cc  >> Welcome, ladies and  gentlemen, to History Sandwiched  In by the Wisconsin Historical  Society and Museum.  We're very pleased today to have  Mike Goc, who is, what I  consider, a very well-known  expert on natural areas in  Wisconsin and specifically here  to talk today about the Sauk  area and give us some more  details on that.  So if we could please welcome  Mike, I'd greatly appreciate it.  (applause)  >> Mike Goc: Well, thank you  all for coming here.  >> Your mic is not on.  >> Goc: Oh, the mic is not on.  How's that?  Is the mic on?  >> Now it's on.  >> Goc: It's green now.  It's green.  That is appropriate. 

 Well, yes, actually this is a  good time to talk about this  since we're thinking about Earth  Day, and the inspiration for  this talk, of course, is one of  our most prominent modern  environmentalists, a man named  Bill McKibben who, 20 years ago,  wrote a book called  "The End of Nature."  And he pointed out that after  nearly two centuries of  industrialization, particularly  in the western world but  actually globally, that there  really was no place left on  earth that was not affected by  human activity.  Of course it was one of the  early popular calls for  recognition of climate change,  global warming, and it left an  impression on me, I must say,  because I live in a rural area  up in Adams County.  I have my own little bit of  heaven there on 80 acres of  woods and marsh, and I like to  think that some of it was  untouched.  But, of course, it wasn't.  And I've also been a student of  Wisconsin history for about 30  years.  And McKibben's idea started me  thinking about how we have, in  Wisconsin, been manipulating,  managing, altering our  environment, our landscape, for  really, well actually for  centuries.  But, particularly, of course  since settlement beginning in  the 1820s-1830s.  So that is how this talk came  about.  And what I'm going to talk  about today are some instances  of how we brought about the end  of nature in Wisconsin.  Now, of course, the conventional  definition here of what we're  talking about, when nature ends,  or what is natural or  what isn't in terms of our  landscape is, we think of it,  it is natural if it existed  prior to the European American  settlement of our area, which,  again, is 1820s-1830s in the  southern part of the state,  '70s-'80s in the northern part  of Wisconsin. 

 And however that definition, of  course, does ignore the fact  that Native Americans have been  living here for thousands of  years, and have been managing  the environment for almost as  long, if not from the very  beginning.  Particularly in the management  of grasslands in the southern  part of Wisconsin, it was a  human managed, if not created,  landscape.  Grasslands, in order to survive,  and the southern part of  Wisconsin was a predominately  grassland environment, prairie  and oak savanna and some  stretches farther north pine  savanna, it requires a fire.  And fire usually requires  people.  In order to maintain a prairie  in this part of the country, a  grassland has to burn about once  every 10 years.  Well, the Sauk Prairie that I'm  going to talk about that this  is, well not really a photo of  but a prairie species, started  to evolve about 6,000 years ago.  Climate conditions were correct.  Things dried up a little bit.  It was harder for trees to grow.  The geology was correct. 

 And I'm particularly going to  talk about the Sauk Prairie  which if you've ever traveled up  highway 12 north of Sauk City,  you know it's that beautiful  stretch of ground that's  bordered by the Wisconsin River  to the east and the south, and  those beautiful bluffs of the  driftless zone on the west, and  to the north, of course, are the  hills of the Baraboo range.  Sauk Prairie started to evolve,  as I said, about 6,000 years  ago.  14,000 acres.  600 different plant species  evolve there in that time.  About a hundred different types  of birds.  And numerous other little  critters.  Reptiles, amphibians, of course  mammals as well.  That system, that prairie  system, survived intact, managed  by natives who burned it on a  regular basis, survived intact  until 1838, we can date it  pretty precisely, when a fellow  named William Johnson, Billy  Johnson, he outlived everybody  on the prairie so he eventually  became Uncle Billy Johnson when  he was 90 years old, but he was  a young man in 1838 when he  brought a breaking plow,  primitive, old fashioned plow  that he loaded in a canoe, if  you can imagine this, put in a  canoe, paddled it across the  Wisconsin River at Sauk City,  and then he also swam some oxen  across.  And he left an entertaining  account of what it was like to  try and get oxen to swim across  the Wisconsin River.  But he got them across and it  was in the fall of 1838 and he  got up to the prairie north and  east of Sauk City/Prairie du  Sac, and he ran a great big  furrow around, just one furrow. 

