Wisconsin Stories
is a partnership of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin
and Wisconsin Public Television.
(traditional Native music)
[Eddie Benton-Banai] There's a great deal in our history
that talks about Wisconsin.
We knew these lands. We knew these rivers.
We knew these lakes very very well.
Phrase as "Wisconsin River," that's really taken from
what we named the river or Wishkonsing River,
the twisting turning river.
And in that description, it must have been
a huge beautiful, just an absolutely--
Ah, God, it must have been so tremendous.
It's, ah, mighty.
It's just powerful...
Ah! Beautiful.
- The history of a state is more than names and dates and events.
History is a story of change,
in what was to what is. Its beginning is beyond memory
and it has no end, because change never stops.
It is a continuous present.
But our history has carried us to now
and we can only understand who we are
by recognizing the changes that have occurred in this place,
that is Wisconsin.
The changing people who have lived here
and the changing ways they have lived their lives.
The history of Wisconsin began long before there was a Wisconsin,
long before the arrival of the people
who would give it that name.
Thousands upon thousands of years of history,
before we even began a century and a half,
we now consider cause for celebration.
The continuous present, shifting, transforming,
unrelenting, molding us into what we have become,
what we are still becoming.
We are who we are because of this place we call home.
(music)
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And now, Wisconsin Stories.
There is a place in Wisconsin called
"The Point of Beginning."
That seems like a good place to begin this story of our state.
The Point of Beginning is the spot where
the very first survey began that divided Wisconsin
into towns and ranges and sections.
The numbers determined by that survey
are what you see on a deed
describing the exact location of the property.
But while we knew The Point of Beginning was the zero zero spot
from which all those numbers began,
we somehow lost track of the marker itself.
That was until Bill Wambach decided it was important enough
that we ought to find it.
- I'm a registered land surveyor, so I'm obviously interested.
I got sent out to Madison to write an article
about the public land survey.
And while I was there the thought occurred to me,
I wonder where this started from?
And I asked the lady in the library
and she gave me Book 1.
And when I opened it, I copied down what Lucius Lyon,
who was Commissioner for the survey,
said that he had set a post and raised a mound of Earth
6 feet square at the base and six feet high.
And so I thought, "Gee whiz, you know, "I gotta go
"and look for that sometime," because six feet high!
There must be some part of that mound here.
And so we knew it was about a half a mile
from Highway 80 into here.
And we came out here, the weeds were up over our head
and I've got a picture of my friend up a tree here,
you know, looking for where in the dickens is the fence?
And then we cut away the weeds
and came and found the fence line, the north-south fence line.
We commenced digging and we were digging
more than, you know, hour and a half, two hours,
when we got all excited because we found some rotten wood.
We thought, "Yeah, we found the wooden post!"
We cut a sliver off to get the wood tested.
Drove off to Madison.
Dropped it at the Forest Products Lab.
Back came the answer that it was arbor vitae,
a previous power pole, so we came back
when we could find a weekend that was free.
Oh! That's it. Same blasted thing.
And that ain't all that happened,
when the third time, probably about over here four feet.
When they did this road,
they probably graded out some of the earth
where the mound was and maybe the whole doggone post itself.
Every measurement, all our maps are based on this point,
right here now.
- Not many people know
about The Point of Beginning which is kind of ironic
because it represents a pivotal moment in Wisconsin history.
To understand how pivotal, it is necessary
to recognize what had occurred in this land
before it was surveyed.
Only then will it make sense when we say that
even though statehood was still 16 years in the future,
The Point of Beginning is where Wisconsin was born.
Where one world began to change into another,
but no world totally ends.
And if we know where to look
remnants of earlier worlds remain
right beneath our feet.
(music)
Before there were people in this place
there was the land
and the land too has a history of change,
millions of years of change with water and wind and ice,
especially ice, sculpting the landscape
that we know today.
Beneath our feet,
written upon the land are the details of its history
waiting patiently to be deciphered
by people like geographer Jim Knox.
- We once believed there were four major times of glaciation
in the last few million years.
We now know there have been
multiple glacial advances and retreats.
How many? We don't know, but many.
And Wisconsin is sitting right in the middle of all of this action.
The interesting thing is,
is we have in the middle of this map
that shows glaciations extending as far south
as the southern boundary of Illinois, down to Kentucky.
Here we have this massive area in the Upper Mississippi Valley
that escaped glaciation.
This is known as the Driftless Area.
It represents more than 10,000 square miles
of mostly southwestern Wisconsin.
It's the only place in the world
that we have in the middle of a continent,
that there was extensively glaciated.
Here's an unglaciated area.
The obvious question is,
"Why do we have this world-famous Driftless Area?"
Lake Superior is a 2,000-foot-deep lake
and that deep depression in the landscape
channeled the ice flow to the west away from Wisconsin
and it channeled into Minnesota downward into Iowa.
