more recent ones
get into labor movements and civil rights movements.
All that's valuable and all that's good
but I got interested in people, not necessarily the people
who were fighting for an eight-hour work day,
but the people who didn't want to go to work.
Bums, drunks, prostitutes, thieves, murderers.
These people all lived here, too.
There's a story in the book about a woman
named Rosina George, she ran a dance hall
in the 1870's and was constantly being arrested
for running this hall without a permit
'cause hers was one of the few places in the city
where black and white people would drink
and dance together and she also served,
she had no restrictions on age, she served children.
And just the noise and just the unsightliness of this hall,
the city kept going after her
but she kept winning these battles.
The news articles on it say she makes a carpet
of the mayor, she walks all over him so regularly.
And she became kind of this folk hero
for just doing whatever she wanted to
regardless of what the city officials tried to do to her.
And that, she was an interesting,
somebody who always stuck with me.
And nobody ever mentions her in a history book
and she was as much a Milwaukee-an as the mayor
or the president of the common council or whoever.
So that's kind of what I'm aiming at here.
In the intro I use the term "orphans of history"
to describe these people and these stories.
The story of Rosina George or there's another
story in here on just this rash of suicides
in, I think it was 1874.
These aren't necessarily important in long-scope
histories of the city but they're interesting on their own
and the people in here were very much Milwaukee-ans.
I'm going to start out with, I'm going to read
part of one called "In a Violinist's Hands".
This is from the murder chapter
and it happened in August 1884.
Professor William Moebius, well-known classical violinist
and music instructor, stumbled out of a Grand Avenue
gambling parlor, a loaded British Bulldog revolver
in his pocket and death on his mind.
It was just past 2 p.m. on a Sunday.
As a child, Moebius had been a musical prodigy
sent to the conservatory at Dresden at age nine
and touring Prussia by age 14.
He had played in orchestras in France, Spain and Italy.
After immigrating to America, he played in New York City
and led his own orchestra in Louisville
before returning to tour the grand concert halls of Europe.
In 1879 he brought his wife and eight children to Milwaukee.
There he taught music and performed with the city's
Bach orchestra, but he also took to gambling.
A string of heavy losses forced him
into a state of horrid dejection.
Nearing the foot of the Granite Avenue bridge,
he pulled the gun from his pocket
and fired a single shot towards the dirt.
The professor was not familiar with firearms.
He had purchased the weapon and a box of ammunition
only an hour earlier from a West Water Street gun shop.
The weapon was so foreign to him that he returned
to the shop a few minutes later and asked the clerk
if he would be so kind as to load it for him.
From there, he hastened to Grand Avenue
and played his last 10 dollars.
He lost.
The volley into the ground was a practice shot.
Satisfied he could operate the piece,
he placed it to his chest and squeezed off four shots.
The gunfire drew the attention
of the midday downtown traffic.
A crowd had already begun to form around Moebius
when a nearby police detective placed
the still-breathing, greatly stunned
and entirely unharmed professor under arrest.
The gun Moebius placed to his heart with the intention
of ending his life had been filled with blanks.
The clerk who had sold Moebius the pistol
was so disturbed by the professor's peculiar behavior
in his shop that he had pocketed the bullets
Moebius had purchased and loaded the gun
with harmless imitation ammunition.
At the police station, Moebius said he appreciated
the clerk's deception and that he was glad to be alive.
He also expressed concern over a small bundle of letters
he had dropped in a mailbox just before his failed suicide.
(audience laughing)
They were addressed to various family members
and friends explaining his plight
and detailing his intention of self-murder.
Before his wife collected him at the station,
he asked if anything could be done to prevent
the letters from being delivered.
He was told there was not.
It was expected they would be delivered
sometime the next week.
So that's kind of an example of what you'll find here.
This one I think probably has the happiest ending
of all the stories in the murder chapter.
(scattered laughing)
Then again, Professor Moebius is something,
it's very, very hard to find any information on him
but he was for this one day
one of the most famous people in town.
And of course, I've gotten most of the sources
from this book come from the old newspapers.
They have proven to be an incredible resource
for putting these together.
Kind of started off just as the easiest place to go.
