Pearls of Wisdom

Recently, I read an entertaining article in the Spring-2012 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History, which is published by the Wisconsin Historical Society.  The article, written by George Johnson, was titled, “The American Pearl Rush – Its Wisconsin Beginnings”.  Johnson writes about the pearl rush that began in this country during the Gilded Age of the 1890’s and how its origins were spurred by the beautiful pearls first found in the Sugar River near the small Wisconsin town of Albany.  The craze and search for pearls then spread to other waters in southern Wisconsin such as the Pecatonica and Rock Rivers and Lakes Monona and Mendota.  As the demand and prices for Wisconsin pearls grew, the hunt expanded to the waters of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers.  As I was reading this fascinating account, I started to wonder if the pearl craze had ever reached the Kickapoo Valley.

            Since most crazes and fads eventually settle into these parts and La Farge and the upper Kickapoo are as susceptible as anywhere for getting in on the latest action for making a quick buck or two, (the Bear Creek Gold Mine is a great local example of this get-rich-quick phenomena) I assumed some pearling has been done on our local river and tributary creeks.  That led me to thinking about the Kickapoo Pearls, those wonderful tabloids of local lore and legend published in 1979 as part of the Kickapoo Valley History Project.  As it turns out, the name of the newspaper published by the history project was derived from a beautiful cluster pearl found in the Kickapoo River.  A drawing of that famous pearl always appeared at the top of the cover page and again on the masthead of each of the Kickapoo Pearls publications.

            In the initial Kickapoo Pearls published in June 1979, reference is made to the magnificent pearl found in the Kickapoo.  In the lead article of that issue found on page 2, the cluster pearl, which is on a ring, looks like three shiny white pearls and is the size of a quarter carat diamond. Barbara Larson Wentz, who owned the pearl ring, related this story about the pearl’s past, “My great aunt lived in Soldiers Grove and was married to John Stelzman who ran a store with Ole Davidson.  My Uncle John got the pearl from a man around there and it was supposed to have been found in the Kickapoo River. Uncle John gave it to my Aunt Hattie in a ring.”  The article goes on to discuss how the famous pearl ring and its history passed through the family and concludes with, “The story that was always told was that it came from the Kickapoo”.

            The article on the Kickapoo pearl then goes on to relate a story told by a La Farge man in an oral history interview done as part of the history project.  It reads, “Fred Morgan of La Farge doesn’t remember pearls on the Kickapoo but he does remember the clams.  They were maybe four to six inches long, he says, and he and his cousin used to have a good time getting them.  They made a boat and they’d put it in the river and let it drift maybe two or three river miles in a day.  They drug a mesh of wire along the bottom of the river and some days they had quite a few clams raked up.  Fred remembers that he never ate many of those clams but his cousin did and as far as he knows his cousin never found any pearls in his supper.”

            Of course, when one reads about the clamming done by the Morgan cousins, you are reminded that the harvesting of clams was also a result of the pearl craze.  Initially those in the search for the prized pearls discarded the clamshells.  This waste was documented in George Johnson’s article as mounds of discarded and decaying clamshells littered the shores of the Sugar River and other streams.  Perhaps seizing on the waste of the shells in the pearling process, an ancillary business was developed where the luminescent nacre of the clamshells were used for the making of buttons.  Markets for Kickapoo clamshells were soon realized as a button factory was established at Richland Center and Prairie du Chien became a center for the clamming industry.  One can imagine the Morgan boys plying the shallows of the Pine River for clamshells to sell in Richland Center before the family moved to La Farge.  Later when they clammed on the Kickapoo, the boys could sell their shells to buyers who made regular pickups along the Valley’s railway line.  

            Fred Morgan is one of the main contributors to that first edition of the Kickapoo Pearls.  Later in the newspaper there is a featured seven-page article on the Kickapoo Valley Railroad.  Morgan, who came from a family of railroad workers, was the main source for much of the material in the articles.  The lead story called “Working on the Railroad” featured Fred Morgan’s recollections of the old Kickapoo railroad from the time in 1911 when the family first came to live in La Farge when his father took a job as a section hand on the railroad.  Fred’s father was killed in 1914 when he drowned while working on clearing flood trash from the railroad bridge south of La Farge near the tunnel. 

Later both Fred and his brother went to work for the Kickapoo line.  Both of the brothers and their cousin worked with the railroad right up to the end when it was taken out in 1939.  In another section of the railroading article, Fred told about the experience of working on the railroad including the bathing rituals in the Kickapoo for the railroad workers.  Morgan related about those earlier days, “After I got big enough to work on the railroad I worked in the summer and then, in the fall, I’d get laid off.  Then my brother got on as section foreman.  Well, I worked steady for him - me and my cousin both.  We worked an eight-hour day and we got $49.92 every two weeks.

“On Saturdays we’d only work half a day and all of us on the section crew quit at noon, see.  And we come down here by the second railroad bridge out of La Farge, my brothers, my cousin and all of us, and we’d strip off and get out in that water.  Always had some soap along and we’d take a bath.  Ted Fields was along, too, but he wouldn’t go swimming.

‘Come on Ted, take a bath’, we’d say.  ‘Aw, naw,’ he’d say, ‘I haven’t taken a bath in so long I don’t want to get that water dirty before it gets run into Violey’.

“He was a comical old guy, anyway.  But every Saturday we took ourselves a splash.  Where we went swimming, that was the same place my Dad drowned.  I used to think about that when I was down there in that water.”

            When the history project started looking for people to interview about the old Kickapoo railroad, Morris Moon, long time Vernon County Sheriff and Clerk of Court said, “If you’re interested in stories about the old Kickapoo railroad, go talk to Fred Morgan of La Farge”.  At the time that Morgan was interviewed as part of the oral history project, Morgan and his wife lived in a little white house on the north end of La Farge.  It was in a part of town where the train tracks used to be close by and many of the railroad workers and their families lived.  So many of the Morgan family lived in that section of little houses that it was often referred to as “Morgantown”.

            When they built the new baseball park next to the schoolhouse in 1937, Fred’s little house was right across Mill Street from the new field.  Being an avid ball fan, Fred went to many ball games across the street from his house.  Around the time that Fred was interviewed for the local history project in the late 1970’s, softball was flourishing in La Farge.  Every Tuesday and Thursday night when the men’s league played, Fred (who also went by the nickname of “Jap”) could be found sitting in the lower seats between the dugout and grandstand along the first base line.  He would join Gordon Waddell, Ray Young, Boob Sandmire and others who sat in that section to watch the ballgames, cheer on the proceedings and offer free advice and concern to the teams playing. 

As he watched those ball games on warm summer evenings, Fred could gaze out beyond right field and see the Kickapoo River beyond the highway and perhaps remember some of the pearls of his life spent around that old stream.

If you would like to contribute to this little history project on a Kickapoo River town, contact me at bcstein@mwt.net or P.O. Box 202, La Farge 54639.  Working together we can continue to tell the story of La Farge.

If you are interested in getting a copy of the Kickapoo Pearls, a republication of these gems of local history is available for sale at the Visitor Center gift shop at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve.  Published in 2009 by the Friends of the Reserve, this Kickapoo Pearls Rediscovered edition includes all of the original four-plus volumes of the Pearls plus a foreword and prologue by Dail Murray and Dana Strobel Van Hoesen, who both worked on the original project.  If you cannot drop into the Reserve for your copy of this classic collection of local history, call 608 625-2960 or check the Reserve’s website for more information.