More Civil War Stories

(This is a continuation of my previous post, which was about a bus tour - "Bringing The Civil War Home To Wisconsin" - which I was a part of.  During the tour as the bus was traveling from one place to another, I gave some personal Civil War stories from my family that are included in this post.)

When we reached Kenosha on the second day of our tour, our motor coach drove to the renovated lakeside area of the city.  After lunch, we went to the Civil War Museum located on 1^st Avenue next to Kenosha Harbor.  This is a new and magnificent facility that focuses on the Civil War and how it related to the six Midwest states of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.  We were given guided tours through the museum’s main floor display that is called “The Fiery Trial”.   The exhibits and displays, some of which are interactive with audio and video technology, take you on a journey starting in a Midwest village when the war began.  The displays then continue through the steps taken to becoming a soldier in the various state units and going off to war.  Camp life at the war front, battles and skirmishes, hospital care and convalescence and other wartime experiences are graphically depicted in life size dioramas, which concludes with the soldiers return to their Midwest homes after the war ended.

            The display also includes several interactive displays that draw people into the experience.  One of these displays was a full size railroad car that was partially filled with soldiers going off to the war.  When you sat next to one of the lifelike robots, it would turn to you and tell you the real story of a soldier heading off to war.  Moving on to another seat, you could hear another story told.  At another part of the display, a steamboat heading home from the war had the same kind of display.  As you walked around the boat and neared an individual standing there, the robot would relay another tale of actual Civil War experiences.

            The upstairs of the museum houses a rotating display, which at this time tells about the role of Midwestern troops in the Battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg.  The museum is also a research center and includes a library with over 2,200 books on the Civil War.  Numerous collections of Civil War era letters are archived at the research center and 85 rolls of microfilm of Civil War documents and papers are available for research and study.  Near the first floor main entrance a Veterans Memorial Gallery honors all veterans in American conflicts.  The displays in this gallery depict artifacts, drawings and photographs from each war and conflict where Midwesterners served. 

The museum also has a theater area where we were treated to a wonderful portrayal of a remarkable Wisconsin woman involved in the Civil War.  Cordelia Harvey was the wife of Louis P. Harvey, who was elected Governor of Wisconsin in November of 1861.  They both became very involved in helping the troops from their state going off to war.  In the spring of 1862, they raised supplies for those Wisconsin troops and headed south to the front to help deliver the relief supplies.  While visiting at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee after the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, Governor Harvey was drowned in an accident during a nighttime transfer of steamboats.

After a period of mourning, Mrs. Harvey championed her husband’s cause by working as a medical inspector at the front, raising funds and delivering medical and hospital supplies and visiting the wounded.  Her relentless efforts to help the soldiers in so many ways led to them calling her “The Wisconsin Angel”.  Eventually she went to Washington D.C. and met with President Lincoln on two occasions to petition for military hospitals in Wisconsin for care away from the front for wounded soldiers.  The President relented to her pleas and Cordelia Harvey would eventually open three Veteran’s Hospitals in Wisconsin and established a Soldiers Orphans’ Home in Madison.  Mary Kabakik, a Kenosha actress who was the first person historical interpreter (more information at cordeliaharvey.com) of Mrs. Harvey, presented an emotional and inspiring portrayal for our group.  After her wonderful performance, Mary talked to us about her research into the Cordelia Harvey role that she delivered so flawlessly and of her emotional commitment to the role.  For me, Mary Kabakik’s performance and discussion were the highlight of our Civil War trip.

As the bus headed north to Milwaukee, I shared with the tour group another story of a Civil War soldier from Wisconsin, this time someone from my own family.

George Melvin had first come to Wisconsin in 1854.  He and his wife Mary Ann and four small children settled in Bad Ax County along the West Fork of the Kickapoo River, where they carved a homestead out of the wilderness.  George was a patriotic man as evidenced by the names of his children; Zachary Taylor – named after the famous American general and 12^th president of the United States, John Perley – named after a famous preacher of the time, Winfield Scott – famous American general in charge of Union forces when the Civil War began, George Washington – named for the father of our country, and born on May 9, 1861 (less than a month after the bombardment of Ft Sumter to start the Civil War) – Abraham Lincoln Melvin.