The old Milwaukee Sentinel papers,
for most of the 1800's, they're all indexed
very meticulously, so I was able to pick out
every murder that they reported on there.
And then through the Google news archives
I picked out a lot more and just got into pulling threads.
Using the newspaper started out as a necessity
but then, as I got further into the book,
I made the conscious decision to stick
almost exclusively with the newspapers
because I wanted to present the stories in the way
people would have absorbed them at the time.
Some of these don't necessarily have an ending
'cause some of these stories didn't really have endings.
They just sort of faded from public view.
And also the newspapers back at that time
were really, really great just to read.
They had this really florid and graphic prose
and did not shy away from anything really.
Even, I mentioned the one about the suicides,
they report on suicides, they print the addresses
where the people lived and they talked to the neighbors
and figure out the reasons as to why this happened.
Working that into this as well,
the interest in this book, I think, is nothing new
because people got it every day back then.
There was a very gossipy style to the newspaper.
That also sort of backed up this idea
that these people were, in my head,
that these people were significant in their own time
because they were, even the respectable people,
city fathers, business leaders and everything,
they got the same newspapers you can find
in the archives now and they would have been, I think,
probably just as interested in this stuff as anybody else.
So I'm going to read a part of another story
that I think really highlights
just how the newspapers talked back then
and I thought of it as this sort of trashy and
alarmist poetry of the 19th century of Milwaukee media.
This one is a story called "Mashers" from May 1881.
So it starts out where there's two girls walking home
and these two young flirts approach them
and ask them to walk them to their front door
and the father of the girls is terribly offended
and this is actually from a letter to the editor
to warn about mashing.
They said the father of these two girls was
perambulating the streets with vengeance depicted
in his countenance and a rawhide in his coat sleeve
looking for these two guys.
The insult upon the girls was the work of mashers,
young male flirts who threw their affection at female
passersby in the main commercial district of the city.
The look of the masher was one meant
for an unmistakable indication of his intentions.
He wears a jaunty little hat on one side of his head,
the Sentinel wrote, grasps a slender cane
and always carries the paraphernalia of his guild
in the shape of showy handkerchiefs,
buttonhole bouquets and other fascinating and fancy trifles.
By early evening, the paper claimed,
the streets were so thick with such brutish-looking
and fantastical apes dressed in the very latest agony,
that women could not venture out unaccompanied
without being subject to their insults.
The typical habits of these dainty darlings of the dive
was to sally forth beginning in the late afternoon
along downtown's Grand Avenue and Broadway.
Finding a pretty girl, the masher would follow
a few paces behind.
Once he was confident no male companion was nearby,
he would quicken his pace and begin his pitch
but these lifted hats and blown kisses of the masher usually
had no effect on the more respectable women of the city.
They do not reap much of a harvest,
the Sentinel claimed, until after the supper is over,
the dishes are clean and the housework done up.
When the cook's servants and chambermaids
come out to have flirtations with their social vis-à-vis.
Writing with a decidedly alarmist tone,
one article was titled "Kill the Masher".
The Sentinel noted that summer was very near
and that soon the mashers at the lake front park
would be as thick as gnats at a country cow yard.
A problem, the paper asserted, would get worse
before it got better.
(scattered laughing)
So that's, well that one's great.
One of my favorites, just the source material for that.
But that's how they wrote back then
and it was, like I said,
just the proof that just the fact that these articles
were so prevalent back then
and covered this huge period of time really
from the 1850's up into the '20s
and by the teens it's pretty well faded away.
But to me that's proof that this was what
the reading public really wanted.
When you picked up a newspaper,
you went to the gossip column or the crime page.
But the two I've read so far are on the lighter side
of what's in the book.
There's also some kind of gruesome stuff
and there were some decisions I had to make
in terms of what to cover, what to include,
what not to include.
The time span for the book.
The Cream City's first century, so 1840's to 1940's.
That was less-so to put it into a 100-year time span
and more to give it some space between anything
that might happen here in the present.
I thought, especially with some of the more gruesome
stories, it might be a little more palatable if there's
a little more time between the reader and the event.
Also it was kind of strange, I actually found myself
toning things down in places from the way
they described it in the newspapers.
