THEIR STORIES WERE TOLD

(This is a conclusion of previous entries that tell the story of “The People Remember”, an oral history project about the La Farge dam project.)

            In the end, after nearly three months of the teams of La Farge High School students and adult volunteers conducting interviews, nearly fifty stories had been told about the La Farge dam project.  Some of the interviews had been illuminating for the students and adult volunteers, while others were not – but it was important that the stories had been gathered.  The interviews began in November of the year 2000 and continued for the next three months.  After each interview the students sat down to listen to the audiotapes of the story and wrote a log or outline of what was said in the interview.  Copies of the tapes and logs were made and sent on to UW-LaCrosse, where students in the UW-L Oral History Program would transcribe the interviews.  Those transcriptions and the tapes were then archived in the Area Research Center at the UW-L Murphy Library.

            As a conclusion to the oral history project, a presentation to the public was to be made in the spring of 2001.  Stuart Stotts, a well known and respected educator, author and storyteller in the state, worked on pulling segments from the interviews that could be used in the dramatic telling of the dam stories in the public presentation.  Using the interview logs compiled by the students and listening to the tapes himself Stotts started to compile a collection of excerpts from the interviews that could be used for the presentation. To organize for the presentation, he grouped the chosen excerpts into three categories that followed the general organization of the questioning that had been used for the interviews.  He was looking for what had been said in the interviews about the history of the dam project and the stories about community and change when the land was taken, the stories of influence and power as demonstrated by federal vs. local government control, and finally the stories of the people’s relationships to their land and the environment.

            After compiling the excerpts from the interviews, Stotts fashioned them into a choral reading to be conducted by some of the same students who had conducted the interviews.  The students who were chosen for the choral reading part of the program included Amanda Andrew, Deanna Ewing, Jessie Lee, Robin Lee, Ximena Puig, Mary Beth Sarnowski and Rene Widner.  Kristi Campbell continued her job as video recorder and taped all of the presentations.  Kayla Muller, who had served as scribe for the oral history project throughout, continued to write articles for area newspapers about the upcoming presentation. 

On April 25, 2001, the program was presented three different times.  In the morning the LHS students were bussed to Brookwood High School where the presentation was made to seventy-five 10^th and 11^th graders.  The first program was a good rehearsal for the later performances and brought out some parts that needed to be improved.  After returning to the Reserve offices in La Farge (this is before the Visitor Center was built), the students went over their morning performance, made some changes in the readings and formulated plans for the upcoming presentations.  After a pizza lunch, the group made their way across the street to the school to perform for the LHS students.  That show went much better, transitions were smoother and the attention to the show by the LHS students was excellent.  A robust question & answer session followed the performance for nearly an hour, again showing the interest by the LHS student body.

That evening, the presentation for the public was held at the La Farge Community Temple.  It was a packed house as most of the people who had been interviewed for the oral history project attended.  The presentation also drew many others from the community who were interested in the oral history project as well as the adult volunteers who had helped the students with the interviews.

Marcy West, Kickapoo Valley Reserve Executive Director, welcomed the large contingent to the evening’s presentation.  I followed Marcy in the program by introducing the project and making presentations to the students and adult volunteers who had helped make the project such a success.  Harvey Jacobs, University of Wisconsin professor, then gave an overview of the presentation and introduced the first topic of the “La Farge Dam Project History and Stories of Community and Change”.  The students then started their choral readings from the stories told in the oral history interviews.

I had settled into a corner off the side of the stage where the students were making their presentation and I was facing the audience.  As I gazed out over the large group of people, I made eye contact with Kayla Muller, who was sitting in a center seat taking notes for her next article.  She nodded her head to her right to point my eyes in that direction.  There seated to her right was a woman whose farm had been bought by the federal government for the dam project.  As the woman listened with rapt attention to the students’ performance, tears were streaming down her cheeks.  I looked two seats over and there was another lady with tears running down her face.  I shifted my gaze to another portion of the community hall and saw a man, eyes misting over, straining to hear the words spoken by lifelong friends.  It was amazing – you could have cut the emotion in that hall that night with a knife!