Probably due to his patriotic fervor to save the Union, George enlisted for military service on November 18, 1861 at the age of 36.  He left his wife and six children – Zachary was the oldest at 13, and enlisted in the army in the village of Ontario.  Eventually he became a member of Company D, 18^th Infantry Regiment of the Wisconsin Volunteers.  After being haphazardly organized and trained at Camp Trowbridge in Milwaukee, the 18^th Regiment saw its first action in Tennessee at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.  As part of the 18^th, Melvin and his fellow soldiers continued fighting at the Battle of Corinth in Mississippi and crossed the state of Tennessee in pursuit of the Rebel army.  On December 3, 1863, Confederate forces captured George Melvin near Memphis.  Today, official government records list this date as his death, but it wasn’t. Eventually he ended up in Andersonville Prison in Georgia in March of 1864.

In letters written home to his wife, George told of how he was assigned to the hospital unit at the infamous Confederate prison.  His main job was to dig graves for those who died at the prison.  Since the prison was little more than a death camp, George’s job was never ending.  According to family stories, George wrote that he was fed well and in good health, but he feared that one of the graves that he dug might soon be his own.  However, he managed and George somehow survived at Andersonville. 

When General Sherman’s Union forces drew near the prison in the spring of 1865, the Confederacy moved many of the surviving prisoners at Andersonville to other sites, including Camp Salisbury in North Carolina.  At that camp, between five and eleven thousand Union prisoners died of disease or starvation and were buried in a series of trenches there.  No records were kept of the mass burials.  Although there is no official record of where George Melvin was buried, it was believed by his family that he died on the march away from Andersonville or that he may be in one of those mass graves at Camp Salisbury in North Carolina.  He never came back to the Kickapoo Valley.

At the Salem Cemetery in rural Vernon County, near where many of George Melvin’s children and grandchildren lived, and next to the gravestone for his wife Mary (who passed in 1899), there is a simple tombstone and a Civil War veteran’s memorial medallion which holds an American flag for a fallen Union soldier, lying forever far away from his home.

The third day of the excursion was spent at Wade House, a Wisconsin Historical Society site located hallway between Fond du Lac and Sheboygan at the small hamlet of Greenbush.  Each fall, Wade House hosts a Civil War reenactment and our tour spent the day there for the occasion.  It was the largest gathering of Civil War re- enactors in the state and provided an interesting look back as the two sides met at the Battle of Chickamauga, a battle fought in northern Georgia in September of 1863.

When we first arrived, our tour group was transported to a command center near the battlefield where we heard from General Grant and President Lincoln.  They talked about their views of the war in September of 1863.  Portrayers Frank Beaman (Grant) and Fritz Klein (Lincoln) provided wonderful first-person information on the state of the war for our group.  Later that morning, many in the tour group visited the two army camps located near the battleground and heard nurses tell of medical practices in the battlefield hospital set up nearby.  A skirmish broke out as the Confederate artillery opened fire on a hill position commanded by Union forces.  A cannon from a Wisconsin artillery unit was perilously close to capture, but was saved by a rousing cavalry battle that repelled the Rebel advance.

Later that afternoon, the battle began in earnest with a twenty-minute artillery duel between the Union and Rebel artillery pieces.  A dozen cannon blasted away at each other as cavalry units on both sides tried to flank the lines.  Suddenly a large army of Confederate infantry emerged from the woods and attacked the fortified hill position.  The cannon from the Wisconsin artillery unit was captured and all members of the ordinance crew were killed.  Soon the Rebs amassed and the infantry let loose a deadly fuselage of fire against the Union troops.  Charge after charge by the Rebels was repulsed, but eventually the Confederacy carried the day and drove the Boys in Blue from the field.  The Southern army had won the battle and stopped the Union campaign from moving into Georgia.

On the bus ride back to Madison that afternoon, I told the group another Civil War story taken from my family.

Phillip Steinmetz was 20 years old and lived in Union County, Pennsylvania when the Civil War began.  He was a student at Lewisburg Academy at the time, preparing to become a Lutheran minister as his grandfather and great-grandfather had before him.  He attended one more year of college, and then enlisted in Company E of the 142^nd Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers on August 20, 1862.

