The Great Kickapoo river Flood of 1978 - Pt. IV

When the story of the La Farge dam controversy was broadcast on the CBS Evening News on Friday, October 13, 1978, a new chapter in the dam story seemed to unfold.  Introduced as “The Great Kickapoo Loggerhead” by news-anchor Roger Mudd, the video story as told by CBS newsman Bob Faw was compelling and emotional.  Seeing Ward Rose, Lonnie Muller and Bernice Schroeder relate details of the heartbreaking process of the dam project for many Kickapoogians affected most people who watched it.

            One of those affected was another CBS newsman, Charles Osgood.  Osgood, who hosted a radio show on CBS called “The Osgood File” wrote a poem about the dam project on the Kickapoo and read it over the air on his radio show later in October.  It is a long piece, as Osgood’s poems tend to be, but I want to include his ending here.  He wrote:

It’s been 43 years since the U.S.A.

Began to help Kickapoo out that way.

They spent nineteen million dollars and they built their road

And a great new bridge, as we already showed.

And they let all that farmland go to seed,

Where today there’s that acreage and sundry weed.

Still, the folks there in Kickapoo have the gall

To complain, showing little gratitude at all.

Congress got impatient and cut off the dough.

Building was stopped about three years ago.

The valley is frustrated, the people mad.

They’d settle now for what they one time had.

Uncle Sam’s embarrassed and his face is red.

And this week somebody in the White House said,

“Tell you what we’ll do in this Administration:

We’ll assign a task force in the situation.”

Nice of those folks in the capital city

To come right out like that and appoint a committee.

And who knows what that committee will find?

Whether to quit while they’re still behind,

Or to finish the dam for several million more

That they started out planning in the days of yore.

Well, we should tell you that which everyone in Kickapoo knows:

They still have the floods.  Oh, they have lots of those.

Plenty of flood damage – my, oh, my!

Fifty million dollars just this past July.

“I’m angry,” says a citizen, “indeed, I am!”

Now you know why they invented the expression: DAMN!

Soon after the CBS News coverage of the dam project by Bob Faw and Charles Osgood, President Jimmy Carter made the official announcement of the first public meeting of the joint federal-state task force to study options for flood control and economic development for the Kickapoo Valley.  Perhaps the features in the nationally broadcast CBS pieces had hurried the process along, perhaps not.

Bob Faw finished his video report on the La Farge dam project by saying, “a flood control project that controls absolutely nothing”.  Would the latest task-force study provide some answers for the dam at La Farge to control something?

Actually, many people in the community of La Farge were sick and tired of all the studies done on the Kickapoo Valley.  President Carter’s call for a new study elicited groans from many in the community, regardless of their position on the dam project.  Kickapoogians were weary of studies.  The problem of flooding in the Kickapoo Valley had been studied to death over a period that stretched back to the 1930’s.

President Carter’s Task Force on Kickapoo River Flood Damage Reduction held its first public meeting On November 16, 1978.  The meeting was held at the high school gymnasium in Gays Mills with nearly 200 people in attendance.  Colonel Ted Bishop of the Corps of Engineers acted as moderator for the meeting which featured representatives from various federal and state agencies.  In addition, Senator Gaylord Nelson also attended the meeting.

            In his prepared remarks, Senator Nelson told the gathering that the dam project at La Farge was dead.  “A dam is out of the question,” Nelson said.  “The project that is currently authorized fails to meet the administration’s economic and ecological tests.  The task force must develop a comprehensive, valley-wide plan that provides a higher degree of flood protection for many more residents.”  Senator Nelson added, “The task force’s review is the valley’s best chance.  The battle over the dam is finished.  We must move forward if anything is to be accomplished.”

            Colonel Bishop told the gathering that the Task Force was formed to find ways to relieve flood damage in the Kickapoo Valley without using structures such as dams or levees.  During the proceedings, Bishop continually asked people who were speaking to not discuss the dam project at La Farge as a possible option.  However, Col. Bishop’s admonitions had little affect on those who testified.

            Many people from La Farge spoke at the meeting.  Bernice Schroeder, speaking as a representative of KLOUT, spoke in favor of completing the authorized project and completing the dam at La Farge.  Schroeder said it was “a broken promise” to the former landowners if the dam was not completed.  She thought that if the dam was not completed then the lands should be returned to the former owners.

            Also speaking from La Farge for completion of the dam project were Roger Andrew, Bernard and Jeanne Smith, Palmer Munson, Olive Nelson and Esther Ziebell.  Palmer Munson, speaking as town chairman of the Town of Stark, spoke of the tax hardships for the people living in the township due to the government buying so much land for the dam project.  Munson also advocated for the completion of the dam, as did people from other places in the Kickapoo Valley.