We can see in the green lobe here
of ice that came into central Iowa,
an example of that ice flow.
Similarly, Lake Michigan is an old ancient lowland
and when these ice floes came down
from the continental glaciers,
they naturally followed these low depressions.
So they were like siphons
pulling away the main flow of the ice.
and this more than anything kept the ice away
from southwestern Wisconsin.
The bedrock that we find in Door County,
the cliffs that face into Green Bay
are a very hard rock unit named the Niagara Formation.
It's what holds up Niagara Falls.
In the Driftless Area, these mounds that we had,
like Blue Mounds, Platte Mound, near Platteville
are capped with that same rock unit,
so we know that once extended over this whole area,
but it's been eroded off.
So the erosion of the recent geologic past
both during glacial times
and in the few millions of years
before glacial times dissected this landscape
into these high, rugged slopes that are so characteristic
of the southwestern part of the state.
? ?
- The Driftless Area would not look the way it does
were it not for the severe changes in climate
caused by having the glaciers nearby.
Considering their impact on the land they spared,
imagine then what the glaciers did
to the land they covered, sometimes again and again.
Can we even comprehend ice up to a mile thick
inching across the continent
with a force capable of erasing hills,
relocating rivers and bulldozing the soil down to bedrock.
No wonder we can still find its trail
at a rock quarry in Valders.
- Glaciers leave tracks on the rock surface that they go over.
It's a result of rocks frozen into the bottom of the glacier
that are being dragged along
as the glacier moves across the landscape
and cuts these scratches or striations
that leaves us a record of which way the glacier moved.
- Geologist Dave Michaelson has spent much of his career
on the trail of Wisconsin's glaciers.
He knows all about the forests on the shore of Lake Michigan,
that is as famous as the Driftless Area
among geologists around the world.
"Famous" because it showed how long ago
the last glacier left Wisconsin.
But don't feel bad if you've never heard
of the Two Creeks forest near Manitowoc.
It's been buried for thousands of years.
- Two Creeks forest bed was discovered in
about the turn of the century.
It's always been an important site
because people recognized that
because there was a glacial deposit over it,
it meant that there had been a reversal in climate.
That is the climate had warmed
for some period of time and then it cooled again
and then glacier came over.
The actual forest grew for at least 250 years
before it was finally killed
by a rise in the level of Lake Michigan
and then the glacier advancing over the site.
These are pieces of spruce that are part
of the Two Creeks forest, so there are 11,800 years old.
You can see their wood that's not much different than today.
They're a little softer but they're not petrified wood or anything.
Put it in a fireplace and it'll burn
just like dried wood that you cut a year or two ago.
When the glaciers were at their maximum,
the whole basin was filled with ice.
Well, when the glacier was retreating
then it was a lake in front of the glacier edge.
We had huge icebergs breaking off.
And the glacier would have had
a wall here 200 feet or more high above the lake level.
But that time, because the northern outlet of Lake Michigan
was blocked, water couldn't escape through Lake Huron
as it does today.
It had to get out through an outlet at Chicago
and that outlet, when the glacier ice
first started to retreat from the basin
was about 60 feet higher than today.
So the surface that we're standing on now,
well above Lake Michigan, is actually lakebed.
This was covered by Lake Michigan at that time
when the Chicago outlet was being used.
And whenever the glacier ice retreated,
north of the north end of the lake,
water could escape through into Lake Huron.
The water level dropped,
dropped actually below the present level.
In fact, Lake Michigan was actually two different lakes,
with the river in between.
You could have walked from Milwaukee
over to the state of Michigan,
and just had to get across a river.
Then after the glaciers had left the north end of the lake,
what we call rebounded,
the land rose because the weight of the ice was removed
from the land and that caused the water to rise again
from that very low level.
(wind blowing)
(engine roaring)
We're drilling here into the lake sediment
that preserves the Two Creeks forest bed.
We're trying to penetrate
just the interval where the forest bed is,
so we can bring that up and look at a sample
that hasn't been exposed to the air
out along the bluff face.
The truck here is driving a--
what's called a hollow stem auger.
It has an opening in the middle.
It stays open as the auger is driven down.
And now, we'll put a sampler down the middle of that auger
to actually collect the forest bed.
We hope the forest bed will be in that sample
when we bring it up.
- No go, huh. - I say we go one more time.
- We're incorrect.
- Gonna do it again?
- Might as well, that's what you are looking for.
- It must be very close.
- Bingo!
- We got it, right there!
It's the actual topsoil...
that's 12,000-year-old forest bed.
It's not very thick, but there are spruce needles in it,
right there, as part of a spruce cone.
It's sort of flattened.
- When radiocarbon dating was developed in the 1940s,
wood from the Two Creeks forest
was the first sample from a geological site to be tested.
Until that time geologists believed that glaciers
had last disappeared from North America 35,000 years ago.
