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WISCONSIN MAGAZINE ^/HISTORY Published Quarterly by the STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN March 1946 WISCONSIN MAGAZINE of HISTORY EDWARD P. ALEXANDER, Editor LILLIAN KRUEGER, Associate Editor CONTENTS Chats with the Editor Edward P. Alexander 257 Two Leaders of the Old Northwest Hercules Dousman and Henry Sibley James Gray 263 An Art Gallery in Frontier Wisconsin Edward P. Alexander 281 Pastor Dietrichson of Old Koshkonong Einar Haugen 301 Bernhard Domschcke: 1. A Life of Hardship J. J. Schlicher 319 Motherhood on the Wisconsin Frontier (II) Lillian Krueger 333 DOCUMENTS : Early Letters of Dr. Theodore E. F. Hartwig, Cedarburg's Physician and Surgeon Arthur R. Boerner 347 BOOK NOTES 357 THE SOCIETY AND THE STATE 368 The WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY is published quarterly by the STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN, 816 State Street, Madison, 6. Distributed to members as part of their dues (Annual membership, $3.00; Life, $50). Yearly subscription, $3.00; single number, 75 cents. Communications should be addressed to the editor. The Society does not assume responsibility for statements made by contributors. Entered as second-class matter at the post office at Madison, Wis- consin, under the act cf August 24, 1912. Copyright 1946 by the STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN. Paid for by the Maria L. and Simeon Mills Editorial Fund and by the George B. Burrows Fund. THE COVER GRAND CHUTE [today Appleton}, WISCONSIN, 1856. Painted by Samuel M. Brookes and Thomas H. Stevenson for the Fox-Wisconsin Improve- ment Company. For a description of these early Wisconsin artists, consult the article on An Art Gallery in Frontier Wisconsin in this issue. WISCONSIN MAGAZINE of HISTORY J§@>* Volume 29 March 1946 Number 3 Chats with the Editor LACK SPARROW HAWK has for long been a figure of much interest to students of Wisconsin history. In 1832, defying B the federal authorities, he crossed the Mississippi River from Iowa into Illinois with a band of Sauk and Foxes consisting of about 1,300 men, women, and children. Though he said he intended only to make corn during the summer, n?r ? A i, the frontier sprang into action, and some 7,000 Black Hawks ^^ soldiers at a cost.of $2,000,000 put down the Hawk's uprising. Only about 150 of. his band were left alive to return to their homes in Iowa. The fighting of the Black Hawk War took place in northern Illinois and in Wisconsin. The Indians are usually said to have crossed the Mississippi at Yellow Banks (now Oquawka) in Illinois, gone north to Prophetstown, and won a skirmish from the whites at Stillman's Run north of Dixon. They then seem to have crossed what is now the Wisconsin state line, to have hidden in the swamps about Lake Koshkonong for several weeks, reached as far north as Hustisford, fled west through Madison, fought a holding action at Wisconsin Heights near Sauk City, and to have been almost extermi- nated at Bad Axe Creek on the Mississippi. Though the pioneers who fought Black Hawk's band looked upon its members as dangerous rats, later generations have been more sympathetic with the Hawk's grievances, have admired his brash courage, and have thrilled to the classic apology for his revolt attributed to him: " Rock River was a beautiful country; I loved my towns, my cornfields, and the home of my people. I fought for it." 257 258 CHATS WITH THE EDITOR [March Mr. Theodore Herfurth, Madison insurance man, has always thought well of Black Hawk and for many years has wanted to know where his trail in Wisconsin ran. Mr. Herfurth discussed the question with Colonel J. W. Jackson, Fred L. Holmes, Charles E. Brown, Albert O. Barton, and others. Mr. Barton, by using the field notes of surveyors made in 1832-33 preserved in the State Land Office at Madison, was able to reconstruct the route taken through Dane County by the Indians and their pursuers. The Hon. Vernon W. Thomson, assemblyman from Richland County, intro- duced a bill in the 1945 Legislature which became law. It grants $2,500 to the STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY "for making a detailed study of the trail followed by Black Hawk through Wisconsin in 1832, for properly marking said trail, and for publishing the results of said study." Determining exactly where Black Hawk's trail ran may be an impossibility, but a trained historical research scholar ought to be able to discover a fairly accurate approximation. He will, however, find it a very interesting exercise in weighing historical evidence. At present nearly all the studies of Black Hawk and his war are based mainly on accounts of men who participated in the campaign and wrote their reminiscences, in most cases many years after the events they seek to describe. Such testimony must be used with great caution. At