Canoeing The Kickapoo

The month of June has been a tough one for visitors to the northern Kickapoo Valley who are looking to do some canoeing on the river.  There has been so much rain over the past two months that has saturated the ground in these parts, that any rain amount in the last few weeks has regularly sent area creeks to bank full status.  So, Weister Creek, Otter Creek, Bear Creek and the other area tributaries empty their full loads of water into the Kickapoo and soon the river is bank full or even out of its banks.  With so much rain in June, the Kickapoo has been high all month and not much good for canoeing.

            I happened to notice a group of campers at La Farge’s Village Park on a recent Saturday morning.  All of the vehicles at the campsites seemed to have two or more kayaks or canoes piled on top.  With the heavy rain of Friday evening continuing into that Saturday morning, canoeing or kayaking on the Kickapoo became a risky venture and that group stayed in camp throughout the morning.  (Later on that Saturday, in the evening, fifteen canoes were stranded in the high waters between Bridges 6 & 7 north of Rockton.  Eventually, those people needed rescue from the high waters by local emergency personnel.)

            Today, canoeing the Kickapoo has become a recreational summer staple for locals and visitors alike. But when I was growing up in La Farge a half of a century ago, it was unheard of to attempt to canoe on the Kickapoo River.   What has brought about this transformation in the recreational use of the river?  What is different about the Kickapoo today that affords thousands of recreational and sport canoeists to travel on its silt-laden waters?  Let’s go back and take a look.

            Several years back I was sitting at the Rockton Bar with Roy Stone.  Roy had dropped in for a bottle of “medicine” and I was there for lunch and to find out what was happening in the world.  There were maybe twenty young folk, clad in t-shirts, bathing suits and flip-flops getting ready to take off on an afternoon canoe adventure.  As we watched the group prepare for their afternoon of paddling the Kickapoo, Roy offered a story about an experience that he had on the river when he was a young lad.

            Although he didn’t give an exact date, Roy’s adventure on the Kickapoo probably happened in the 1930’s.  He and a friend hatched up an idea to get a boat and go fishing on the river for some big trout.  Roy said that they knew the best fishing holes on the river were far off the highway, so drifting down the Kickapoo on a summer afternoon was the trick to reaching those big Rainbows.  Roy’s friend had a small flat-bottomed duck boat of sorts with a couple oars.  They figured it would be dandy for making the trip.  They would float down to La Farge, fishing along the way, fill up their gunnysacks with big trout and then catch a ride with someone coming back upriver their way.  Roy talked his Mom into making a lunch for the trip and the two Rockton boys were off on their fishing adventure on the Kickapoo.

            They put in below the Rockton mill and headed down river.  They immediately came to a fallen tree blocking the river and had to portage around it.  They no more got there little boat back into the water then they came to another blockage and had to do another portage.  And so it went for several hours as the boys did more carrying their boat than paddling it.  At some of the smaller obstructions, they tried to maneuver their little boat through the trash and snags.  More than once, their boat ended bottom side up in the water, dumping the passengers into the muddy waters.  Their lunches were lost and the fishing was forgotten.

By the time they reached the Star Valley flats, the two teenage boys were soaked and beaten and hadn’t achieved the halfway point in their trip.  They pulled and pushed their boat over and through numerous snags and fallen trees as they tried to float the meanders on the flat.  The banks were so steep in that section of the river, that the boys eschewed portages and virtually walked their boat down the clogged river.  Roy said it seemed like they pulled their boat for miles through water too shallow to float the little craft.  By the time they reached Bacon’s Bridge (the Reserve’s Covered Bridge today), they had all of the river that they could take and hauled their boat out.  Far from the village that was their original ending point, the boys sat glumly, beaten by the snarls of the Kickapoo.  Wet, tired, muddy, and forlorn, the two must have been a pair to behold.

Suddenly a Model – A pickup came putting down off Norris Ridge to the south and crossed the bridge.  It was a neighbor heading back up river.  He stopped and asked the boys what they had been up to.  When he heard their story of woe, he smiled and told them to get in.  The back of the Ford was full of ground feed, so the boat would have to wait for another time, so off they went, back home to Rockton.

Roy never did know how the boat was returned, nor did he care.  When I asked if they had caught any fish, he guffawed as only Roy could do and said they hardly had time to get a line in the water.  “We never caught a dang one,” is how I remember Roy telling it.  As we watched that day in Rockton as the young folk headed out to canoe the Kickapoo, he still remembered that awful afternoon on the Kickapoo from over seventy years before and wondered why anyone would want to canoe that river.