            On December 13th of that year, Phillip’s regiment was involved in the ill-fated attack on Marye’s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia.  During the afternoon portion of the attack, Phillip was shot in the arm as he handed a rifle to a comrade (who was killed at the same time in the fusillade of gunfire).  The mini-ball shattered the bones in Phillip’s forearm and when taken to the hospital tent, army surgeons prepared to amputate his arm.  But Phillip begged them to save his arm and they did not do the surgery, possibly because of the many more serious wounds that the doctors had to deal with during the battle.  Eventually after Phillip stayed several months in the hospital, the arm healed, but he only had partial control of his hand (his fingers remained curled for the rest of his life).  He was discharged from the 142^nd on March 9, 1863 and returned to his home in Union County.

            Before the war was over, Philip moved with his family to Seneca County, Ohio where he and his brothers worked in the shipyards and war warehouses.  After the war, Phillip became a farmer and married Dorothea Krause, a Seneca County girl, and they immediately began raising a family.  In 1875, Phillip, and two of Dorothea’s brothers set out to the West to look for new farms and homes.  Dorothea and their five children would come later when land was found.  The men first looked at farmland in southern Indiana, but found it much too Southern (as in CSA Southern) for their tastes.  They moved on toward Wisconsin, where they heard that cheap and good land was abundant.  As they were driving the wagons west, Phillip’s arm that was wounded in the war began to swell due to the constant vibrations and stress of driving the team.  Stopping in the Chicago area, a doctor there prescribed that the arm should be amputated at the elbow.  Phillip again refused so the doctor cut open the arm to reduce the swelling and drained some of the liquid.  After resuming the trip towards Wisconsin, the wounded arm continued to fester.  Phillip saw a doctor in Waukesha County, who opened up his arm and removed several large bone splinters that had worked themselves loose from the original war wound.  After several weeks of rehabilitation, Phillip and the Krause’s drove their wagons across Wisconsin to Bad Ax County where they staked out claims on over three hundred acres located on Morning Star Ridge on the eastern side of the county.  That fall, Dorothea and the children arrived by train at Union Center, the nearest railroad depot to the farms, where Phillip and her brothers met them.  The family was soon settled into their new home on Morning Star Ridge.  In Wisconsin, six more boys were added to the Steinmetz family and the ten brothers and sister Mary all grew up in the La Farge area of Vernon County.

            Phillip became a charter member of the Grand Army of The Republic (GAR) Post #154 in nearby Star (Seelyburg) when it was founded.  Phillip attended the GAR veteran’s reunions, which were held annually in La Farge, with pride for the rest of his life.  He passed away in 1908.  On his grave in the Bear Creek Cemetery located outside of La Farge, an American flag held in a GAR veteran’s bronze medallion marks the spot where a veteran of the Civil War rests. 

Civil War Stories

Carolyn and I recently participated in a bus tour around southern Wisconsin that focused on how the Civil War impacted the state.  Sponsored by the Friends of the Wisconsin Historical Society and arranged by past-president Chuck Hatfield of La Farge, the tour was titled Bringing The Civil War Home To Wisconsin!  The three-day excursion began in Madison then traveled to Beloit, Milton, Kenosha, and Milwaukee before ending at the Wade House grounds in Greenbush near Sheboygan.  Although the tour never came close to the Kickapoo Valley, the area’s history was well represented on the trip.

            At the first stop in our state’s capital, we were given a tour of Forest Hills Cemetery.  This facility has an entire section of graves of men who died at nearby Camp Randall while training to go off to war.  Many of the men from Vernon County who served for the Union trained at this large military camp in Madison.  In another section of the cemetery is the “Confederate Rest” where over two hundred men who served the Confederacy are buried.  They were some of the prisoners captured at the battle for Island #10 on the Mississippi River (an early Union victory for control of that river) and brought north to Camp Randall for a short while.  This final resting place for the CSA prisoners is the only Confederate cemetery maintained in the northern states and the Stars & Bars flies over the graves located there on one day each year.

            Later the tour group moved to the State Historical Society Museum on the UW campus.  We were shown Civil War artifacts that are stored in the museum’s archives.  Among the items that we were shown was the Civil War drum of Samuel Arms.  Sam Arms was a 12-year-old slave in Georgia who was unofficially adopted by a Wisconsin infantry company and became their drummer boy throughout the rest of the war.  After the war was concluded, he eventually settled in the Valley area of eastern Vernon County and raised a large family there.  His family has donated the drum to the State Historical Society for display at the museum, which is located on the UW Campus.