 It took him a couple of days to  do it because he actually  claimed a lot of land.  And that was his claim.  He couldn't buy the land yet, it  hadn't been surveyed.  That was his squat and he said,  this is mine.  And when he turned that furrow,  what he did, of course, it was  the equivalent of cutting a  redwood.  That he brought about the end of  this prairie environment, this  prairie landscape, that had been  there evolving for 6,000 years.  He, of course, was just a rather  primitive one, as I said.  His plow wasn't very much.  Actually it was very similar to  the plow probably that Thomas  Jefferson or George Washington  used.  But later on, it didn't take  long, a couple years later two  ambitious Swiss immigrants,  Oswald and Henry Ragatz,  arrived, and they claimed 640  acres in the western part of the  prairie, and they bought a  30-inch breaking plow. 

 Now this was the type of plow  that John Deere had just  developed down in Illinois.  This also, it was called a  breaking plow but it could have  been called the prairie killer.  There it is.  There's one variety of it.  It turned a 30-inch furrow, now  think of this, 30 inches or so.  This thing was powerful enough  to cut through those prairie  roots, the grasses, the roots of  all those plants and flip that  thing 30 inches.  Now, of course, it took him a  while to do that.  They didn't do anymore than  several acres, at the most, a  day.  And they left an account.  As you can see, it took a lot of  oxen as a matter of fact. 

 This is not the Ragatz but it is  a breaking plow.  Oxen were the preferred species  for this because they were  strong and slow and steady and  they would work harder.  You'd burn horses out doing  this.  In fact, there's a way to chart  development of farming in a  frontier area just by knowing,  watching when the oxen go and  the horses come.  You can just look at census  records and can you say the  prairie is broken or the ground  is broken.  Well, here's an account that one  of the Ragatz brothers left of  what it took of how they broke  this prairie.  "We usually took a 10- to  20-acre patch and plowed around  and around it, working toward  the center.  The grass and underbrush often  came up to my shoulders as I  trudged alongside the oxen.  The roots clung tenaciously to  the soil.  And every inch was a hard pull,  often a struggle. 

 But furrow by furrow we  triumphed over the wilderness.  This being virgin land, we  disturbed innumerable moles,  field mice and snakes.  The latter did not like to cross  plowed land so always retreated  into the dwindling, grassy  centerpiece.  There were bull snakes, blue  racers, six and more feet long,  rattlesnakes, milk snakes, blow  snakes, and copper snakes, in  fact, snakes and snakes.  They gave both the oxen and us  much trouble.  It was only after I came out to  victory in a 15-minute contest  with an enormous blue racer, in  which I had nothing but a  three-foot stick to defend  myself with, that I overcame my  fear of them.  Thereafter, snake-killing was a  great sport for me."  Now snakes are not cute and  cuddly so it's hard for us to  empathize with them sometimes.  But think of these critters,  these animals.  Their environment is being  destroyed slowly, inexorably, as  these oxen are slowly moving  around.  And they're coming closer and  they're always retreating into  the grass. 

 Then of course the guy who is  steering the plow eventually  gets up enough nerve to kill  them with a club.  And in this the snakes are  symbolic.  When the snakes go, of course,  the prairie is gone.  14,000 acres went very quickly  there on the Sauk Prairie,  thousands more across southern  Wisconsin.  By 1860 the Sauk Prairie was  producing quality wheat and  flour, enough that a farmer  there won the gold medal at the  Wisconsin State Fair.  And actually that same year,  1860, Wisconsin was the number  one wheat growing state in the  Union.  Now who would think that  Wisconsin is a wheat grower.  But that's the way it was and  that was after these prairies  were broken all through the  southern part of the state.  Well, the wheat didn't last for  long.  By the 1870s, 1880s it was done  and we made that slow switch to  the dairy farming, and by 1910  of course, Wisconsin  was the dairy state. 