Professor Jacobs introduced two more sections of the presentation and the LHS students, performing with excellence after their two earlier rehearsals, read their excerpts about “Stories of Influence and Power: Government/Local Control” and “Stories of the Relationships to the Land and Environment”.  The stories were being told!

After the last of the student’s choral readings, Jacobs said that there would be a ten-minute break and then everyone would break into small group discussions.  But before anyone could move, Olive Nelson stood up to speak.  Olive, who had been interviewed for the oral history project, said that the presentation that had just happened had been the best thing that had ever happened to all the people who had to sell out for the dam project.  Her observation was met with spontaneous applause and shouts from the audience and the whole assemblage broke into a huge group hug.

More tears flowed and then laughter erupted as the older times were remembered with fondness.  The student presenters received enough hugs and pats on the back to last a lifetime.  The stories had been remembered and the stories were told.

I would like to finish this with a few of the excerpts that were read by those LHS students that night.  Remember, these are the words of people who were interviewed for that oral history project.

They said I had to be out in 30 days, this was March; I had 225 head of cattle.  Where was I supposed to go?

I graduated in 1937, from La Farge.  The flood was in 1935.  And in 1937 the government had made their study and recommended an earthen dam.  Now I am 82 years old this year.  My entire adult life and the adult lives of many people have been spent involved in this one issue – your entire adult life – on one thing.

It was a depressed area, but we didn’t know it.  We were happy.

Neighbors fighting neighbors, families split, hard feelings.

Afterward people were scattered.  These were your close friends, it was sad.  People used to gather at the store, and after – no place for us all to get together again.

The government had made us a promise, and my feeling is when you promise something, you follow through.  When I left the farm, I felt some bitterness; not for myself but for the way my friends and neighbors were treated.  The government had betrayed us.

Up until this time, all our elected officials favored it, but the Sierra Club went the political route.  Our elected representatives changed their positions.  The Sierra Club had the money and the influence; they forced our representatives to change their positions.  Our little community, we are poor, no money, no influence, we didn’t stand a chance, and the project got stopped.

Most people, around here were pretty handy, can fix a tire by yourself, but here was a tire we couldn’t fix.

The people loved the land.  It was a terrible place to farm but a beautiful place to live.

So, we will finish this story where we started it by hearing the words of James Daines, a man who wanted the stories to be heard.

The land’s not mine anymore.  I don’t hunt it.  But I do stop and get a drink from the well every time I drive by.

Their stories were told.

The People Were Remembered

(This is dedicated to the memory of James Daines, who passed on July 27, 2014.)

            James Daines did not want the stories to be forgotten.  He would tell his own story to anyone who would listen, but he wanted all of the stories to be told and remembered if possible.

            In September of 2000, a group of La Farge High School students and adult volunteers from the community gathered to begin a most remarkable oral history project here in the northern Kickapoo Valley.  Their objective was to gather information from people regarding their memories and experiences with the La Farge Dam Project.  The students and adult volunteers involved in this unique oral history project were trained in interviewing techniques and learned about the history of the dam project.  Then, they set out with tape recorders to get the peoples’ stories of this turbulent time in the history of La Farge and the Kickapoo Valley.

            How the oral history project came to be in the first place is intertwined with James Daines’ wanting the stories of the people involved with the dam project to be remembered.  When the “government land”, the nearly 9,000 acres of land purchased by the federal government for the dam project, was being returned by the federal government to the state of Wisconsin in the mid-1990s, a Citizen’s Advisory Committee deemed that the land should be used for the public good.  The land should be a place that all people could use.  After a lengthy process of looking at possible uses, it was decided that the land would be preserved in its natural state for everyone to enjoy.  The idea of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve was born and an initial management board was created to oversee the operation.  The management board soon hired Marcy West as the Reserve’s first executive director.

            Soon after taking the job, Marcy found herself in James Daines’ pickup being given a tour of the lands that made up the Reserve.  James was giving the new Reserve director a personal tour of where people used to live and how many of those folks were passing on due to old age.  He was telling her the story of his family farm and the time when all the farms were bought up by the federal government.  Each of the farms and homes that were taken for the dam project had the story of the family that lived there.  It became imperative that those stories needed to be saved and the sooner the better.