I grew up in La Farge nearly twenty years after Roy’s little adventure, but I remember no canoeing on the river of any kind.  It’s not as if we didn’t hangout on the river.  As a kid, we fished off the old dam at Seelyburg and dropped our worms by the power plant there.  We skated on Darrell Hollenbeck’s Slough next to the river in the wintertime.  I speared carp in that slough a couple of times – a Rite of Spring on the Kickapoo carried over from the old days.  My friends and I were in the Boy Scouts, so we did lots of outdoors stuff and activities, but we steered clear of canoeing on the Kickapoo River.

It wasn’t like we were adverse to the activity.  When Scout Master Harry Lounsbury took us up to Camp Decorah on the Black River, we learned canoeing skills on the lake at the camp and then took our canoes out for an afternoon trip on the river. It was great fun.  But we didn’t canoe the Kickapoo because, as Roy and his friend found out, it wouldn’t be great fun.

In Scouts we even built our own canoe! It was a project that the scout troop tackled in the garage of assistant Scout Master Arnie Widstrand.  We worked on assembling the wood strut frame and covering it with canvas as a winter project.  We admired our canoe in the spring, but didn’t take it out on the Kickapoo.  Harry loved to fish at Petenwell Flowage on the Wisconsin River over by Mauston and it seems to me that we took the canoe over there to use.  I don’t know what happened to that canoe – hope Royce Gudgeon didn’t take it out on the Kickapoo.

Kevin Alderson and his group of friends came through La Farge’s Scouting program soon after.  They also built a canoe, but I’ll have to tell of the fate of that craft in the next entry.  We’ll continue this paddle through the past about canoeing the Kickapoo next time.

History's Hit Parade

            1970 – the beginning of a new decade and the end of an old one. 

1970 – a time of transition for the little Kickapoo River town of La Farge, Wisconsin. 

1970 – Change was in the air for La Farge, forces from afar were about to pull and tug at the essence of the community. 

1970 – Some people were leaving; people who had to sell their homes and farms to the federal government for the dam project.  Other people were coming to the Valley; people with new personal values and life styles. 

Crank up the jukebox of life as the times for La Farge, “They were achangin”.

The #1 hit song for the year 1970 was B.J. Thomas’ “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”.  With the soggy, wet months of May and June that we have here in the Kickapoo Valley, could we have a more appropriate song title?  But it was also a somewhat appropriate tune for La Farge in 1970 as the federal Kickapoo Valley flood control project with its projected dam to be constructed just north of the village prepared to get going.  With the dam built and holding back the flood waters of the Kickapoo River, folks in La Farge, Viola and downriver wouldn’t have to be so concerned about raindrops falling on their heads.

“Let It Be” by the Beatles was #2 on that 1970 hit parade list and that classic by the Fab Four fits right in to what was happening to the dam project at La Farge.  When Governor Patrick Lucey ordered an “Intensive Review” of the Kickapoo Valley flood control project with intentions of stopping the dam construction at La Farge, pro-dam Kickapoogians howled for the governor to let it be.  Eventually Lucey provided measured support of the La Farge dam and commended the citizens of the Valley for their support of the project.  The Village of La Farge, led by the local dam-backers organization, threw a big celebration party on a Saturday night.  Some say that night and those festivities was La Farge’s finest hour.  So it appeared that the dam project was “Signed, Sealed & Delivered” – the #9 hit of that year sung by Stevie Wonder.

But soon after the governor’s endorsement of the project came forth, the John Muir Chapter of the Sierra Club filed an injunction in federal court to stop the construction of the dam.  It appeared that we had a “Ball of Confusion”; the Temptations #8 hit song in 1970.  (I must confess here that I could not remember anything about this song.  I know that I was busy in 1970 as I graduated from college, was married to the lovely Carolyn Kinsey and started on my first teaching job that year.  But I was not totally out of the loop for that year, so how could I not have any memories of a song from one of my favorite groups.  I even went on the Internet to look up the lyrics to the song and listen to the Temptations sing it on a YouTube spot.  Nothing!  Nada recognition!  Every other song in the top twenty from that year was recognized, but I drew a blank on that one.  I did find an interesting line from the song though – “Hippies moving to the hills” – but that’s another Kickapoo Valley story from the 70’s to get into at another time.) 