            Later, after lunch at the University Club, the tour group was enthralled to hear from General Ulysses S. Grant.  Frank Beaman of Mineral Point, a member of the tour, has been doing first person portrayals of the Civil War general for some time.  His spot-on presentation to us was as President Grant in his later years when he was writing his memoirs near the end of his life.  The first-person account of the famous American leader as he told of his amazing journey in life was very illuminating for us all.

            As our motor coach traveled south on I-94 that afternoon, I gave the first of my in-transit stories about men from Vernon County (then called Bad Ax County) and their role in the war.  I told how in 1861, after the fall of Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, then Wisconsin Governor Alexander Randall made a call for Wisconsin men to enlist in the Union cause.  In Bad Ax County, that call was answered with a rally on April 24, 1861 in Viroqua.  Funds were immediately collected to organize a fife and drum corps to help rally the recruits and intensify patriotic desires to serve.  Company I was formed by June with Bad Ax County men and that unit arrived in Madison at Camp Randall in July and were mustered into service.  That company would eventually be made a part of the 6^th Regiment, which was part of the famous Iron Brigade – one of the legendary units that fought in the war for the Union army.

            Later, in December of 1861, Vernon County men formed Company C of the 18^th Regiment, known locally as the “Bad Ax Tigers”.  One of the leaders of that unit was Jeremiah Rusk, who had once been the county sheriff.  Rusk demonstrated remarkable leadership skills with the unit and eventually became a general in the army.  He participated in the siege and capture of Vicksburg and was with General Sherman on his “March to the Sea”.  A fellow officer said of General Rusk, “He rode farther into hell than I would care to go, and he was the only man I have ever seen who would take such risks.”  Later Rusk would continue his leadership skills developed in the war by serving Wisconsin as a U.S. Congressman and as Governor from 1882-89.  He was the Secretary of Agriculture in the cabinet of President Benjamin Harrison from 1889-93.

            Returning to the tour, we had supper that night at The Butterfly Club in rural Beloit.  After the meal, Kevin and Patsy Alderson of La Farge talked to the group about their Civil War book, Letters Home To Sarah.  They told the story of Guy Taylor, a Dane County bonus enlistee, who wrote amazing letters home to his wife, Sarah, telling about his observations of the war.  After the war was concluded, the Taylor’s would move to a Town of Clinton farm in Vernon County and then into the village of Cashton.  Kevin and Patsy’s story of how they happened to find the collection of Civil War letters, an amazing story in itself, was also shared with our group.

            The following morning, the tour made a stop at the Milton House Museum in Milton, Wisconsin.  The old roadside inn, built in an interesting hexagonal configuration, has been restored beautifully and includes an original 1850’s - era cabin that served as a summer kitchen for the inn.  That cabin also secretly was an access to a tunnel that led into the basement of the inn, where runaway slaves attempting to become free were hidden.  The Milton House is Wisconsin’s only officially recognized Underground Railroad site.  Our guided tour of the handsomely restored crossroads inn was very interesting. 

On the way out of the museum, I noticed a wall that listed the names of the many contributors to the museum.  In one square were the names of Walter and Joan Steinmetz – long time residents of the city of Milton.  Walter, the son of Bill and Almeda Steinmetz, grew up in the La Farge area and had passed away only two days prior to our visit to the Milton House.

            As we drove east towards Kenosha later that morning, I shared another Civil War story from Vernon County.  I told the story of Isaac Richard (Dick) Lawton, who had left his farm, located along the Kickapoo south of La Farge and had enlisted for service to the Union on February 5, 1865.  Dick Lawton soon became very ill in the army and rheumatic seizures had rendered his legs useless.  According to the Lawton family history, U.S. Army doctors contacted Melissa Lawton, Dick’s wife, for her consent to amputate both of her husband’s legs.  Instead, she told the doctors to send her husband home – “We’ll care for him here”, was her reply.  When her husband arrived home in late May of 1865, Melissa could do little for her invalid husband except provide him the comfort of home and family. 