One interview I'd done, someone asked me
about in terms of how race is addressed in the book.
You know there are some stories that talk
African-Americans in Milwaukee but the person said,
"Well, there's nothing about the native populations there."
And that was, aside from there just not being a lot
of material for that, also these newspapers at the time
they wrote very condescendingly about non-white people
and even within white people, certain immigrant groups.
There's that balance of trying to be true
to the source material and trying to present this well
and in kind of the raw style that they used
but also to not be too much of a downer
in any area and especially with the way
that the minorities were addressed.
Not that that's not worth looking at
but just not the direction I wanted to go here.
And the next story I'm going to read
is about a woman found in the lake, a dead body
and this one gets to, again that style of journalism
but also it speaks to another theme
that I was going at in the book, was just how
the public reacted to these things as they happened.
Crime scenes, disaster scenes.
You'll see people on the internet
talking one way or another about appropriate places
to take selfies, whether this historical site is OK
or this is not, or funerals or whatever.
Just reading about people, specifically people
in Milwaukee back then and how they reacted
when a building burned down or when somebody died
and there was a murder in the street or something.
I can assure you, if they had had the means,
there would have been selfies at these crime scenes
from those people, this is not a new phenomenon.
And if anything, I think people have gotten better about it.
But this one is called "The Woman at the Breakwater"
from June 1898.
I'm not going to read the whole thing but basically,
there's a man who rents a paddle boat
from a lakefront stand.
He has a woman with him. They go out onto the lake.
They come back in a few hours, the woman's not with him.
He says he left her at the beach.
A body washes up a few days later,
they determine that it was this unknown man
who took the woman out onto the lake,
murdered her and tied a horse hitching weight
around her waist and tossed her in the lake.
But if the police had a general idea as to how
the crime was committed, they had no clue
as to the identities of those involved.
Hundreds of Milwaukee-ans were drawn
to the display of the garments,
and I should preface here, the body fell apart
when they took it out of the water so the only
evidence they had was this horse hitching weight
and the clothes, the undergarments that the woman
was wearing, and they put them on display
at the central police station, hopefully to get someone
to come forward to break this case.
Hundreds of Milwaukee-ans were drawn to the display
of the garments including curious ones who were,
in the words of the Milwaukee Sentinel,
impelled by a morbid interest in gruesome things and
inspected the discolored garments with an evident pleasure.
Scores of tips revealed dozens of women,
either Milwaukee residents or visitors,
who could not be located by loved ones.
One woman feared the departed to be her daughter
whom she had not heard from in some time
and was quite unhappily married to a man
who had threatened on several occasions to kill her.
Another tip told of a woman
who had taken up with a married man.
When the situation turned sour, the man told a friend
of the woman that he had gave her some money
and she had left town.
The missing woman's friend suspected
he would not tell the truth.
One man told police his wife had run off on him
and was last known to be living in Milwaukee.
He asked for and was given a piece of the lace
from the underclothes found on the body.
He refused to give his name but promised to return
the next day with more information.
He was never seen again.
A Chicago man made the trip north and said the clothes
looked very similar to those owned by his wife
who had walked out on him some time ago.
Examining the teeth from the corpse, however,
he became convinced the body was not that of his wife.
He was fairly unmoved during the process,
telling the police he was merely curious
as to the identity of the body and did not care one whit
if his wife was alive or dead.
(audience laughing)
Despite the case's publicity, no positive
identification of the body was ever made.
Three days after the woman at the Breakwater
was recovered, she was buried in the Potter's field
at the county poor farm along the south bank
of the Menomonee river to be forever eulogized
as "Name Unknown".
And there are, especially through the disaster chapter,
I didn't even really intend to do it, but reading
through these as I was putting them in order,
I found that there's this theme that there's always
these huge crowds of people who gather around
when something goes terribly, terribly wrong.
This one quote that I just love came from,
they're launching a ship in Milwaukee's inner harbor,
a wooden ship, and they dropped it into the harbor.