The Madison-based chapter of the Sierra Club claimed that the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to adequately answer environmental concerns in the Impact Statement that had earlier been submitted.  (Looking back, one has to agree with the Sierra Club on the Corps’ first EIP on the dam project at La Farge.  The report was very brief and basically said that the Corps was going to build a dam and lots of acres were soon going to be under water, lots of water.  At the same time that the Corps’ Environmental Impact Statement was submitted, all nine pages of it, the Corps released a three hundred plus page report on the recreational and economic benefits of the dam project.  Kind of shows where the Corps’ interest was at the time.)  Eventually in due process, Judge James Doyle rejected the Sierra Club’s request and let the dam project proceed.

Another celebration was called for and La Farge obliged with gusto.  A groundbreaking ceremony was held at the dam site north of La Farge in August.  Over five hundred people were in attendance with a legion of politicos fawning over the new project to bring flood control to the Valley and economic salvation to La Farge.  The golden shovel sprang forth and scoops of dirt were hoisted into the air signaling the official start of the construction of the dam.  (Work on the dam had actually begun several weeks earlier after the injunction case in federal court had been settled.)

Supporters of the dam project were happy once again and perhaps felt like singing a line or two from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” (#7 on the 1970 hit parade).  Perhaps, with the dam construction actually moving forward and the opposition to the project defeated in court, the musical lines, “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind” fit the mood of the dam-backer crowd.        

            Yet, let’s not suppose that the folks against the project didn’t have a theme song as well in the summer of 1970.  Maybe they could use the #16 hit of the year for their anthem; sung by The Carpenters, “We’ve Only Just Begun” to describe the determination to stop the dam at La Farge.  For another year would bring other injunction attempts from the Sierra Club to stop the project.  Water quality studies would begin on the proposed waters of beautiful Lake La Farge that would prove devastating to the completion of the project.  Senator Gaylord Nelson began to voice political concern over the project’s perceived environmental problems.

            In the end, Edwin Starr’s one-hit wonder from that year of 1970 probably foreshadowed what lay ahead for the two sides of the dam project at La Farge.  Yes, Starr’s #10 hit for that year, “WAR”, might have set the tone for what lay ahead.  As the conflict between the two sides over the dam project escalated; as tensions between the two sides ended friendships that had lasted a lifetime; as the fabric of the community of La Farge was ripped apart, some lines from Starr’s anthem seem almost prophetic.

War, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing

Say it again.

            

Memorial Day in La Farge - 1929

It must have been a nice day on Thursday, May 30, 1929.  It was Memorial Day in La Farge and as it was reported, “With attending pleasant weather and perfect roads, the Memorial Day ceremonies in the village were carried out with a complete and nicely executed program.”  That assessment of the day’s activities was the lead sentence in the front-page article that started with the headline, “Memorial Program Was Great Event”, in the June 6, 1929 La Farge Enterprise.  So let’s take a look at how this little Kickapoo River town celebrated on that day nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

            The Memorial Day activities began at nine in the morning with a caravan of cars leaving the K.P. Hall, which is where the local American Legion post met at that time.  The cars drove out to the “Baptist Cemetery on Bear Creek” (today the Bear Creek Cemetery) where the Fife & Drum Corps played patriotic songs and the graves of veterans were properly decorated.  The “perfect roads” that were mentioned earlier were a must for this trip out to the Bear Creek Cemetery as the stretch of road between there and the village was often a boggy quagmire and nearly impassable if it had been a wet spring season.

            At ten o’clock, the Memorial Day Parade began on the east end of La Farge’s Main Street business district near O.B. Kennedy’s Store (today the Episcope office).  Leading the procession was the La Farge Brass Band followed by the World War veterans marching with the colors.  These were the men from La Farge who had served in the 1914-18 conflict known then as the Great War or the World War.  Today we know of that conflict as World War I, but the Second World War hadn’t been fought yet in 1929, so there was no need to tag the World War with a number. 

            Following the color guard of the World War veterans were cars carrying the few remaining local veterans of the Civil War.  These men had probably been members of the local GAR post, originally started in Seelyburg then later moved to La Farge.  When most of the Civil War vets passed on, the GAR post in town was discontinued.  However, the auxiliary of the GAR was still active in town and those ladies as well as the Women’s Relief Corp were the next part of the parade.  Bringing up the rear were all of the school children from La Farge Schools – “from kindergarten through the Senior Class” as the article mentioned.  The parade proceeded west down Main Street and then north to the Chapel Hill and Star Cemeteries.

At those two cemeteries located on either end of old Seelyburg, veterans’ graves were decorated, the band and the Fife & Drum Corps played more patriotic music and a salute by the Legion rifle squad was fired.  The rifle salute held at Chapel Hill Cemetery turned out badly according to an accompanying article titled, “Gets Shot In Eye At Grave Volley”.