Later, some Winnebago Indians, who returned to the Kickapoo Valley and their former homes each year, came to the Lawton farm to set up their camp for the summer.  They went to the house to visit their old friends and noticed Dick’s sorrowful condition.  The Winnebago immediately set out to help Melissa with his care. “At once full of sympathy, they made valuable suggestions as to treatment, and offered some of their remedies gathered from Mother Nature and proven through many years of experience.  Before long Dick took a turn for the better.  The patient and loving ministrations of his wife, seconded by the virtues of the Indian remedies, paid off tremendously and in a surprisingly short time Dick was back on his feet.”  The story is told in the family history of how the help from his Winnebago friends probably saved Dick Lawton’s life.

More Canoeing On The Kickapoo

“On Thursday night, May 17 a party of canoers (sic) consisting of three men and three boys camped overnight upstream from the bridge over the Kickapoo on the north side of the tunnel.  This party had launched their two canoes in the river someplace between Rockton and La Farge.”

            So began a front-page article in the May 31, 1962 issue of the La Farge Enterprise weekly newspaper.  The article went on to describe the group of people on that canoe trip on the Kickapoo River, “One was an elderly gentleman along with his son, son-in-law, and three grandsons (about 6, 8 and 10).  These campers make many canoe trips in different parts of the state.  They said they especially enjoyed the scenery in this part of the state and that it was one of the most beautiful trips they had made.”

            Bernard and Jeanne Smith, who lived nearby on Tunnelville Road, visited the group of canoeists in their riverside camp and found out more on how the group happened to be on the Kickapoo.  “Their trip on the Kickapoo may have been prompted by the article in the Milwaukee Journal about the La Farge dam.  They had the newspaper clipping with them.  They were interested in the project and thought it would be a wonderful thing for this ‘undiscovered’ country.”

            As we continue to look at the evolution of canoeing on the northern Kickapoo River as a major recreational activity, this newspaper article from the past can almost serve as a launching place for this story.  I find it interesting that the May 1962 canoe trip was newsworthy enough to get front-page coverage in the local newspaper.  But for that time, the trip is so unique that it draws that kind of attention.  Because of the impending dam project, the river was becoming known for more than just periodic bad flooding.  By October of 1962 Congress would authorize the go-ahead for the flood control dam to be built north of La Farge and the federal project would start to move forward.

            One of the first aspects of the dam project to be seen in La Farge was the study of the land along the river that would be affected by the impoundment of water behind the dam.  By 1960, research crews from the Wisconsin Historical Society had come to the La Farge area to look for archeological and historical sites in the Valley that would be affected by the dam project.  During the following decade that research would expand to include a listing of several hundred sites.

            Other researchers from the University of Wisconsin - Madison came to the Valley to study the flora of the area.  Much of their initial findings were conducted from the river as the two botanists paddled down the Kickapoo in a canoe from Ontario to La Farge.  When the pair hitched a ride back up river with a local, the story of their canoe trip on the river amazed the Kickapoogian.  More people from outside the Valley started to look at the Kickapoo River as a recreational canoeing venue.  In April 1965 a family of four from Madison capsized their canoe in the flooding Kickapoo and were rescued.  The brief article in the La Farge newspaper noted that the family was lucky to survive.

            Later in July of 1965, a tourist group was formed to promote the Kickapoo Valley and that group met for the first time in Readstown.  At that initial meeting, much of the discussion was about ways to promote canoeing on the Kickapoo River.  Later in September, the tourism promotion group, then going by the name of the Kickapoo Trails Association, met in La Farge.  Fifty-eight people were in attendance at that meeting as interest in tourism was apparent in the Valley.  Plans were discussed on holding events to attract people to the Kickapoo Valley.  Over the winter, the organization changed its name to the Kickapoo Valley Association (KVA) and Harry Lounsbury and Bernard Smith, who served as an early president of the organization, represented La Farge on the board.