The test results revolutionized their thinking
by proving that the ice had receded only 12,000 years ago,
a mere blink of an eye in geologic terms.
But, an awful lot has occurred during that blink.
Changes in human world happen a lot faster
than changes in geology.
(birds chirping)
(engine roaring)
- The first time I came out here it was bone-dry
and I found three projectile points in about ten minutes.
When this site has been plowed and rained on
if you walk barefoot from one end of the site to the other
you're gonna cut your foot, that's how many flakes
and pieces of debutage are out here.
- There is a place in Wisconsin
where people have lived for more than 10,000 years.
Today, it's a farmer's field, but we know people were there
because of the things they left behind.
Archeologists have learned that distinctive styles
of projectile points, including arrowheads,
can identify the time they were made
and the people who made them.
The projectile points and pottery pieces found at this place
range continuously back in time from 100 years ago
to when the very first people walked this land, the Paleoindians
Archaeologist Dave Barton.
- Sometime around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago,
instead of having four lakes in the Madison area,
there was one big lake called Glacial Lake Yahara.
In Paleoindian times, this would have been
just really an oasis.
You've got all the wildfowl
that are attached to the marsh and the lakes around here.
You've got the white-tailed deer.
You may have had some megafauna in the area.
So, this would have been a really interesting site.
This would have been prime beachfront properties.
I talked to Bob Birmingham, the state archaeologist,
and I said, "Well, whatever we do,
"if there's a site in the state of Wisconsin
"that we need to preserve, this is the mother lode."
I know there are a lot of developers out there
that would see this is one of the most prime
developmental prospects in the county.
And instead of seeing condos up there,
I wanted to see prairies,
because this basically is the largest Paleoindian site
in the state of Wisconsin.
This is a fantastic opportunity for us to take a site
and over the next 50 to 100 years
ask the questions about what were Paleoindians like
and what were they doing here 12,000 years ago?
- Stone tools and pottery can tell us that
people were living here for thousands of years,
but can they tell us anything
about the way those people lived.
The distance and time is so vast that it almost
seems impertinent even to ask such a question,
but there are hints waiting in the ground
for someone to dig them up and recognize them.
Back in 1964 Franklin Schaeffer decided that he needed to
put some drainage tiles in his field,
so he hired this enormous ditching machine
which cuts this nice trench about 18 inches wide, very precise.
And about halfway through the field the machine hit something.
The operator was thrown off the machine; the machine stopped.
They didn't know what it was at first, because rocks,
it usually just kind of tosses out of the way with no problem.
They got down and discovered the end of a femur or thighbone.
They also found some tusk fragments.
These ended up in the Kenosha Public Museum.
- We call them megafauna, big animals.
Can the bones of these Ice Age giants,
woolly mammoths and mastodons,
tell us anything about the Paleoindians
with whom they once shared this land?
In Kenosha County, mammoth bones have a great deal to say
to archaeologist and museum curator Dan Joyce.
Back in 1990, Dave Wayson,
who's an amateur archeologist in Kenosha
was doing a little background work for me
and he went over to the Historical Museum.
He saw a couple of boxes of bones
and Dave knew that they were either mammoth or mastodon bones.
Took a close look at them
and saw these strange marks on the bones.
He came to me and we'd looked at them and said,
"Well yeah, they look like butchering marks to me."
Stone tool marks from cutting up the animal.
Out West, we've known since the 1930s
that Paleoindians killed and ate mammoths.
And the evidence is very definitive out there.
We suspect that of course, that they did it
east of the Mississippi River too,
but we had no evidence at all, so got me to thinking,
right away, "Well we have some mammoth bones in our collection
that were discovered in 1964."
Went back to my museum and indeed
they did have cut marks on them.
Turns out that another local amateur archaeologist
had actually gone out there in '64 and made a map
with coordinates and distances and angles and everything
and had a little star that marked the spot
where the bones were found.
Once we started excavating, we obviously started
to uncover bone after bone
and very quickly we discovered a bone pile, massive tangle.
One of the things we found with these sites
is that they really thoroughly butchered these animals.
They took every ounce of meat that they could
and you can see that this animal is really jumbled.
We have a portion of the pelvis over here.
The lower jaws over here.
Part of the skull's over here, facing this way,
with a tusk coming out.
The one thing this photo also shows very nicely
is a 1964 tile trench.
This is obviously where we came up with tusk fragments.
A lot of people didn't really believe
that you can have a mammoth in your backyard,
but yeah, they're there.
They're under feet.
The dating materials: what we've recently done
is we've run a very refined date on it
and it's coming out at about 12,200 something.
Back in the Western United States,
mammoth hunters are seen to be hunting mammoths
between 11,300 and 11,700.
As you can see, we're five hundred years earlier,
so it throws a little bit of a monkey wrench in the works.
If you're looking at 12,200s,
the glaciers are not too far to the north, very very close.