   According to the article, an accidental discharge from a shotgun as the rifle squad was preparing to shoot a volley over a veteran’s grave hit a grave monument and splattered shot into the faces of four members of the rifle squad.  Dick Trappe, Emory Thayer, Orville (Casey) Sanford and Ivan Major were hit with the discharged shot, “all of whom had their faces more or less stippled with the deflected shot”.  A lead pellet pierced the eye of Ivan Major and he was immediately taken to one of the local doctors to have it removed.  From there, Major was taken to Viroqua for x-rays and later saw an eye specialist in LaCrosse.  Fortunately, Major received no permanent injury to the eye.  The other three “stippled” members of the squad were also taken to the doctor’s office in the village to have the pellets removed from their faces.  The newspaper account said those three with the flesh wounds were completely recovered.  The Memorial Day procession continued on to Star Cemetery on the north side of the Kickapoo River, perhaps without a rifle squad for the rest of the ceremonies.

 There was also a ceremony held at the Seelyburg Bridge over the Kickapoo.  The ladies of the Women’s Relief Corps honored those lost in the Civil War, Spanish-American War and World War and threw garlands of flowers into the river water.  Usually a rifle volley was fired from the Star Cemetery above during this riverside ceremony, but I’m not sure if it was that day after the earlier accident with the rifle squad.  After all the ceremonies were concluded at Seelyburg, the veterans of the three wars and their families were treated to a dinner held at the K.P. Hall.

In the afternoon of that Memorial Day from La Farge’s past, a track and field meet was held on the school grounds.  It was called the “Free For All Track and Field Meet” and La Farge athlete Cy Yeomans stole the show that day by winning three events.  Yeomans won the pole vault by soaring to a top height of 10 feet, captured the discus title with a throw of 109 feet and took the top spot in the shot put at 43 feet.  Dick Husker won both the sprint races at 100 and 220 yards while Theron Green took first place in the half-mile run.  Rounding out the track and field meet events, Bob Lawton won the broad jump and Paul Harris took first in the high jump.

 Later a baseball game was played on the field south of town before a “fair-sized crowd”.  The La Farge and Viola “city teams” met on the baseball diamond for an exhibition game, with the downriver visitors securing a 7-5 win.  According to the newspaper account of the game, “Due to the tardiness in getting the game going, it was decided to call the game at the end of the seventh.  The score might have been different if the game had went over the ninth hole.”  The La Farge-Viola baseball rivalry would heat up even more, later in the season. 

But, all in all, Memorial Day in 1929 turned out to be quite a nice day in La Farge.  Times were good in the little river town, but they were soon to turn.  The 20’s would continue to roar for several more months until October, when Black Tuesday and the stock market crash would plunge the nation into the Great Depression and hard times would follow. 

More Travers Building History

(This blog entry is a continuation of a story started last time about a building on La Farge’s Main Street.  Built in 1899, the brick veneer building was originally called the Travers Building after its owner Art Travers.  Travers and others operated a variety of business places in the store building during the first twenty years of its existence.   We continue the story of the Travers Building with some of its more recent uses as a hotel annex and the village’s post office. – BDS)

            In its most recent history, the old brick building next to La Farge’s busy Z-Zip Stop convenience store/gas station has been the home to a real estate office, Hometown & Country Realty.  For a few years before that, it was the home of a restaurant for a while.  Both of those types of businesses were reincarnations of former enterprises carried out in the building’s first-floor retail space.

            For over forty years, from 1950 until 1991, that space was occupied by La Farge’s Post Office.  There is an entire generation or two who grew up in the community who will always remember the brick building as the post office.  For much of that time, Mac Marshall Jr. was the postmaster in La Farge, working in a building that his family owned.  There were usually one or more members of the Green family working at the La Farge Post Office in that building as well.  Lester Green was the postmaster in 1950 when the post office was moved from its former location on south State Street (across from the lawyer’s – Ralph Freeze at that time - office).  Lavern and Willard Green also had rural mail routes and for many years worked out of the post office in the brick building, that previously had been known as the Hotel Annex.