            On May 15, 1966, the KVA sponsored an Arts & Crafts Fair in Gays Mills as part of the Apple Blossom Festival.  By the following spring, the KVA was sponsoring a river cleanup campaign to open up canoe trails on the Kickapoo.  In late September 1967, the KVA sponsored a special Fall Colorama canoe trip on the Kickapoo from Bryant’s Bridge at Jug Creek to the Bacon Bridge located just north of La Farge.  Newspaper writers and photographers from around the state were invited on the trip and seventeen canoes with thirty-seven people made the paddle down the Kickapoo.  Ironically, Harry Lounsbury, the local druggist and an avid outdoorsman and canoeist, was dumped in the river immediately when his canoe capsized.  Eventually everyone completed the scenic canoe trip and was treated to Dale Sandmire’s bar-b-queued chicken in La Farge’s Village Park.

            Because of that KVA sponsored canoe trip, articles soon appeared in the Milwaukee, Madison, LaCrosse and other newspapers lauding the Kickapoo River for its beautiful canoeing vistas.  Later that fall, Bernard Smith reported at a KVA meeting on the canoe trail progress.  He noted that all of the bridges over the Kickapoo had been numbered and signed from Ontario to Seelyburg and work was ongoing on timing the canoeing intervals between the bridges and roads along that section of the river.

            In June 1968, the KVA began sponsoring what would become an annual Father’s Day Kickapoo Canoe Race on the river and forty-seven people participated in the first race held on a course on the river near Readstown.  More and more people were canoeing on the Kickapoo as these events were publicized.  Through Harry Lounsbury’s influence, Boy Scout groups from throughout the area were soon canoeing the Kickapoo River.  Brent Waddell and his dad Gordon took a group of boys from LaCrosse’s St Michael’s Orphanage canoeing on the Kickapoo in August 1968.  Later that year in October, the KVA sponsored another Fall Colorama on the Kickapoo, which included canoe trips on several parts of the river.  The event again drew hundreds of people to the Valley, many of whom canoed the river.

            Soon a need arose for better services on the river for people wanting to canoe.  Bernard Smith bought a dozen aluminum canoes to rent and put in a canoe landing at his Tunnelville Road farm.  Upriver on the Kickapoo, canoes could be rented at Duane Obert’s BeautiView Resort at Wildcat Mountain State Park and a canoe route was cleared from Ontario south to the lower park.  The recreational activity of canoeing the Kickapoo River had begun.

            On July 18, I took a canoe trip on the Kickapoo River.  Our group of canoeists put in at the Bridge 10 canoe landing north of Rockton. As we rounded the first bend of the river, there was a family of people swimming at Bare Ass Beach, just as people have been doing on warm summer afternoons for decades.  Down river, our meandering course straightened as we paddled through the old millrace at Rockton and then glided under the “Million Dollar Bridge To Nowhere” that stretched far above us.  We passed the new canoe landing below Rockton then drifted upon the old rusty piers of the Jug Creek Bridge and remembered the old canoe landing located there.  Further down the river we glided under the weeping sandstone cliffs with their green walls of lichen, mosses and flowers.  We spied some Northern Monkshood clinging to the magnificent and sheer sandstone walls north of Bridge 14.  We departed the river there at that canoe landing  – eleven canoes and twenty-two people having spent a couple of serene hours canoeing the beautiful Kickapoo River.      

But before we leave the story of the winding river, we need to revisit the mention of the canoe built by the La Farge Boy Scouts that I alluded to in my last entry.  The local Scouts on a couple of occasions built canoes as part of their troop activities.  I was involved with one of those canoe-building projects, but I’m still not sure what happened to that canoe.  Later, when the La Farge Scoutmaster was Melvin Hanson, the troop built another canoe and troop members Kevin Alderson, Tony Benish and Phil Muller decided to take it out for a spin on the Kickapoo River.  According to Kevin, they launched from the Seelyburg dam area and headed up river.  It was early spring and there was still ice on parts of the river.  As they were negotiating around some snags in the river, a tree limb punctured the canoe’s fiberglass prow and slashed open the side.  Water poured in and soon the canoe was sitting at the bottom of the Kickapoo.  Tony thought that he was going to drown until he was told to stand up in the less than three feet of water, Phil couldn’t stop laughing as the trio floundered in the water and Kevin was properly aghast at the demise of the troop’s new canoe.  Eventually they were able to get the damaged craft back to the Seelyburg Bridge and drag it up to the old river road.  That canoe’s days on the Kickapoo were definitely numbered.

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.