You're looking at a very new vegetation
because the glaciers have recently retreated,
perhaps just opened up to human habitation.
- As soon as the climate warmed
and the glaciers made their final retreat,
people were moving in right behind them.
And if Dan Joyce's dates of 12,200 years ago are correct,
they were here on the shore of Lake Michigan
even before what until now had been
the earliest known people in North America.
But who were these first people?
What became of them or are they still here?
David Grignon of the Menominee thinks they are.
- Menominee is not really our name.
It's "Kiash Matchitiwuk",
which is translated to "the ancient ones."
We are the ancient people of this land.
When I hear the word Paleoindian, I think it's Menominee.
Our history is a oral history.
And I said that the creation story took place
at the mouth of the Menomonee River, not far from here.
And it was there that the Menominee people
came into existence.
We don't have a migration story like a lot of tribes do.
All of our history says that we-- we're always here.
- One thing that I'm gonna do--
If somebody wants to flip the lights off?
One thing I'm gonna do is just show
a couple of examples of rock art before we go,
so you kind of get an idea of what it is that we're going to be looking for.
The whole southwestern part of Wisconsin
is a very good place for looking for rock art.
And we haven't covered, I don't even think, 1% of it, yet,
and all of the survey that we've been doing.
Up until 1985, they're actually only about 18 sites that were reported.
And since '85, we found more than a hundred others
and we just started.
(music)
- Archaeological sites can identify
where ancient people lived, when they lived there,
and even what they ate,
but artifacts in the ground can't explain
how people viewed their world.
There are however all around us in Wisconsin
tantalizing messages from the past.
- There's something interesting right there. See it? Right there.
- Archeologists Cindy Stiles and Bob Birmingham
believe that if enough of these messages can be found
they will provide a glimpse into the minds of the people
who lived in this place long before us.
- We checked this pretty good except for the real low.
Can you get in there?
As long as you're here why don't you just
go as far as you can go, because most of the--
most of the flat surfaces are low.
- More and more, rock art sites are being viewed
as wonderful worlds in which we can actually view
the ancient world through the eyes of the people
who are making the rock art.
That is sort of the focus of much rock art research, right now,
is understanding that these are not simply
pictures put up to decorate a wall of a cave,
but these actually have to do with the fundamental
belief systems of ancient people.
You can't read ideology from an arrowhead
or from the garbage, the animal bone and so on,
the people left behind-- but from these symbols
we can start to approach that.
In Native American belief systems,
the universe is divided up into many levels
and the uppermost level is dominated by
bird-like spirit beings.
We are now seeing over and over and over again, at this particular rock site,
imagery that is associated with the upper world
and with Thunderbirds.
This rock, this very large rock,
must have been considered to be a home
of some very powerful thunderbird,
and therefore attracted shaman or others looking for power
and looking for help in their daily lives.
And then there is an underwater or underground level
which is ruled or overseen by composite beings
with feline features and serpent features.
The central figure of this site is this very large carved face
which features horns on both sides of the head,
rays coming up from the top of the head
probably indicating some sort of headdress.
They are depicting the underworld spirits,
here at this place,
to appease or to evoke the underworld spirit beings.
- One reason for the abundance of rock art in Wisconsin
is the perfect canvas of rock shelters and outcroppings
provided by the unglaciated Driftless Area.
Without this landscape we would not know as much as we do
about its previous inhabitants.
People used these rock shelters over and over again,
leaving behind a stratigraphic record
of ten thousand years of human experience here.
So it is only fitting
that in the very heart of the Driftless Area
is a rock shelter that is providing
anthropologist Bob Salzer with our best look yet
at the beliefs of ancient Americans.
- One of the reasons that the site is important
is because of the paintings that are there,
more than 40 individual paintings.
So, it's important because of that.
It's on the National Register of Historic Places because of that.
It is also important because there are dirts
underneath the paintings are neatly laid down
in a layer cake fashion and are undisturbed,
so that unlike most archeological sites,
we have a long sequence of human occupations
that are each separated.
And so one of the major contributions
that our work here is going to make
is to refine our understanding of human history
in the Driftless region and beyond.
One of the groups of figures is actually a legend
and we've dated that group of figures to
about 900 to 1000 AD, so we know that that legend
is at least that old.
That a legend can be handed down word of mouth
for a thousand years and still remain
sufficiently intact for us to be able to identify it is--
That's major news.
Probably the most important thing
that we've discovered about those people
whose leavings been the subject of our painstaking research
is how smart they were.
I think that we have a tendency to-- I don't know--
to assume that prehistoric peoples
were much simpler, simply because
they lived in prehistoric times.
The discovery of these paintings and how elaborate they are,
containing conventions that's an ancient art style,
it causes us to stop and think and say,
"Hey, these people back then were pretty darn smart."
- To Ho-Chunk artist and educator Truman Lowe
these messages from the past evoke deep personal meaning.