 Of course, this was going on.  Excuse me a minute, let me take  a sip.  So while this was going on in  the southern part of the state,  in the northern part of the  state changes to the environment  were also occurring.  At work up in the northern part  of Wisconsin, just about  anywhere, if you drew a line  across the state from Sheboygan  to Fond du Lac to La Crosse,  just about anywhere in that part  of the state, what I call is the  machine that ate the north woods  was at work.  The pioneer pine lumbering  business was the first big  business in Wisconsin.  It was ultimately worth millions  of dollars even in 19th century  money.  And it required, just like any  modern industrial enterprise  does and did at the time,  required the accumulation of  capital for investment.  It required the hiring and  managing of a workforce of  thousands or more.  It required acquisition of  resources, land and lumber, and  the establishment of mills,  industrial enterprises.  It required marketing and  transportation, not just on a  national, on a international  basis. 

 This was big business, the first  one to come in Wisconsin.  When they started logging,  seriously logging after the end  of the Civil War in northern  Wisconsin, they concentrate on  white pine.  It was the easiest log to move,  the most marketable and there  was plenty of it.  White pine.  It was estimated there were 130  billion board feet of white pine  in Wisconsin at the end of the  Civil War.  Now you think a board foot  is 12 inches by 12 inches  by an inch thick.  That's one board feet.  There were 130 billion of them.  No wonder how they thought  they'd never run out, it would  never end.  But of course, they did. 

 There were numerous, numerous  "sawdust cities," as they were  called, numerous instances of  the biggest, fastest, largest  sawmill in the world.  It was either in Oshkosh or it  was in Wausau or it was in  Eau Claire or Menomonie,  briefly the biggest mill  in the world was in  Menomonie on the Red Cedar River  west of Eau Claire.  It belonged to  the Knapp-Stout Company.  This is Stout of the patron of  University of Wisconsin at  Stout, by the way, in Menomonie.  Anyway, the main mill of  Knapp-Stout back in the 1870s  could cut 300,000 board feet of  pine a day.  Now that is the equivalent of a  one by 12 board.  One by 12, 57 miles long.  One day's cut, 57 miles.  So if you took eight days' cut  and you put a one by 12 at the  state line in Kenosha and you  traveled up the interstate and  just lined up one by 12 boards,  you go to Milwaukee, you go to  Madison, you go to Tomah, you  get up to Eau Claire, you get  all the way to Superior, 418  miles as the DOT tells me,  that's the equivalent of eight  days' cut.  From one mill in Wisconsin. 

 In one season this one mill, the  whole interstate could be a  plank road.  And as I said, that was only  one.  I said when they started in the  late 1860s they had 130 billion,  they estimated, board feet of  white pine.  By the time they really stopped,  they thought they didn't have  enough anymore, they couldn't  move them or handle them  economically, by 1897 they had  only 17 billion board feet left.  Now I still think that's a lot  but think of how much they took  out.  And that was just one species,  white pine.  Now in terms of changing their  environment, changing the  landscape, they, of course, had  to move the logs, move the logs  to these mills, and the easiest  way to do it was put them in a  river.  So one observer said that God  made Wisconsin for logging  because he laid out rivers up in  the pinery and those rivers all  conveniently ran south and west  to where sawmills could be  located and the logs could be  moved.  In order to move these logs to  market, the environment, the  landscape, was changed through  the construction of dams to  steer the logs, to hold water in  lakes so that the logs could be  stacked on them, on the ice, and  when spring came and the water  rose in the lake, the cock would  be opened, the stop boards would  be pulled out of the dam and  down they would run to the mill.  It was another, again, in  addition to the logging that  changed this whole northern  Wisconsin environment, just the  manipulation of waterways turned  lakes into marshes and marshes  into lakes, turned rivers into  less free-flowing than they  were. 

 Well, of course, everything  comes to an end, as we know, and  as I said, the pioneer white  pine logging ended by the turn  of the last century.  And there was all this capital  invested in northern Wisconsin  and industrialists were really  wondering, what do we do with  our money?  Well, technology came along.  1880s, two bits of new  technology came along that  helped these industrialists out.  The first was the introduction,  the development, of wood pulp  papermaking.  Previously paper had been made  out of rags and old scraps.  It was very precious, it was  high quality, but they developed  a technology of using logs,  using lumber, and now the logs  that were low grade, weren't as  valued in the pine logging days,  were suddenly very useful.  We're talking birch that wasn't  highly valued.  We're talking about jack pine,  red pine, fir, spruce.  They could be turned into paper.  And the infrastructure was  already there in terms of  sawmills. 