            The brick building became part of Mac Marshall’s hotel in the early 1930’s.  Mac’s Hotel was located on the corner lot, two doors east of the brick building (which was still then known as the Travers Building).  Mac’s became La Farge’s only hotel when the Curry Hotel (the old Hotel Ward located on the corner lot which is currently a parking lot for the La Farge Medical Clinic) burned down in June of 1929.  At that time there was still a strong demand for hotel rooms in La Farge.  Teachers who taught at the school in La Farge would often rent rooms in the hotels in town during the school year.  (Fred Mercer, La Farge’s agriculture teacher and coach, was staying in the Curry Hotel when it burned down in 1929.  Mercer, who still lived in Wauzeka at the time, lost all of his possessions except the clothes on his back in the fire.)  Railroad workers also stayed at the La Farge hotels, indeed it was a man named Cox, who was a conductor on the Kickapoo rail line, who first discovered the fire at the Curry Hotel.  There were ten guests at the Curry Hotel on the night that it burned down.

  Mac Marshall needed more hotel rooms, so he purchased the Travers Building to meet that need.  (One source said that Mac bought the property from C. E. Yeomans, who had purchased the Main Street building from the Travers family.)  They called the new acquisition the Hotel Annex and moved the dining room from the basement of the old hotel building over to the first floor of the Annex building. 

Mac’s Coffee Shoppe, as the dining room/restaurant was called then, was a going place in the community.  Besides offering guests in the hotel hot meals three times a day, the hotel’s dining room was also a bakery with homemade pies, doughnuts, cakes and cookies for sale.  A 1929 advertisement in the La Farge Enterprise for Mac’s restaurant also listed candy bars and box candies; tobacco, cigars and cigarettes; and ice cream, soft drinks and fresh fruits for sale.  The ad finished with “School students and Farmers especially welcomed”.

The Hotel Annex dining room was a very busy place in those days.  Mary Lee Muller shared some memories with me about the hotel’s dining room.  Her mother Anna Norris and Maggie Potter were cooks in the hotel dining room and that dining room would be filled with customers during the busy dinner and supper hours.  (Mary Lee also related an interesting story about another of the cooks at the hotel.  Alphreda Lawton cooked at Mac’s and was also a midwife who helped deliver babies in the La Farge area.  One night, Georgia Evans, who lived on the family farm up on Maple Ridge, had to hook up the horses to the family buggy and race down the hill to Seelyburg and then to La Farge to get Alphreda to come help with Georgia’s mother’s birthing.  Then it was a quick ride back to the Evans’ place where Georgia’s baby brother, Pete, was brought into the world.) 

The men who worked for the railroad always ate at the hotel, as did many men who operated businesses on Main Street.  Mary Lee could remember Tony Novy, the village’s blacksmith and Dr. Frank Gollin sitting at the same table each day for lunch.  There were no lunches served at the school at that time, so teachers and students alike would hustle down to the hotel during their noon hour (which really was a full hour back in those days) to eat their lunch.  The hotel’s cook stove was usually going before five in the morning, as the baking had to be done before breakfast was served.  Besides the hotel guests, many people coming into La Farge for work would catch breakfast in the hotel dining room.

 The apartments on the second floor of the Annex building were converted into hotel rooms.  Maxine Shird, who grew up in her folk’s hotel on Main Street, said that the rooms in the Annex were usually reserved for the railroad workers who needed a place to stay.  She said there were usually three or four railroad men staying at the hotel during the week.  When the Kickapoo Stump Dodger made its last run on August 15, 1939 and the railroad buildings and tracks were pulled out of La Farge later that fall, Mac’s Hotel lost some steady customers.

Mac’s Hotel building burned down in 1942 – it was the last hotel in the village.  The Major’s Feed Store building, which was just to the west of the hotel, was burned out at the same time by the hotel fire, but the Annex building survived.  Although the hotel business would not be revived, Mac Marshall continued to rent out the upstairs rooms in the Annex, which were later reconverted back to apartments.  The dining facilities were also rented out and a restaurant remained in the first floor space throughout the 1940’s.  In September of 1950 when that space in the Annex was converted for use as a post office, the Bluebird Café, which had been operating there, moved across the street to the Tony Novy building, located on the northwest corner of Main and Silver Streets.

At a meeting of the La Farge village board held on April 22, 2013, it was decided to order that the old Travers Building be razed and the demolition material from the building moved off the property.  Negotiations are under way for that order to be executed, but neither the building’s current owner, who is in bankruptcy proceedings, nor the lien holder on the building want to incur the responsibility and costs of the demolition.  The village has issued a “Notice And Order To Raze And Remove” and wants the building taken down within a week of the notice.  Regardless of how it happens, the end of an old building in La Farge is near.  The last of the five buildings on the old Central Hotel block will be gone.