- That's why you wear the mask.
I can remember it specifically.
We were traveling between Linden Station in Boston.
My mother was driving and she sort of points out,
like this, she says, "Somewhere over there
"is really where our tradition is buried."
I didn't know what that meant,
so I asked, "What are you talking about?"
And she-- she just said that somewhere
in that part of the state
all of the tradition of the Winnebago was in the cave,
put there as safekeeping.
Of course, being young, you think of all these objects
that are stored somewhere in a cave.
And the battles have gone on so long
with the neighboring tribes,
it was really lost at that point.
The more that I begin to think about this place in that story
there's a real strong kind of connection for me.
It's not the same as my childhood image.
It's more the idea of how a record is made, to me,
to today's libraries; those are the repositories.
We build special places to house and collect this information.
Museums serve the same purpose.
I think that the artists here
wanted to give us a sense of history.
Wanted to tell us this is where we really came from.
It's an actual record.
It provides continuity to who we are, what we were.
And... if we could understand it,
there's probably a lesson in there
that also tells us about the future as well.
- There are many different styles of rock art in Wisconsin,
demonstrating the change has always been part of life here.
Cultures evolved, tribes displaced or absorbed.
Other tribes' ideologies adapted.
Deciphering that history of change is an ongoing quest
by people of today to more fully understand
the people of yesterday.
On the other hand, there are those for whom
the link to yesterday remains unbroken.
Ojibwe elder Eddie Benton Banai.
- We know, and this is what I teach, my children, my grandchildren,
and soon my great-grandchildren,
that the true history of the original people
of this part of the world has never been written.
The true history of our people is recorded
in our genetic memories and has acted out
via our songs, our stories, or rituals,
and via our original religion,
which were the Ojibwe people,
it is the lodge, the Midewiwin lodge.
Within the lodge is kept "the" original teachings.
(music, chanting)
- Even before Jean Nicolet came to this area
there was dreamers in our tribe that foresaw that.
They had indicated in their dreams
that someday in the future
a large vessel will come across the bay
and will bring a people that are light skinned
and they will change your lives forever.
- We have no way of knowing
when the first European arrived in Wisconsin.
Written accounts were few and most did not survive.
What little we do know was recorded secondhand
by one of the Jesuit missionaries required to
report periodically to their French superiors in Quebec.
Those reports were later published as the Jesuit Relations
and provide the only account of Frenchman Jean Nicolet's
landing in 1634
on the shores of what was probably Green Bay.
Museum director Ann Koski and historian Tom Martin
take that account with a grain of salt.
- Gotta admit, this makes a wonderful story.
Here you've got Samuel de Champlain up in Quebec
sending his explorer Jean Nicolet to try
and find a route to the sea to establish trade relations.
You know, this is how the story goes.
And he comes down and he lands in what is known as Red Banks
which is about 14 miles north of Green Bay.
And he steps ashore and he's wearing this
gorgeously-decorated Chinese robe, you know,
because they thought he was going to the Orient,
in multi colors and with flowers and birds
and embroidered on it.
He steps ashore with his pistols
and he raises 'em up and fires them
and then these thunder and lightning sticks.
The women are frightened out of their minds
and run with the children and scatter.
- I think the robe and the guns
are probably a little far-fetched.
Most historians agree that that part is probably myth
because there had been fur traders through this area
and Jean Nicolet had been exploring north of here
for quite some time and they feel
he very well knew what he was coming upon,
that indeed they were Native Americans and not Oriental.
As far as coming in and having Native Americans meet him,
that's probably true, because if he did land
at the alleged spot, there was a large
Winnebago encampment there.
And, it was a permanent encampment.
(music)
- Whether myth or history, Nicolet's arrival in Wisconsin,
occasioned three centuries later
one of the grandest celebrations
the state has ever witnessed.
The 1934 Wisconsin Tercentennial in Green Bay
was a summer-long festival of pageants,
ceremonies and exhibitions
highlighted by a visit from the President
of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Native Americans were invited to participate
in the Tercentennial Celebration
and honored as the original inhabitants,
but they may not have seen much cause for celebration.
Even before the arrival of Nicolet,
the upheaval caused by Europeans on the East Coast
was sending a flood of refugee tribes
into the Great Lakes region.
Fierce warfare erupted across the land.
But that devastation was minor
compared to what happened when new alliances
forced people to gather for security
into larger and larger groups.
Uprooted, hungry and in declining health
refugees and residents alike were an easy target
for a new enemy, against which they had
no defense: European disease.
This cruelest of enemies may have wiped out as much as
90% of the population.
Historian Rhoda Gilman.
- There's good reason to think that diseases preceded
the actual coming of the white man.
In many cases, diseases that at least were
not native to this part of the country.
There's something terribly terrifying
about a new disease that you don't understand.
You don't know how it spreads.