            Marcy soon gathered a team of interested people to look at what could be done to save the stories.  Her bosses, the Kickapoo Reserve Management Board, supported the need for such a project, as did the schools at La Farge and Ontario.  Meetings were held to get a team formed to tackle the task of collecting the stories.  Fritz Cushing was brought on board to head up the project.  A grant was secured from the Wisconsin Humanities Council to help pay for costs for training and equipment.

            About this time, which was the spring of 1999, several students in an American History class that I was teaching at La Farge were very interested in learning more about the dam project.  All of the publicity that had accompanied the transition of the land from federal back to state and local control also had created a renewed interest in the project.  For high school-age students, who hadn’t even been born yet when the dam project was stopped in 1975, this time was bringing to life a new facet of local history for them.  They wanted to know more about the La Farge Dam Project.  I told them to talk to the people who had been affected the most by the project – the former landowners.  Two of the students, Robin Lee and Kristi Campbell, set up an interview with James Daines.

            It was arranged that Robin and Kristi would take a couple hours from their regular morning school-day schedule and meet James at his former farm on Weister Creek.  Robin had a sheet of questions to ask and Kristi toted the video recorder and tapes to record it all.  They would leave around 10 am and return to school at noon, in time for their afternoon classes.

            They never came back.  By 12:30 Principal Mert Pederson stopped into my room asking if I knew where the two students were.  I didn’t.  So we waited, another hour passed and then another.  Shortly after three o’clock and around dismissal time for the day, Robin and Kristi made it back to school. And what a tale they had to relate!

            When the students met James on Weister Creek, they started the interview at the flowing well on his family’s farm.  Robin asked the questions and took written notes, Kristi kept the video recorder going.  When asked about the process of dealing with the Corps of Engineers when it came to selling his farm, James became agitated and angry.  His emotions startled the students (later James would relate to me, “I think I scared the kids a little.”), but James calmed down and told the convoluted story of selling the farm, which had stretched out over a span of two years.  When he was finally done with his story, he offered to give the students a tour of the area to hear stories of other families that had sold out for the dam project.

            Having a little time left before they had to return to school, Robin and Kristi hopped in James’ pick-up and off they went.  Kristi was scrunched behind the front seats, videotaping the narrative from James and panning the former farms through the windshield.  Robin was furiously taking notes and asking questions as they came up.  They drove up Weister Creek Road; they drove west on County Highway D all the way to Dell; they went up 24-Valley and Wolfe Valley, then back down “D” to the old state highway, where they turned north and headed toward Rockton.  At every former farm, James would stop and tell about the people who used to live at that now vacant place.

            Robin ran out of paper on which to take notes, Kristi ran out of videotape.  Finally, nearly two hours after starting their little tour they returned to the Daines’ farm on Weister Creek.

            The next day, Robin and Kristi had quite a tale to tell their classmates in history.  The word “kidnapped” came up jokingly more than once.  Robin showed everyone the reams of notes that he had taken on the interview.  Then the class began to look at the videotape that Kristi had shot the previous day.  The students were mesmerized as James passionately told the story of losing his family’s farm.  As the tape played, Robin and Kristi would interject comments about the process of getting the story.  It took most of the rest of the week for the class to watch the entire set of videotapes.  Some of the students started making a map of the journey taken in James’ pickup and plotting out where people used to live along the route.

            With that interview, a facet of the emerging oral history project started to take shape.  High school students from La Farge should be part of the process in gathering the stories from the people affected by the dam project.

            Next time, more on “The People Remember” oral history project.

  If you would like to learn more about the La Farge Dam Project, an autographed copy of my book, That Dam History: The Story of the La Farge Dam Project can be sent to you for only $20 (which includes mailing costs).  I just received another shipment of my La Farge history book after running out again (I think this is the 5^th re-order of that book).  If you would like a copy of La Farge: The Story of A Kickapoo River Town – Vol. I send $25 to me at P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639 or contact me at bcstein@mwt.net.