What were these broad water highways that brought
men singing to Wisconsin?
What language are they singing in?
I'll tell you about it today on Pioneer Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin School of the Air, a series of programs
for intermediate grades, bringing authentic
pictures of life in the early days of our state.
Your historian is Miss Doris Platt, supervisor of
elementary school services of the State Historical
Society of Wisconsin.
Now here to tell you about water transportation is Miss Platt.
Hello boys and girls.
Today we are starting a second season of programs about life
on the Wisconsin Frontier.
How did the pioneers get to Wisconsin from
the east or from Europe?
The lakes and rivers were their highways, canoes
and barges and keel boats were their transportation.
But long before the pioneers came here, Frenchmen and
explorers and missionaries came down the Great Waterways.
You will remember that in 1535, Jacques Cartier
discovered Canada and for the next 70 years,
French sailors and fishermen from Gaskinian, Brittany
came to the coast of America to fish for cod and whales.
And sometimes they came down the Great Lakes.
We don't hear much about them, but we do know that they were
equated with a hearing Indians long before Quebec was named.
Quebec was founded in Canada in 168 by Champlain.
The name was a hearing word, "K-Bec," which means a
narrow place in the river, and the city was on an island.
From that time on, many explorers and traders started
into the interior of America.
Let's look at a map of Wisconsin and the surrounding territory
and see the waterways that these men followed.
This is a map of Wisconsin and over to the east
of it, the Great Lakes, and just a little
bit of Lake Heron.
The explorers from the east, from the Atlantic and Canada,
came down the St.
Lawrence River into Lake Heron,
and then they stopped at Mac and All Island right about here.
Here they rested for a while, and then they changed a canoes
and broke up their forces and went in various directions.
Here are some of the ways that they could come into Wisconsin.
They might come down to Lake Michigan and into Green Bay,
and here they would follow the Fox River
down to Lake Winnebago, and then on further along, down
to a place called a "portage."
At first it was just a spot where there was no
city, though later it had the name of "portage."
We'll put a sign here on the Fox so that you'll know
the way that they came.
After they had carried their canoes across the
portage, they went on down the Wisconsin River,
until they came to the Mississippi and Prairie Dishin.
The Mississippi River forms the border boundary of our state.
Here it is all the way along the western boundary of Wisconsin.
Another way of coming into the state was through Lake
Superior up here at the north.
Here the Voyagers might start out on the Bruell River.
Put a little sign here for the Bruell, and this is
about where it would be.
They came down to a place called "Solend Springs," and again
they unloaded their canoes and carried them on their
heads over to the St.
Croix River, which flows into the Mississippi.
Still another way to come into Wisconsin was from
Lake Superior down here to the Montreal River,
down to a little place which we know today as the
Lacta Flambo Reservation.
Then they would portage their canoes and come
on down the Wisconsin.
This doesn't seem to want to write.
Then they would go down again to portage, carry their goods,
and come on to the Mississippi.
Another famous spot was the Chippewa River.
Again coming into the Mississippi, all of
these involving portages.
Let's see, here's a sign for the St.
Croix River over here, and one for the Wisconsin River,
which comes along to portage and then turns and goes
out to the Mississippi.
All of those were famous highways in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin River is 300 miles long, and it was a
super highway for missionaries and explorers and traders.
But the famous men who came to Wisconsin, whose names,
some of them we even know, were the voyagers of olden days.
Now we say today, "A voyager is a traveler," but "A voyager,"
which is a French word, meant eventually, "a
paddler of a canoe."
When the Frenchmen came to Canada and later to
Wisconsin, they were simply delighted to find canoes.
They had no boats like this in Europe at all.
The canoes were light, they could carry heavy weights,
they could go over rapids and whirlpools, and not break up.
And these Frenchmen were looking for China, and they thought
maybe a light canoe could take them all the way there.
I have a canoe model here, let's look at it.
This was made by Chippewa Indian Bob Pine in recent years.
It's a family style canoe, the model.
Inside, it's made of white cedar, the framework.
The outside is made of yellow birch.