Look at the terror that is felt today
when we read about something like Ebola
or other unknown viruses, that may-- mad cow disease--
that we have no idea how exactly, how it spread.
No control over it and it's a very terrifying thing.
And you could certainly imagine how
an Indian village would react to smallpox
which is extremely infectious and kills people very quickly.
And it was real hysteria.
Any human group would feel the same way.
- We, the Ojibwe people, were given seven major prophecies,
probably about 500 years prior to 1492.
One of those prophecies
was the coming of a light-skinned race to this land.
Among those prophecies were a lot of things
that are taking place now.
The near loss of the language was prophesied.
The near loss of our own identity was prophesied.
The near loss of our way of life was prophesied.
It was prophesied.
- The Ojibwe have been living the truth of their prophecy
for nearly 400 years,
clinging to the fine distinction between loss and near loss.
To the elders of the Lac du Flambeau band
of Lake Superior Ojibwe, that distinction is worth fighting for.
(practicing speaking Ojibwe language)
Boozhoo, niijii. - Boozhoo, niijii.
- That's what you can say to your friend
when you see them in the morning.
My grandmother raised me
and she talked Indian to me constantly, all the time.
Back then, a lot of talking,
before I knew how to talk any other kind of language.
I asked my grandfather, I said,
"Why does grandmother always talk Indian to me?"
And he says, "Well," he says, "I'm gonna tell you something.
"There will come a day and you will see that day
"when you can look down the street
"and you'll see a young man.
"You'll have all the Indian features.
"He'll look like an Indian person,
"but you won't be able to talk to language."
And that has come to pass, because they tried to take
our language away from us
through the boarding schools and other things.
In fact, there are very few people on this reservation now
that can talk the language.
I would like to have more of our youngsters
know more about our language.
And I think they want to have that
because the language actually is a nucleus of our culture.
[Teacher reciting Ojibwe language] What is makadewaa.
Makadewaa: what color is that?
[Students] Silver. [Teacher] Black. [Student] Black?
[Teacher] Mmm-hmm, it was taken... Now I want it back.
I think all, all reservations,
all over are trying to do the same thing.
They're trying to bring their culture and language back.
(music)
- They gather today sometime between May and July,
just as they gathered at the height of the fur trade
more than 250 years ago.
But what is recreation today, was serious business then.
The French called the gathering "rendezvous"
and the place, Prairie du Chien, and so do we.
The "prairie of the dog" was the site of a large Indian village
located strategically at the intersection
of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers,
the trade routes leading east to Green Bay
and south to St. Louis.
Rendezvous brought together European traders
with American Indians from vast distances
and many different tribes.
They came to this place to exchange what each wanted from the other:
furs for beads, furs for blankets, furs for rifles.
- The trade items that were the most exchanged
were the metal items and decorative items,
bright colored claws, glass beads.
And then for utility, anything iron and steel
because the Indians were a Stone Age culture.
They didn't have access to the metals.
So, bringing them blades
that could be resharpened and reused
was a big technological improvement for them.
And we were after the money and the beaver fur.
(music)
- The roles were clearly defined.
The Indians hunted and trapped,
while the Europeans supplied the manufactured goods.
And as the Indians adopted more and more of these goods,
the traders became more and more established in the region.
Soon in the late 1700s,
the Indian village at Prairie de Chien
was joined by a French settlement.
Two centuries later, led by state archaeologist Bob Birmingham,
today's residents search for
a trace of those first French cabins in the ground.
- We know that somewhere in this area
was a cabin belonging to a Michel Brisbois,
probably built in the very early part
of the nineteenth century.
In this pit, we almost immediately came up with
some features or disturbances in the ground
suggesting to us that in fact
there was a house constructed right here.
You can see in this line, by the way, a number of linked beams.
These are rosary beads, so we're quite confident that
at least we have someone who is probably
a French-speaking and a Roman Catholic
living in this house.
Our archaeological excavations are taking place roughly
right in this area where some houses are shown.
Maybe one of these houses is the Michel Brisbois house.
We're not really sure.
All these narrow lots are referred to as French lots.
It was characteristic of the French Colonials
to divide property into very narrow lots
all of which had frontage on the river.
And these French lots still can be found
in modern maps of the area.
Jean LaPointe, who is helping us excavate,
traces his family here in Prairie du Chien to the 1700s.
He is descended from a fur trader, who married a Sioux woman,
as was characteristic in those days.
His family property basically is recorded on this,
in this 1820 map.
(music)
- Prairie du Chien was one of three great fur trade centers,
in what would one day be Wisconsin,
along with Green Bay in the east,
and far to the north, off the southern shore
of Lake Superior, Madeline Island.
Here, as throughout the fur trade region,
the intersection of Indians and Europeans
resulted not in displacement and battles of her dominance
but in the creation of a new culture,
a melding of two worlds.
Museum director Steve Cotherman.
- Even before Europeans came here,
this was an important place for the Ojibwe people
because of its strategic location on the lake.