 In fact, on the site in the  1890s-1900s, exactly where  pioneer sawmills were built  anywhere up and down the  Wisconsin River valley, in the  Fox River Valley, less so in the  Chippewa and other rivers,  particularly in Wisconsin here,  a paper mill was built.  The other new technology that  came along about that time was  the development of  hydroelectricity.  1880s that first electric plant  was built at Appleton and then  proliferated.  In fact, dams to generate  electricity were built at every  water power site, in fact it  became such a fad to do this,  not just in Wisconsin but across  the United States, that the term  used was hydromania.  That dams were built, and I can  just recite the Wisconsin, at  every water power site.  At Nekoosa, Wisconsin Rapids,  Plover, Stevens Point, Mosinee,  Wausau, in numerous small,  Merrill, Rhinelander, all the  way up and down there were  hydropower plants to generate  electricity, paper mills to  utilize the wood and also, by  the way, to utilize that  electricity.  Now, the problem with using  water either to make paper or to  move logs or to generate  electricity is that rivers go up  and down, they flood in the  spring they dry up in the  summer, they freeze over in  Wisconsin in the winter.  And so a group of industrialists  got together in 1907 in Wausau,  and they chartered a company  called the Wisconsin Valley  Improvement Company.  Isn't that a wonderful word?  Improvement.  We got to improve on nature. 

 And they created, they were  chartered by the state and their  purpose was to create as uniform  a flow as practicable, as they  called it, in the Wisconsin  River.  And they did that by proposing a  creation of a set of reservoirs  that they would build on these  old logging dams that were built  by the pioneer loggers and turn  them into dams, improve dams  that would hold water so that in  the winter when the rivers dried  up, they could release water  down and run the mills and run  the hydro plants.  That floodwater would not be  wasted, as they called it, my  goodness, it was running all the  way to the Mississippi,  we couldn't use it,  but if they dammed it.  And to give you an idea of how  much water, these numbers, we  always throw a lot of billions  around in this conversation  here.  They estimated, let's see above  Merrill, Merrill is, I'm sorry  my map's a little fuzzy here,  Merrill is right about there and  all of that, we're talking about  Vilas County, Oneida county,  that big beautiful Wisconsin  Lake country, they estimated  that if they built all the dams  that they had wanted to build,  and they did by the way, they  could hold 19.2 billion  cubic feet of water  which would be enough to flood  the entire state by a foot and a  half.  Put a foot and a half of water  over the whole of the state.  That was in 1907.  Well, they got their charter,  they built the dams and then  they continued to build dams.  This is the dam constructed on  the Wisconsin for the Rainbow  Reservoir.  If you're familiar with the  north, with the Wisconsin River  valley, this is a nice big,  well, we like to call it a lake  but it's not really a lake,  it's a reservoir, and it's  about half again,  as big as Lake Mendota. 

 These ladies are standing on the  inside.  This is the reservoir side of  it.  Dams continued to be constructed  through the '20s and the '30s  and also on other Wisconsin  rivers they were built all the  way down.  Let's see, you come down to the  Wisconsin Dells to the Prairie  du Sac dam that was one of the  last ones built in the 1940s.  It creates what we call Lake  Wisconsin, which of course is a  reservoir for power generation.  And by the time they had to  stop, budding environmental  movement thanks to Gaylord  Nelson and others, by the time  they stopped, they were holding  up, they could control  41 billion cubic feet of water.  Now if we multiply that out  that's enough to put three feet  of water, roughly, over the  entire state.  And the Wisconsin River, of  course, became known as the  hardest working river in the  world.  As they touted it in the 1950s.  And if you ever take a canoe  trip down the lower Wisconsin  River way and you get out of  your boat, say, at Spring Green  and you step on to the sand bar,  it might be ankle-deep water, it  might be knee-deep water, it  changes, of course, because of  rainfall and weather, but also  it changes because the necessity  to hold the water in the river  all the way up as far north as  the Michigan line at Lac Vieux  Desert, which is, of course, the  source of the Wisconsin. 