There are no nails or metal in it, it's sewed together with
the root of a red spruce tree.
And it has gum or pitch from pine on it to
keep it waterproof.
This gum or pitch was often reapplied as the canoe hit a
rock for a rapid and broke up.
There were many types of canoes, but the main one,
made by the Algonquin Indians for the early French traders,
was a long canoe about 35 feet long, made of yellow birch, and
it could be paddled by 14 men.
The equipment it contained was this, the paddles for
the men of different lengths, because those who sat in
the middle didn't need so long a paddle as those
at the end of the boat.
A toe rope to pull a canoe along the rapids, a sponge, in
case the canoe struck a leak, the sponge could pick up
several quarts of water at once, and tracking poles.
When a canoe went along against the current, sometimes
the canoe men had to track or push with their poles.
And when they finally arrived at a place where the
streams went to the west, with a joyous ceremony,
they threw their tracking poles away, threw them
over their shoulders, and didn't need to
use them anymore.
In the bottom of the canoe, where the sacks
are bags of goods that the men were carrying,
they were about 90 pounds each, and tied up with little
ears like sacks of flowers, so the men could lift them.
And they were placed on poles at the bottom of the canoe, so
they wouldn't break through.
These big canoes, weighing less than 300 pounds,
but capable of carrying five tons of trade goods,
were used on the big rivers and lakes.
Smaller canoes were manned by eight paddlers, and were
perhaps only 25 feet in length.
The voyages were French-Canadian.
They were short men, about
five feet six inches tall.
Otherwise, their legs were too long and took up too
much room in the canoe.
In fact, if a French boy grew tall, six feet, he was
very unhappy because then he could never be a voyager.
The voyager had to be strong.
He lifted from 200 to 450 pounds of goods on his shoulders and
carried them over the portage.
And he had to be fast.
You know he could paddle a stroke a second, making five to
six miles an hour in his canoe.
And we were told by one traveler who came to Wisconsin
in 1826 with some voyagers, that his men had started
paddling at three o'clock in the morning.
At seven o'clock at night with very few rest stops.
He said to them, "It's dark, you must be tired.
Don't you want to stop?"
And they said, "No, we're fresh yet."
And he figured out they had paddled 57,600 strokes
with their paddles, but they were still fresh.
And they were very fast these voyagers.
They could unload their canoe if it had a hole
or a leak in it and mend it, put it together again,
cook breakfast, eat shave, and get back in the boat
in less than an hour.
And they had their own terms and their own songs.
They had a great sense of humor.
They called certain little patches of the trip pipes.
They could stop and smoke their
pipe when they got a signal.
And then they went on again.
And so their voyage was so many pipes long.
And when they went to a portage, they had so many rest stops
which they called "poses."
We have the word "repose" today, meaning "to rest."
The voyagers counted everything in "poses" about a third of
a mile between rest stops.
And we find that one portage which came from Lake
Superior to Locke de Flambeau was 145 "poses" which
actually was something like 45 or 50 miles.
The voyager came along then singing his happy songs,
laughing, smiling, even though he had very hard work.
And maybe he had bruised ankles from those heavy
packages he had to carry.
He very often had long hair to keep the
mosquitoes away from him.
He came then singing as he came, keeping rhythm, keeping happy,
just as these men were singing that you heard this afternoon.
We have a picture of a canoe here with Marquette and
Joliette coming down to the Wisconsin River in about 1673.
They may have been the first white men ever to
appear on this river.
And with the explorers came their voyagers and their
tradesmen. And they came to trading posts along the river.
Some of them at Prairie De Chine, some at Portage.
These little trading huts were a man by officers of the company.
The voyagers themselves didn't sell the things.
They carried them.
They were the paddlers, but they didn't sell them.
The Indians brought their packs of furs into the little
store. And there they exchanged them for beads, or kettles,
or many of the things that they treasured so
dearly and did not have.
Dave McNamara of the State Historical Society Museum is
dressed as a voyager today.
And he's going to show you some of these trade goods.