And so when the French got here
in the middle of the 17th century,
this became a strategic location for them, too.
They didn't have to go out and hunt for that special spot.
And the trade network
that the Native American peoples had already had
in place for hundreds of years
was just appropriated by the French.
They stepped right into it and continued the trade.
There was about 130-year history
of the intermingling of Native American
and French-Canadian cultures in this area.
Intermarrying, what is referred to as a Métis culture,
French-Canadian and Ojibwe people.
- When the French first came to this area
there were very few French women.
They married Indian women
and their descendants became the mixed blood labor force,
and to a large degree management force of the fur trade,
the bridge between European and Indian cultures
in this part of the world.
It's a fascinating story and one that I think has been
until very recent years neglected a lot by historians
who tended to think in terms of European and Indian
as very separate categories.
Michel Cadotte, who was important here on Madeline Island
is almost a textbook example of the sort of thing that happened.
His grandfather was Frenchman who came west in the late 1600s,
married an Ojibwe woman,
had a son who followed his father into the fur trade.
He had two sons, Jean-Baptiste Jr. and Michel.
By this time they were approximately 3/4 Ojibwe.
They had one French grandfather.
Michel, in 1793, opened a post here on Madeline Island.
He married a local Ojibwe woman,
so his children were one-eighth French,
but culturally still French,
but had close ties of course with a local Indian band.
All of the maternal relatives were here.
- The Métis culture was the dominant culture, in this land
for nearly as long as the measure of our statehood.
It was the mechanism by which the fur trade operated successfully,
a middle ground existing comfortably
between what had been and what would be.
Then, for the young nation's victory
over the British in the War of 1812,
the land became a territory of the United States of America.
- The British took over that trade for a while,
but they maintained most of the French ways
of doing business, because this was what the local providers
of furs were accustomed to.
And the Americans came, took over the fur trade
and they had their own Yankee way of doing business.
And it turned fur trade culture upside down.
- That bridge between two cultures,
that was all pretty much wiped out when European settlement
moved westward and simply took the land away from the Indians.
Therefore at that point in the United States,
the mixed blood had a choice, in a way.
They had to either identify with their Indian relatives,
which many of them did, or leap into the white world
and simply forget their Indian heritage,
which also many did.
- The Ojibwe got a lot over the years in ways of new technology
and all the goods that came to this area
through the fur trade.
Some people will tell you that was good.
Some people will tell you that it wasn't.
But what we do know is that it happened
and the adjustments that had to be made
by the original people here were profound,
changed their lives forever.
- The cultural landscape was changing yet again
and for many the change would be cataclysmic.
(music)
- He's very good.
What a nice cut!
We know the fort was built of logs.
At least one account says that each wall
was 150 foot along and that the log walls
were 16-foot high.
The only places we're finding a lot of artifacts
are almost within the confines of the block house.
The stockade, we've already identified.
- There had been forts in this land before,
built by the French and the British and the Americans,
to establish a military presence and protect economic interests.
But the forts built in 1832
in the communities of the rapidly developing lead region
were for something new: the protection of settlers,
who claimed the land for themselves.
On a hilltop near Blue Mounds,
that story too has left its mark in the ground.
- Late 1820s, a guy named Ebenezer Brigham
brought a number of miners out to this area.
He heard from the Native Americans
that lead was to be found at this location.
And in 1828, established a little community
which is now known as Blue Mounds.
In 1832, an alarm sounded here on the frontier.
A group of Native Americans in Illinois
had crossed the Mississippi River
to reclaim one of their villages.
At the head of this group of Native Americans
was a famous warrior chief, Sauk and Fox Indians, named Black Hawk.
Immediately the militia and regular Army
was dispatched to basically take Black Hawk
and his band back to where they're supposed to be, which is in Iowa.
As a result Black Hawk started moving north
towards Wisconsin to escape conflict with the military.
Ebenezer Brigham decided to build a fort on this spot.
And in the spring of 1832, he got everybody together.
They built a fort and with the intention, I think,
of only coming to the fort when trouble started brewing.
And in fact, trouble began almost instantaneously.
About a week after the fort was built,
a member of the fort militia was in fact killed
by Native Americans just outside of the fort area.
- The American settlers, in harm's way,
had legitimate fears that bloody summer of 1832.
But the outcome of the so-called Black Hawk War
was never in doubt.
It was not a contest of equals.
It was a frustrated gesture of defiance
in the face of an unstoppable force.
The United States was growing.
It needed more land, and people like the Ho-Chunk,
whom the Americans called Winnebago,
were standing in the way.
Today on a parcel of land that once was and is again theirs,
the Ho-Chunk remember their own stories.
Gordon Thunder.
- In this house there are maybe five or six rooms.
And in the night, cold night and it's raining or it's miserable
someone knocks on your door and says,
"Can I come in; I'm cold and I have no place to go."