 Again, the end of nature.  Improvement companies, of course  the Wisconsin Improvement  Company was the first and the  largest, but there's an improve  company on the Wolf, improvement  company on the Chippewa, all the  big rivers.  In fact, if you remember a  couple years back when the movie  Titanic was popular, the hero  came from Wisconsin.  Remember he came from Chippewa  Falls, and he said he swam in  Lake Wissota.  Which is a flowage, the  reservoir built upstream from  Chippewa Falls.  And it's called Lake Wissota  because it was built by the  Wisconsin-Minnesota Power  Company.  It's not a lake, of course, it's  another one of those flowages.  Well, moving on here, we're  talking about more of the end of  nature in Wisconsin.  And actually when he think about  the end of nature in Wisconsin,  how can you not talk about  Wisconsin Dells.  But what I'm talking about here  is something again we go back a  hundred years or so ago, and new  technology was coming in terms  of that paper-making equipment  that I talked about and also in  terms of hydroelectricity, but  also the automobile became  popular in the United States. 

 In fact, if there was  hydromania, there certainly was  automania.  Just, again, numbers help  sometimes, 1916 Wisconsin had  125 licensed automobiles.  I like that.  Think of before World War I.  However, 10 years later,  Wisconsin had 650,000 licensed  automobiles.  Now, you know we've lived  through the adoption of  technologies.  We all adopted PCs in the '80s  and '90s, and we all adopted  cell phones in the last 10 years  or so, and I wonder if we  adopted that technology any  faster than our grandparents or  our great-grandparents adopted  the technology of the  automobile.  Well, one of the spin-offs of  it, logical for Wisconsin Dells,  logical for Wisconsin, is  tourism.  That the 1920s saw the birth of  automobile tourism.  Traditionally, if you wanted go  some place, and people came to  the Wisconsin Dells from the  Civil War period on, you got on  a train and you stayed in a  hotel and you stayed maybe for a  week or two, but by the 1920s  you had a car. 

 You could travel to Wisconsin  Dells or you could travel to  this particular place, Lake  Delton.  Lake Delton, of course, is  another one that became famous a  couple of years ago, remember we  all saw it on TV when the dike  washed away and that nice house  washed into the water.  Here's that dike when it was  built about 1928.  The area that washed away is  around here because this is the  dam over here that made the  lake.  A fellow by the name of William  Newman, he was a contractor from  Chicago, one of those guys,  contractor from Chicago.  Incidentally, he made his money  as an excavator helping to  reverse the flow of the Chicago  river.  And we've got that problem now  with those fish so we can blame  him for this too.  Anyway, he came to Wisconsin  Dells and noticed Dell Creek,  Dell Creek is the creek if  you've ever been to Mirror Lake  State Park, Mirror Lake is Dell  Creek dammed.  And down stream of Mirror Lake,  Dell Creek ran and it really was  a good pioneer water power site  because there were several small  dams built on it.  And before it entered the  Wisconsin River, there was a big  wetland, 200-300 acres, and  Newman looked at it and said,  I've got a drag line and I can  make a lake. 

 So he built a dam, he built the  dike, and created about a  264-acre lake, but he also did a  few other things, things that  we're familiar with now but were  brand new in the 1920s.  He decided to create a modern  multipurpose recreational  community.  He built a grand hotel, the Dell  View.  You could come and stay there.  American plan.  He was up-to-date.  He advertised farm-raised food.  You could look out your window  and see where the chickens were  raised that you had on your  dinner.  He was right in tune with the  time today.  Free range chickens, although he  didn't call them that. 

 He had a water park.  He had the first, as a matter of  fact, the first water slide in  the Dells, ran into Lake Delton.  He had a golf course, of course,  it was the 1920s.  He had a little stadium where  rodeos and circuses could  perform.  6,000 people in this stadium  could come.  He didn't build it but there was  a night club right across the  road where, it was Prohibition  and if you wanted adult  entertainment you went over to  the Purple Grackle it was  called.  Contemporary with his time, he  even built a little airport  there at Lake Delton.  And to advertise the whole  development, he bought a copy of  the airplane that Lindbergh flew  across the Atlantic.  A copy of the Spirit of St.  Louis, a -- airplane. 