nearly every point it presents startling variations. To take a single instance, we recently examined sixteen accounts of the Wisconsin Heights battle in order to try to determine the losses there. Most of the stories agreed that only one white man was killed, but they listed from 6 to 168 Indian deaths (Black Hawk himself named the lowest figure). The historian examining the campaign is struck at once by the fact that nearly all work done thus far has not made use of the records of the War Department which are now in the custody of the National Archives. Nor have previous writers examined the Indian Office records concerning the war, photostatic copies of which are in the library of the WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 1946] CHATS WITH THE EDITOR 259 The Society is hoping to interest a well-qualified research scholar, perhaps one who has almost completed his work for the Ph.D. degree, in sifting the printed evidence and in seeking out the official government records to show where Black Hawk actually traveled. Such a study will incidentally throw new light on the whole campaign. When this research job has been completed, the Wisconsin High- way Commission and a similar body for Illinois should cooperate with the state historical societies of the two commonwealths in marking the approximate trail followed by Black Hawk and his band. Much public interest will be stirred by such a project. A DISTINCTIVE FEATURE of Wisconsin's personality is the way the melting pot has functioned here. Other states have had more immigrants of as diverse nationalities, but all of these states have A Study of kac^ some *afge city* where members of a national „ _ group could huddle together, determined to per- BeaverDam, , c w <• i • i petuate the way of life of their mother country. Wtsconsm Wisconsin, on the other hand, has had only one good-sized city (Milwaukee), and the immigrants in this state have settled about the countryside or in relatively small munici- palities. No other state has had this type of settlement for so long a period and for as many diverse nationalities. Wisconsin thus offers unusual opportunities for study of the process of the merging of the nationalities. The WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY has been interested for a long time in recording their history. Starting as early as 1879 and running through 1910 or so, the Society published in its Collections or Proceedings studies of the Swiss, Germans, Belgians, Cornish, Ice- landers, Norwegians, Polish, Scots, and Bohemians. With the establishment of this Magazine in 1917, the interest broadened, and many excellent articles have appeared here, while the late director, Dr. Joseph Schafer, did outstanding work on the problem in his various volumes of the Domesday Book series. 260 CHATS WITH THE EDITOR [March The Society wants to continue this research and to try to make an even more systematic survey of the problem in the next few years. The Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation has lent a sympathetic ear to the plan and this fall made a grant of $3,500 to the Society to begin the work. Mr. Richard K. Showman, who has had graduate training toward the Ph.D. in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin, has been employed to make a thorough study of the development of a typical Wisconsin city—Beaver Dam. This place was settled in the 1840's by Yankees from New York and New England, received a strong German overlay in the 1850's, and has since added sizable groups of Irish and Poles. Mr. Showman is doing a general history of the com- munity under the direction of Professor Merle Curti of the University of Wisconsin. In this intensive study he hopes to develop a research sampling technique which may be applied to other places in the state. Perhaps eventually the Society may have a traveling research man working in this significant field. FOUR YEARS AGO last fall, we gathered together our family, said farewell to our friends in New York State, and returned to the Middle West where we had been born and raised. But instead of , . to Iowa or Minnesota, where we had lived before, we __ . / came to Wisconsin, reputed to be a clean and liberal Wisconsin ... state, albeit a turbulent one. We arrived in Wisconsin filled with much zeal and considerable hope. For seven years we had been going about our work as di- rector of the New York State Historical Association, trying to acquire some of the varied skills demanded in historical society work and almost imperceptibly forming an ideal of what such work should be. When the Wisconsin opportunity turned up, though reluctant at first because we enjoyed what we were doing, we examined it with growing interest. The situation was a little forbidding; the venerable Historical Society dating back to 1846 was not too well kept up nor too influential with the citizens of the state.