Jim Coxe from Wauzeka called for the completion of a dry dam at La Farge, saying that such a structure would benefit everyone in the Kickapoo Valley during floods.  Carl Oppreicht of the Gays Mills Flood Avoidance Committee spoke in favor of construction of small retention dams along tributaries running into the Kickapoo River as well as completion of a dry dam at La Farge.

Vernon County Board member George Nettum admonished the members of the Task Force for the failure to complete the dam at La Farge.  He called the dam project the “biggest fiasco ever” and encouraged the Task Force members to include the completion of the dam at La Farge in future plans.

The Task Force recommendations did call for an expanded flood insurance program for villages in the Kickapoo Valley, crop insurance for farmers along the river, a valley-wide warning and preparedness plan, evacuation/relocation plans for Soldiers Grove, flood proofing and a levee system for Gays Mills and a federal/local effort to clear the river and tributaries of snags and debris.

However, the preliminary recommendations released by the Presidential Task Force in December included nothing about the completion of the dam at La Farge.  As Senator Nelson had said repeatedly throughout 1978, the dam project at La Farge was dead.    

And so it went.  For the next decade a variety of efforts were made to do something with the partially completed dam at La Farge.  Many politicians at the state and federal level tried to move the dam project in some way towards some sort of conclusion.  But it never happened.  “A flood control project that controls absolutely nothing.”

*                                  *                                  *                                  *

            To finish, let me write that a completed Corps of Engineers’ flood control dam north of La Farge that should have been completed in the mid-1970’s would have greatly lessoned the devastation of the flood of 1978, then the massive destruction from the flood of 2008, and now the misery of the flood of 2017.  That is what the dam was designed to do. 

The finished dam would not have curtailed any flood waters on Otter or Bear Creeks nor saved anybody’s washed-out driveway along those streams. The completed dam would not have saved Ontario from the ravages of the recent flood in July of 2017.  But we should also remember that five retention dams for the Ontario area were to be built as part of the project at La Farge.  If built, those retention dams would have lessoned the impact of the recent floodwaters on Ontario.

In the end, by not completing the dam or any of the ancillary parts of the federal project like the retention dams, the Kickapoo Valley was left to its own devises to cope with devastating floods.

Always 12:51 in La Farge

In the past few years, I have written several local history notebooks during the Yuletide season based on a nostalgic trip down La Farge’s Main Street of the past. Many of the visits down memory lane drew comparisons between the village’s Main Street from previous times and that of today. Although I have received many favorable comments from readers about those notebooks, those trips to nostalgia make me wonder if I am over-doing the concept. After all, all of us involved in this little history project about La Farge have their favorite time to remember about their hometown. In these year-end local history notebooks I have stepped back to the early 1950s, another time to the 1960s and last year composed some doggerel where I time-traveled through decades of Christmas memories on La Farge’s Main Street.

But if one had the gift to do some of that time travel, where would you stop the clock in your memories of La Farge? Would it be some favorite time in your childhood when you were growing up in this village? Would it be that best birthday party ever or that very special 4^th of July Celebration? Where would you stop the clock in your cavalcade of memories about this place?

The reason that I pose this question is because of the clock on the La Farge State Bank. Although the time & temperature sign on the corner of the bank building has been operating in starts and stops for some time, the clock finally locked up, gave up the ghost and has posted the same time (with no accompanying temperature) for the past several weeks. It always reads 12:51. Which is alright in a way because, as we are want to say here in the Kickapoo Valley as we try and look on the brighter side of things, the stopped clock is always correct twice a day. But what time is it stopped on? Is it nine minutes before one in the afternoon, which means that the lunch hour is almost over? Or is it fifty-one minutes past midnight, which might have meant “last call” at La Farge’s watering holes in years gone by. (Do taverns and bars really need to stay open until 2:30 AM? Didn’t our grandmothers always tell us that nothing good ever happens at two in the morning?) So if we’re all locked into 12:51 here at the end of our current year of 2011, where would we like that clock to stop in another year from our past?

I was thinking perhaps that it would be fun to stop the clock at some highlight of the village’s history. Perhaps we could go back to that election in 1899 that ratified the incorporation of La Farge as a village. Or we could stop time nearly a decade later and perhaps could be a passenger on the Kickapoo Stumpdodger as it wound its way back up the Valley after La Farge’s town baseball team had taken on all comers at the Crawford County Fair. The players and fans would be giddy after winning the tournament, which had been set up (rigged might be a better word) to beat La Farge in the first place. A week later, the Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper would declare the La Farge team the best in the state for its exploits. Those would be fun times to be a part of.

How about a time stop in La Farge on November 11, 1918 as the Great War was ending? We could hear the village’s church bells pealing out the news of the armistice being signed in Europe and join in that wonderful parade that spontaneously bloomed on Main Street. Wouldn’t that be a fun place to stop in our time travels?