 And he used it to fly around,  and people would look at it and  it would say Lake Delton  Development Company on the side.  Now that was the most  recognizable airplane in history  to that time.  Anybody who looked up at that  airplane said, ah, Lindbergh.  And another thing that Newman  did, he divided the shore of  that lake into lots and sold  them for second home development  to people who would drive up,  the first weekenders in  Wisconsin, who would travel.  And he marketed it particularly  in Chicago.  But also in Milwaukee, but  particularly his target was  those big city folks who would  be willing to drive on two-lane  highway 12 through Rockford,  through Madison, to get to Lake  Delton, their little spot on the  lake, have their lake lot.  Well, it lasted for a while,  very briefly '27, '28, '29, we  know what happened in 1929, '30,  '31, '32, the Depression hit.  It was like the subprime.  The subprime bubble burst even  though it wasn't necessarily  interest rates.  It was a case of, of course, the  economy tanked and he could not  sell those lots anymore and the  whole recreational community  just died. 

 It was postponed actually  because everything kicked off  again after World War II.  And if were the smart enough in  1950 you could buy a lake lot on  Lake Delton, frontage on that  lake, for $150, for the cheapest  one which is probably just  access up in the hill, or right  on the water for 1500 bucks.  1950.  So this lasted.  And of course Lake Delton, in  case anybody is curious, Lake  Delton has been rebuilt, the  dike has been rebuilt, it's all  charged up and you can go up  there again if you want.  I'm talking about a dust storm  here so I have to wet my  whistle.  Well also in the 1930s, of  course we know it was the  Depression that knocked out the  Lake Delton development, also,  of course, hurt farming.  And in that same period, 1933,  1934, '35, and '36, the weather  pattern in the central part of  the United States became  extraordinarily dry, dry and  hot.  We know of the dust storms in  the dry period, particularly in  Kansas, Oklahoma, but also  occurred in Wisconsin, and  particularly affected that area  of the state that is most like  the dry plains of the west, the  central sands region.  This is the area of Adams  County, Waushara County, part of  the Wood, Portage Counties, in  particular. 

 The central sands region that is  known, agricultural scientists  call this, some of the soil  there, not all of it, the soil  known as Plainfield sand, as the  poorest medium for agriculture  in Wisconsin.  It is sandy, it is duney.  In fact, if Wisconsin did not  get 30-some inches of rain in  every year, this part of our  state would look like southern  Utah, Arizona, New Mexico.  It was settled late because if  you could pick land just about  anywhere in Wisconsin, you  didn't go there.  Well in '33, '34, as I said, '36  was hot, the record for the  hottest temperature in Wisconsin  is in Wisconsin Dells, which is  just near this area, and it was  112 degrees in July of 1936.  Previous to that in May of 1934,  this is the time of year early  spring until it rains, this  light soil is very much prone to  blow.  And on the night of May 9-May  10, a wind came out of the  northwest and it picked up a  million tons of sand, was  estimated, out of the central  sands of Wisconsin.  20,000 acres lost a foot of  soil.  Think of that, a foot of soil  blown off.  There are photos of the sand in  drifts like snow. 

 This is a colossal, really,  continental storm, that one.  Did its damage here in  Wisconsin.  But this is also the storm that  blew across the United States  and when Franklin Roosevelt sat  down to dinner in the White  House on the evening of May 9,  or by the time it finally got  there, he looked out his window  and saw the dust cloud blowing  across.  And, supposedly, it's a nice  story, supposedly he resolved to  do something about it.  Here in Wisconsin there's one  thing we have to be proud of,  another good story for the month  of Earth Day, is our University  of Wisconsin system and the  Conservation Department decided  that they would use the  available technology that they  knew of and convince farmers in  this central sands region to  plant trees, to plant trees in  wind breaks, shelter belts, as  they were called in those days.  And one of the fellows was a  university extension professor,  a guy named Fred Trink.  And he became known as Pine Tree  Freddy in the central sands area  because he was able to convince  farmers in seven Wisconsin  counties to, by the time World  War I, the United States got  involved in World War I in 1941,  between '35 and 1941 Wisconsin  farmers in those counties  planted 3,300 miles of shelter  belts.  Those are rows of trees and many  of them had to be planted more  than once because the trees died  in that hot year of 1936 and  later.  It was a complete flip in how  farmers thought about their land  that they actually could take  steps to preserve the soil.  And this was the first one of  its kind in the United States. 

