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THE GENIUS OF WISCONSIN

By Helen Farnsworth Mears. In the State Capitol at Madison

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EMPIRE: A WISCONSIN TOWN...... W. A. Titus 295

MICAJAH TERRELL WILLIAMS-A SKETCH

.Samuel M. Williams 303

KATE DEWEY COLE-AN APPRECIATION........... 314 DOCUMENTS:

A Swiss Family in the New World: Letters of Jakob and Ulrich Bühler.....

Diary of a Journey to Wisconsin in 1840.....
EDITORIAL COMMENT:

Why an Affidavit?; 1923; The American Historical
Association; The Wisconsin Magazine...

COMMUNICATIONS:

Early Days of Rhinelander; The Chicago Con

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The Society as a body is not responsible for statements or opinions advanced

in the following pages by contributors

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN
Paid for out of the George B. Burrows Fund Income

WISCONSIN1

WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD

Wisconsin, lopped from Michigan as a territory in 1836 to become a state twelve years later, shares in the story of the discovery and the settlement and in the qualities and activities of her population much in common with the whole North Middle West. Yet Wisconsin possesses an individuality, both historical and social, more organic than the little red line of the map. Geography has had profoundly to do with her becoming; in her, the regional characteristics of man find the most indubitable and emphatic expression; and, moreover, once organized as a state, she began instinctively, like many other state units, to create personality, as must any group, however artificial or accidental at first, when it makes its laws together under one dome in the spiritual center, and sends its youth to one schoolhouse on a neighboring hill.

But the story of man here, between the majestic castellated bluffs of the upper Mississippi and the stern iron and copper bearing rocks of Superior's wave eaten shores, is not one story but three. There have been three human occupations of this rolling terrain of sunny swale and drumlins, with its innumerous rivers winding between the wild rice marshes, or the now perishing forests, or the shadowy scarps and dalles, with its thousand glacial lakes in the northern pineries or the midland oak openings, and with its wide driftless area, once surrounded but never traversed by the ice sheet, where today the unstriated old Cambrian

1 This paper presents a poet's vision of Wisconsin, historical and actual. It differs, at least in form of statement, from the historian's vision, and probably no historian would agree with the poet's statement in all matters of detail. But whoever is able to thrill at sight of an eagle sailing above the mountain crests, will rejoice in this stark new phrasing of the story of our state. We appreciate it so highly that, although the paper was not originally written for this magazine, we welcome the opportunity of first presenting to our readers its unique qualities.-EDITOR.

sandstone stands weathered and carved into mesas and giant toadstools. But no man, from first to last, ever settled on the mountains of Wisconsin, for the primeval ranges were beveled down to that peneplain underlying the Cambrian long before the trilobite or protozoan-though sometimes in the jagged cloud banks, white on afternoon horizons of early autumn, one may fancy he sees their tremendous ghosts.

The three occupations of this ancient land have been three independent efforts of man to light his fire and to sing his song. And, though only the third, with its hosts of inpouring exiles and seekers, constitutes the epic of the settlement, of the building of our cities and the state, nevertheless, the occupation of the red man invited the Frenchman, and the Frenchman pioneered the thoroughfares thither for the aftercomers and their household gods. The aborigines (Fox, Menominee, Winnebago, and other tribes finally huddled between the fierce Dakota on the west and the fierce inland ranging Iroquois from the east) have left to none of our states more reminders of a vanished folk culture: the Indian names of so many rivers, lakes, and hills; the trails whose grass-grown depressions may still be traced down the groves; the stone celts and spear points and the copper knives and needles dug up by fresh-water beaches or along the ploughed fields; the chipping sites under primeval oak trees; the corn hills; and above all, the hundreds of earthworks, both conical barrows over the bones of unknown chiefs, and those totemic animal effigies low hillthat lie on their gigantic sides asleep on so many tops and green declivities, by the waters of ancient villages. The native tribes-long since, as white men's hunters, for a pittance of glass beads, iron hatchets, and whisky, debauched in their handicrafts and agriculture have been exterminated or deported (like some of the Winnebago to Nebraska), or live sordidly on the northern reservations,

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