The water displaced, rushed up onto the shore
and knocked over a viewing stand
that people were crowded onto and I think
two people drowned but the next day
everything was in ruins, the next day there were these
throngs of people everywhere and the Sentinel quoted
a peanut vendor who had set up nearby
and was doing very good business and he described
these disasters, this interest in it, he called it,
"It's an ill wind that blows nobody good."
And I think that is one of the best ways
to get at this interest in these awful things.
So dealing with this there's also,
I mentioned trying to find that balance
between what is OK to talk about
or what will fit in the book and what won't
and just to share kind of a personal story from this.
In doing these, I think there's about 80 stories
in the book but there were some that I left out
just 'cause there wasn't room or I didn't really like them
but then there were others that I started on
and never completed, and again when you're finding
these, you find this story of a missing person
and then you look into it and it turns out to be nothing.
About halfway through the process, I was looking
for some good kidnapping stories
'cause kidnapping stories usually fizzle out
and I found this one of a teenage girl
who was kidnapped in the early 1880s
and it was really interesting because she went missing
and the mother said there was some suspicious man
who'd come to their house the day before
and they were looking for this man
and they're looking for the woman or the girl,
they didn't know if she was murdered
or if she'd been kidnapped or run away or what
and I was finding this very long trail of articles,
much longer than you usually find and I found one
in the index, the card catalog of the Sentinel articles.
I changed around my search terms a little bit
and finally found one more article
after not being able to find out anything.
It was that the girl was found and she was OK.
And I remember just being like, "Oh".
(audience laughing)
I had a couple seconds there where I was just like,
(disappointed sighing) "Oh, man."
(audience laughing)
And if you deal with this for so long
and I think that might be a part of the reason
that the newspapers wrote in the tone that they did.
'Cause yeah, I did this really intensely for maybe a year
but these guys did this every day
and there's this very gossipy nature of the newspapers
and there was a very definite gallows humor that they used.
There was one, in the story about all the suicides
there was a man, he hung himself I think, I don't know
or he drowned but anyway they had the body
and they didn't know who it was
and then a couple people came forward and they said,
"Oh, it's such-and-such, we know him."
And so they printed the next day that such-and-such
was found dead, he'd killed himself
and a day later there was a news item that said
this guy had come forward, he'd taken the train
into Milwaukee, he was living somewhere in the outskirts.
He said, "Well no, this isn't me."
(audience laughing)
And the Sentinel, they mention this
and then they close the article with something like,
"Well, if he's unable to prove that the corpse
"is not his, he might be charged with perjury."
(audience laughing)
And this is still a story about a suicide.
There was also another one where,
this is from the 1850s where they found a body
in the river and it was a fairly gruesome murder.
No, they'd found a head in the river, excuse me.
And they hadn't found the rest of the body
and it was also another one of those where
I just wasn't able to follow the story through
really to the end, but they wrote about the boy,
he was boating in the river, he pulled in the head
and then the Sentinel, they closed it by saying,
"Well, we weren't able to identify the body.
"Inquests were not the order of the day."
Meaning, whoever wrote that just didn't feel like
going and finding out who it was.
So I think I've got time.
I'm going to do one more and this one--
This is a kidnapping story.
It's typical of the kidnapping stories I was able to find
and it's actually one of my favorites.
I think it's a good way to try to wrap things up.
Kind of an uplift, if you will.
So it's called "The Runaways" from September, 1898.
On a street corner near the Wells Street
train depot in Chicago,
two Milwaukee children approached a police officer.
"Take us to our Uncle Adam", John Matthews,
aged 10, told the cop.
At his side was his eight year old sister Louisa.
When the officer told the kids he had no idea
who Uncle Adam was, John offered an alternative.
"Well, take us to our Aunt Polly then."
The pair ended up at the police station.
When asked how they had come to be so far from home,
John told police they had been kidnapped.
According to the boy, the pair had been approached
at Milwaukee's Chicago Northwestern railroad depot,
the big house by the lake, as he put it,
by a well-dressed woman who asked them
if they would like to take a train ride.
They said they would and she purchased three tickets,
loaded them aboard a southbound train
and sat with them all the way to Chicago.
Upon arriving in the city, she told them
to wait at the depot, left and never returned.
The police contacted the children's frantic parents
who had not seen them since sending them off
to Sunday school that morning.