 And it lasted, again thousands  of miles of shelter belts,  lasted until the 1960s in the  advent of irrigated agriculture  in that area.  Those big center pivots need at  least a quarter mile, if not  more, of clear ground to spin,  and shelter belts were planted,  ideally, every quarter mile.  So they're just about all gone  now.  Like the prairie of 150 years  ago.  I've often thought that I should  find one, one of the original  plantings and do my best to save  it and put a plaque on it, but  one of those things I never get  around to doing.  But again, it's the one in all  of these terms of environmental  change here's one that was  positive.  Something preserved rather than  lost.  Now here we're back to where we  started.  We're back on the Sauk Prairie.  This doesn't look like the Sauk  Prairie, of course, but it is. 

 This is actually the  nitroglycerin plant at the  Badger Army Ammo Plant.  Badger Ordinance, as it was  known during World War II.  Built for the war in 1942.  10,500 acres of that prairie  were taken to build this  armaments plant.  It produced, during World War  II, it ran for about two years,  produced propellant for  artillery shells, for the M1  rifle, for machine guns, all of  the armament that was used in  World War II, activated again in  Korea, and was most active  during the Vietnam period.  In fact, Badger ran for 10 years  during Vietnam.  It produced almost, I want to  say, yes, it was the largest  producer of ammunition for the  M16 rifle, that was the rifle  for the infantry men in Vietnam.  It produced what they called  rocket motors.  The propellant that went into  the rockets that were fired by  the helicopters that were,  again, the signature weapon of  the Vietnam era.  Of course it took out, how  things go here, a hundred years  previous, the farmers that I  talked about earlier, destroyed  that 6,000 year old prairie,  Badger Ordinance came along a  hundred years later and  destroyed a good number of those  farms, about a hundred of them. 

 Badger continued to operate, as  I said, until 1975.  Production stopped when the  United States wound down our  commitment in Vietnam in '75.  The plant sat idle through the  '70s and the '80s and into the  '90s.  And during the Clinton  Administration, if you remember,  there was this big base and  military facilities  decommissioning and  deacquisitioning, as the federal  government talks about it, and  so in 1998 the federal  government decided to get rid of  Badger.  And there's been a process for  12 years now, the discussion has  gone on, exactly how to finally  dispose of it.  And it's working, but it's  taking its time.  One of the things, though, that  happened before it was decided  to take it out of federal  control, in 1998 a conservation,  let's see, the Wisconsin  Department of DNR ornithologist,  a wonderful guy by the name of  Mike Mossman, got into the  Badger Plant and did a survey, a  walking survey.  Badger, of course, was idle all  these years.  There, of course, were 1400  buildings over the property but  a lot of vacant land.  And Mike got out there and every  morning for five weeks he walked  a grid pattern across, back and  forth as a scientist would,  listening to what he heard every  morning. 

 In that five weeks he walked 42  miles, and he discovered that  Badger had become the home of 95  grassland birds.  95 species of grassland birds.  That some that are endangered.  Certainly, many that no longer  can survive on the farms around  Badger are living on that  property.  They're there now of course.  Birds like Upland sandpiper,  Eastern Meadowlark, this one  here, I wish I had an Audubon  painting but I don't.  And other birds that do not  survive or have difficulty  surviving on farmland, on that  old prairie that's converted to  farmland, are now striving at  Badger.  It's interesting how, it's what  I call the DMZ phenomenon.  The demilitarized zone that  separates North and South Korea  is a few miles wide and because  the army, no one has been there  much for years, it is a  fantastic wildlife refuge.  In fact, many of the cranes, we  love cranes in the Wisconsin  because of the Crane Foundation  in Baraboo, well there are  cranes that survive no place  else. 

 They're there in the DMZ but we  have our own version of that at  Badger.  So we come full circle here on  how we have manipulated and  changed our environment here in  Wisconsin.  And, for me, the question I  always think about, or lesson if  there is to be a lesson, is that  we should not worry about  whether nature ended or didn't  end or what is natural or what  isn't but accept the fact that  we are responsible and take  responsibility for it.  Thank you.  (applause)