We could move forward in time and welcome all of the local service men and women back at the end of World War II. That was a time of great change and transition in the village, a time of hope for the future. Maybe we could pinpoint a particular season of one of those great LHS basketball teams in the early 1950s? Wouldn’t that be fun to time travel back to those old gymnasiums in the Kickapoo Valley League and watch the Wildcat boys rack up win after win.

Even though there are mostly forgettable memories of the ill-fated dam project that most of us would not want to relive, there are even a couple of times in that dam story that might warrant a stop. I would like to time stop in the village on that Saturday night in May of 1971 when La Farge dam supporters celebrated the decision by Governor Patrick Lucey to support the dam project. Governor Lucey, in an open letter to the citizens of the Kickapoo Valley (which was really an open letter to La Farge), had said that, “If participatory democracy is to have any meaning whatsoever, we must, I feel, respond to the people most directly affected. With this in mind, I have decided not to stand in opposition to the project.” I missed that Saturday night celebration in La Farge forty years ago, so it would be fun to return to that time to catch the excitement.

Another dam project time stop we might want to make would be for “Proxie’s Funeral” that occurred in January of 1976. Perhaps no village ever put on a more effective and fun form of protest against their elected representatives. Wouldn’t it be fun to return to that time to attend Senator Proxmire’s wake in the Raven Bar or accompany the funeral possession up to the dam site? We could hear “Reverend” Red Alderson’s humorous eulogy again and watch Ward Rose toss the dummy effigy of Senator Proxmire off the unfinished dam into the “Dead Sea”.

Perhaps we won’t even have to travel that far back in our time travel. We could go back to the turn of the new millennium and welcome in the twenty-first century. Maybe we could be in the victory parades as the village welcomed back another champion LHS volleyball team? Wouldn’t it be fun to relive those noisy nights as the team bus was escorted back into town by the fire trucks, sirens wailing and lights flashing, and the Wildcat girls on the team screaming with joy to the town and showing off their latest conference championship trophy or WIAA regional or sectional championship plaque?

So many times to choose from for our stopping of the clock, but I would personally choose a Christmas Eve in 1953. (I’m kind of guesstimating on the year here, buy I think that I’m about at the right time.) My family lived in a ranch house on Highland Street, between Bird and State Streets. We were all still together then as a family and this six year old was stubbornly hanging on to his last beliefs in the magic and wonder of Santa Claus. We walked to the Christmas Eve services at the Methodist Church only a block away. I remember the huge Christmas tree in the front of the church, how the lights were dimmed and the candles provided most of the light. Carols were sung and I joined other children from Sunday School classes with some special songs of the season.

When we returned home, a miracle had happened! While we were in church, St. Nicholas had visited the village, stopped at our house and filled under our Christmas tree with presents, many of them for me. Grandmother, who lived across the street, joined us in opening the presents – what a grand evening it was! The next day, we all packed into Dad’s Buick Roadmaster and it was off to Aunt Alice & Uncle Mike’s house in Cheyenne Valley for Christmas dinner. The house was packed with family and friends. The women worked in the kitchen to help Aunt Alice get the huge dinner ready; the men sat in the living room and talked about their jobs and adult stuff like that. The kids were upstairs regaling each other with news of their wondrous Christmas presents.

Those were special times for me in my memory stop, but they wouldn’t last much longer. Stopping the memory clock at a particular time only can last for so long. The next year, our family’s Christmas Eve was held in a room at the Viroqua Hospital, where my Mother battled against the leukemia that was ravaging her body. That’s one of the disadvantages of stopping the clock on these trips back into our memory – the bad times aren’t necessarily erased as we make the clock stop to visit the good times.

May you all make it home for Christmas.

If you would like me to send you an autographed copy of my new book on the La Farge dam project, please send $19 to me at P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639. If you would like me to mail you a copy of my earlier book on the history of La Farge, send me $25. However if you would like both signed books sent your way, then send me $40. All of the dollar amounts listed will cover all mailing expenses.

I have been busy this week sending out the book to people all over Wisconsin, from Phillips to Janesville and from Germantown to Wausau. Books have made their way to Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, California, Washington and Alaska. The book will soon be in the hands of our exchange-student daughters in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Sydney, Australia.

Locally, copies of the book are available at the Episcope office, La Farge State Bank, Kickapoo Valley Reserve Visitor Center, Rockton Bar, Bramble’s Bookstore in Viroqua and Dregne’s Gifts in Westby.

By the way, I am currently working on a local history notebook about pool halls in La Farge. If you have any photographs, memories or stories to tell about the fascinating billiard room culture that once thrived in our village, send them my way. Working together, we can tell the story of this little Kickapoo River town.