Their father, William Matthews,
rushed down to Chicago to retrieve the children
and sat with them as they recounted
their fantastic story to a Milwaukee police detective.
The children went on and on about the Chinaman
and all sorts of funny people they had seen in Chicago
and the cross woman they had encountered
at the Chicago police station who was saying horrid things
because she did not like the bread she was given to eat.
But their description of the kidnapping
was evidently lacking and both the police
and the children's parents agreed
that the pair had simply run away.
Evidently John had been punished by his mother
for lying the day before and had determined to skip town.
Police sent the kids home with their parents
who punished both for their flight to the south.
But once again, little John Matthews
felt that his penalty was undue.
The very next day, he and Louisa again walked
to the lake front depot, boarded a train and,
despite declarations that they did not like the city,
disembarked in Chicago.
There they once again claimed to have been kidnapped
and were held at the police station to await their father.
Mr. Matthews had no idea how the children
had managed to make the trip twice without paying
and without drawing the suspicion of any adults aboard.
He told the newspapers that his son
was likely next bound for an industrial school.
(audience laughing)
And I brought one more along, so I think we'll do that one.
We've got a couple minutes here at the end
and then a little bit of time here and then we'll do
some questions before we get to the book signing.
This one is from the vice chapter.
I don't think I read anything from there.
Well, the mashers would have come from the vice chapter
but this one's also from the vice chapter
and charting the vice chapter, there's these alarms,
these panics that happen like clockwork.
Basically, "What's wrong with kids these days?"
That goes back probably as far as there's been children
but this one is from January 1922
and it's called "With Bells On".
The most recent fashion accessory
of the Milwaukee flapper was causing concern
among school officials in the city.
Flappers, a teenaged army of pretty girls
with bobbed hair, short dresses and rouged faces,
per the Milwaukee Journal, were known
for their slinky sex appeal and alluring perfumes.
But this new trend was drawing attention
for more than just the eyes and nose.
The most chic of the flappers set was now
adorning her outfits with small, jingling bells
whose tinkle accommodates her promenade.
By the time these jingling flappers
were set loose on summer vacation,
the Journal was already declaring that 1922
would go down as the year of the great flapper controversy.
At 14, they look like grown women did before the war.
At 17, they can pass for 24, the paper wrote.
If you were a high school boy,
you say they have snap and make keen dates
and you were proud to walk down the street
with one hanging on your arm.
Of course, it was not high school boys who were
worrying so loudly about these girls and their snap.
The mobility and independence of the flappers
seemed to some a fast road bound to ruin.
Milwaukee flappers found idols at the movies
and dressed to mimic their favorite female stars.
They went with boys who drove fast cars,
went to dance halls and road houses
and spent the money of their companions,
or even their own as many were,
on cold drinks and hot jazz.
The Journal talked to one young girl
who had just the night before been out
until 3 am at a country road house.
The reporter asked if there was
any adult supervision to her night out.
"What did we want of a chaperone?" the flapper spat.
"We knew the boys, and anyway,
"a girl can take care of herself."
The reporter found another girl
who was also familiar with the back roads.
"Do boys take liberties with me?
"Not so you can notice," she told the man.
"If I like a boy pretty well, I let him kiss me
"if he wants to, and of course he always wants to.
"If I don't like him, nothing doing."
Seeing that the Journal man was taken aback by her
attitude towards what had once been
a fairly verboten subject, she continued, "Why not?
"If you like boys, why not let them know it?
"Why not have a good time as you go along?
"There'll be trouble enough later on,
"any movie will show you that."
Despite the somewhat shocking behavior
the Journal man uncovered, he was less alarmed
by the flapper than others.
"So why not let the flappers flap if they want to?"
he asked his readers.
"Their momentary eccentricities probably are
"far more harmless than we choose to believe."
As far as the flapper's jingling dresses,
school officials said they would probably move
to ban bells from acceptable student clothing.
Their accompaniment, it's said,
had a tendency to distract the boys
from more serious matters.
(audience laughing quietly)
So if anybody has any questions now
I'm happy to open things up.
(audience applauding)
Oh, thank you.