And then fine; to show, you let him in,
"Well, you can come in and sit in that chair for a little while."
But then, he stays longer than you really want him to.
But he's here already so there's-- by your own sense,
you just can't throw him out.
"Well, you can stay here
"and you can have that little place right there."
I'm pretty certain some of his relatives coming
and knowing that, there's no way that we can get rid of--
I said, "Okay well, you guys can do whatever you want to in that room."
Pretty soon they get more and they said they want the rest of the house.
Finally, there's too many of them, so we can't stop them, so.
At first, they should have stopped at the door, say you can't come in.
There are other places, other places to go,
but we're not that kind of people.
- The deaths here at the fort
were caused by attacks by Native Americans,
but it's unclear which Native American group was responsible.
In Black Hawk's autobiography,
he lays out a strategy whereby he would
send out warriors to harass all these forts
that were being built in all the communities.
This strategy was meant to keep people in their forts
and therefore not coming out to attack
his band of men, women and children.
So it is possible that in fact, for Blue Mounds,
was attacked by Black Hawk's warriors.
On the other hand in 1828,
when Brigham and his miners settled,
they were doing so in violation of treaty.
And is also quite possible
that the local bands of Winnebago were seizing
the opportunity to address some of their grievances
and basically saying to themselves,
"Okay, it's war and now is the time to let them know
"that we are very angry about them being here."
- These are the stories that were handed to us
saying this is what happened to us.
There's a sense of that feeling that
we had with the land and who we were
and that was so strong.
That these warriors, they were trying to defend a way of life
that sustained us and we knew this is all that we knew.
And someone's going to take that away from us.
We're certainly going to do something to defend that
and that's what these people were doing.
It isn't like you see in the movies, you the wagon comes by,
everybody comes down out of the hills and surrounds it.
And they make it look like we're savages,
just this one be blood-thirsty and one--
It wasn't that; it was some way to let someone know that,
that they were intruding into what we thought
was something that belonged to us.
It's not the land; it's not anything,
but it's the way of life.
(music)
- After the conclusion of the Black Hawk War
which ended of course very tragically
with the massacre of Black Hawk's band
in the Mississippi River.
In 1833, a number of other treaties
with Native Americans were concluded
that in effect removed all the Native Americans
from southern Wisconsin and they're thereby allowing
for white settlement.
The western movement of the Europeans
wanted to use this land.
The only way that they could do it
was to write these laws and saying we decree
that these people have to be gone.
- Control of the land had shifted from one people to another,
from people who believed that land could only be
lived on and fought for.
The people who believed that land could also be
bought and sold.
(music)
And so after our journey through millions
and thousands and hundreds of years,
we returned to The Point of Beginning,
the place where the world that was here before
began to be transformed into the world
that we know today.
- Tom Jefferson was a surveyor for a number of years.
He was a engineer, mathematician,
and he came up with this system of a rectangular method
of laying out the land, because it was important
for our young government, you know, to find a way
to sell this land. They needed money.
February 1832, Lucius Lyon got the contract,
came out here to start surveying these sections over here
and when he got here, the Black Hawk War was on.
So, he went back to Galena and hung out, waited.
He was afraid to be out here
because they might be attacked by the Indians
who are trying to defend themselves from the militia.
Indians don't believe that you can buy the land, you know,
and yeah, they figured that out quickly.
Surveyors were coming out to measure it,
so that other people could come and-- Yeah, yeah.
(music)
- Our story about Wisconsin is very touching story.
Very sad story in some respects.
Yet, it's beautiful, too.
- It's beautiful and lasting,
because we've still survived.
[Cranes bugle calls]
- Change is inscribed upon this land.
It has been part of the landscape for millions of years
and it will continue to shape the cultural
and physical landscape of the future.
In the midst of it, change can seem as bad or good
as the events that occasion it.
but while tragedy and injustice retain their infamy as long as memory,
change itself is harder to pin down.
For better or worse, it never stops.
And we who live in this place
are both the object and the instigators of change.
Individual threads in the fabric of history
that we are now weaving day by day
for those who will follow,
just as the fabric of today was welcomed by those
who came before.
We are who we are because we live in this place
we call Wisconsin.
This Wisconsin, we call home.
(music)
Major funding for Wisconsin Stories
was provided by: AT&T,
providing business and residential long-distance service
throughout Wisconsin;
SC Johnson Wax,
a Wisconsin manufacturer of home cleaning
and home storage products;
the Credit Unions of Wisconsin,
serving the financial needs of two million Wisconsinites
and their families;
and the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission,
celebrating 150 years of Wisconsin statehood.
Funding also provided by:
Firstar Corporation,
Harley-Davidson, Incorporated,
Marshall and Illsley Corporation,
the Outdoor Advertising Association,
the Philip Morris Companies,
W.H. Brady Company,
Weber Stephen Products Company,
and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.