Dave is dressed in typical fashion.
He has a deer skin jacket.
And the voyagers also wore deer
skin leggings and moccasins.
This jacket has many beautiful beads on it.
Will you turn around Dave so we can see these beads?
You know the traders sold the beads to the Indians,
and then the Indians put the beads on jackets and sold the
jackets back to the voyagers.
Dave has a bando on his head.
He doesn't have the long hair from mosquitoes,
so he's using this scarf or a bando to keep them away.
The voyagers also wore them around their waist as
sashes. And the Indians love those as trade goods too.
They especially, however, prize metals such as
the kettle that Dave has.
This belonged to Winnebago Indians and was a trade article.
Other articles here came from the Hudson's Bay Trading
Post in O'Night of County at Trawlake in our own Wisconsin.
There are harpoon heads and points made of
metal used for fishing.
And there are trade beads.
These beads are large.
They're very early beads.
They are not the kind sold on the
jacket that Dave is wearing.
There's also an axe head because the Indians valued
the metal for arrows and axes rather than the flint and stone
that they used themselves.
When the Indians came in, they very gladly exchanged
the beautiful furs that they brought for what we might
call inexpensive articles that they valued in return.
They often brought in beaver skins.
Beaver skins were highly prized in France to make hats
for the fashionable gentlemen.
And so they were one of the rare and choice
skins from Wisconsin.
Next is an otter skin.
This is a very lovely one.
Very long.
You see the skin both sides.
We'll turn it over for us so we can see the other side too.
You see it's good on both sides.
And next is the tiny muskrat.
This was valued by the traders because they could
carry so many of them.
They could pile them up and put them all together and take
them along.
And last we have a timber wolf.
This was not the most ordinary type of
fur, but it was still one of the things that was collected.
The voyages traveled through Wisconsin and sometimes when
they grew old, they decided to settle and live there.
And more often, their descendants lived there.
And the voyages and their descendants knew about the
waterways and the canoes.
We do have a few stories of canoeing in early
Wisconsin. You've heard the expression "tippy canoe."
One school teacher who came here tells us that she was so afraid
when she was in the canoe that she sat as still as a mouse.
And she didn't dare touch her tongue or move it from one side
of her mouth to the other for fear she'd tip the canoe over.
I guess that means she was a silent rider.
She wasn't talking very much.
Back in Prairie de Sheen, in about 1770, Mrs.
John Marie Cardinal has left us this
note about her canoe travels.
She says, "The water was so high in the Mississippi and
the herds of buffalo so thick my husband and I had to
wait to cross with our canoe until the herd had passed by.
Can you imagine buffalo on the edge of Wisconsin long ago?"
And finally, one of our famous travelers who was
a governor, Doty, and with Lewis Cass, governor of
Michigan, traveled all over Wisconsin in a canoe in 1820.
But after all, other boats came into being bigger boats
and boats that were perhaps even more useful in a canoe.
Let's look at the Batot.
I have a picture of one here.
The Batot was the next boat used by traders.
It's a long, flat wooden boat and
it carried more men and more freight than a canoe.
And it didn't sink far down in the water so it could be
used on very shallow streams.
This was in favor in the early 1800s, but in 1825, even
another boat became more used by the traders and the voyagers.
This boat was called a Durham boat.
It was actually invented in the east, but was introduced
into Wisconsin by John Arndt of Green Bay in 1825.
This boat was pulled and not paddled.
Men could walk around the edge of it and
push it along and it too rode high in the water.
Another favorite boat used by soldiers and settlers
was the Keel boat.
This Keel boat had an enclosed
deck. You could sleep in it, you could even cook in it.
Nathan Myrick was at LaCrosse in 1840 and he
tells us he borrowed a boat like this from the army.
Nathan was only 18 years old, but he was going to trade
with the Indians.
And he put his Keel boat together, put
more wood in it, and fixed it up so that if he were snowed
in all winter, he could still live on it very comfortably.
And he was very successful in this.
He worked along and managed to trade and
make money and didn't get snowed in after all.
But of course, the boats that brought people to
Wisconsin were bigger boats.
The first boat on the Great Lakes was the Griffin.
This boat came in 1679 and here we see it coming to
Green Bay with the Indians welcoming it and shouting.
And LaCrosse, the explorer, was there.
He saw to it that the Griffin was packed
with lots of lavish birds and he was going to become
rich when the boat returned to Canada and to France.
Alas, it went into a storm and never was seen again.
That's one of the mysteries of Wisconsin,
what happened to the Griffin.
We have a picture of a wooden anchor such as might
be used on the Griffin or other boats of this type.
Then if we skip a few years, we know that the Voyager and
his canoe is gone and the bigger boats, the steam boats,
are coming into the country across the Great Lakes with
people to live in Milwaukee and Madison and other little
towns and villages that were just growing up in the 1840s.
If we have a model here of one of these steam boats, this is
called the Milwaukee and it has a paddle wheel, but it was
a steamship, it was in use in about 1840 and came across
from Buffalo to Milwaukee and Chicago and other Lake Port.
We have a picture of the dining room on one of these
Lake steamers.
How would you feel if you were eating at
that table, little bit seasick wouldn't you, as the boat
was wobbling back and forth.
We also have some pictures of the tickets and the freight
bills that were used on the ships.
The steamship tickets were little pieces of paste
board, yellow or purple.
This one is for the steamship war eagle for a passenger
and for a cabin as the person came along across the lake.
We also have some freight bills and lading bills.
This is one for a grocer who
lived in wild losing and he's contracting for materials
to be sent from Galena up the Mississippi River to him.
On the bill we see price of apples and coffee and even for
a bag of lead.
You know the lead was mined in Galena and
mineral point and Dodgeville and places near there and could
be sent up the river up the Mississippi to wild losing
and other places in the north.
We also have an ad for shipping from England to Milwaukee,
from Liverpool to Milwaukee way across the ocean.
One of the Canadian lines and
Montreal ocean steamship line advertises that daily each week
the ships are sailing and are bringing goods from way across
the water to Milwaukee or Chicago or places of that sort.
Those of course were all boats for freight and for lots of
people but we also had smaller boats on the Fox River and
on some of the other tiny rivers and lakes in Wisconsin
which were still important waterways for the settlers.
In 1856 people were very interested in building
canals and the Fox Wisconsin waterway was made then.
It was finished and when it was then you didn't have to portage
a canoe but you could ride in a boat down the Fox River through
Lake Winnebago past portage and on down the Wisconsin.
And so we had a number of boats that at that time
were used for passengers coming into the interior.
I have the steamboat whistle here from one
of these smaller boats.
The captain of the ship would blow his whistle or the pilot
when he came to a lock when the boat needed to go through
the locks then he would say well we'll have to wake up
that sleepy lock tendered.
And he would blow his whistle and the lock tender would go
out and open the locks for him.
People also had to ride ferry boats because there were no
bridges at that time and they had to put their horses in
their wagons and all their goods on the ferry and be
pulled across the rivers.
Sometimes one man would pull them across.
Sometimes very famous people had to ride those ferries.
The Kinzies who came to portage, Governor Dodge, all sorts of
people in the early days had to use ferries which were just
rafts or tiny little boats, not like ferry boats at all today.
The ferry at Ashcash finally went out of use when
we find that a floating bridge was built instead.
But many of the pioneers in Wisconsin built their cabins
far from the water.
They weren't near a river or a
stream and then they needed solid roads under their feet
and under their horses feet.
How did they build those roads?
How did they survey them and mark them so that
other people could follow?
Maybe you'd like to look up something about a
famous Wisconsin surveyor, increased lapen, before
next week.
Goodbye boys and girls, I'll see you then.
Miss Doris Platte is your historian on this series of
programs, Pioneer Wisconsin, authentic pictures of life in
the early days of our state.
Miss Platte is supervisor of elementary school services for
the Wisconsin State Historical Society.
Pioneer Wisconsin is a presentation of the
Wisconsin School of the Air.