THE LAND OF THE WINNEBAGOES.

Appleton, Wis., June 10, 1887.

My dear W——: We had a late start to-day from Oshkosh. It was half-past nine o'clock by the time we had reloaded our traps, pushed off from the railway embankment, and received the God-speed of M——, who had come down to see us off. The busy town, with its twenty-two thousand thrifty people, was all astir. The factories and the mills were resonant with the clang and rattle of industry, and across the two wagon-bridges of the city proper there were continual streams of traffic.

I suppose that Oshkosh is, in its way, as widely known throughout this country as almost any city in it. The name is strikingly outlandish, being equaled only by Kalamazoo, and furnishes the butt of many a newspaper joke and comic rhyme. Old chief Oshkosh, whose cognomen signifies "brave" in Menomonee speech, was the head man of his dusky tribe, a half-century ago. He was a doughty, wrinkled hero, o'er fond of fire-water, and wore a battered silk hat for a crown. About 1840, when the settlement here was four years old, the Government offered to establish a post-office if the inhabitants would unite on a name for the place. The whites favored Athens, but the Indians, half-breeds, and traders round about Butte des Morts, wanted their friend Oshkosh immortalized, so they came down to the new settlement in force, and the election being a free-for-all, carried the day. It is said that the Grignons were so anxious in behalf of the Menomonee sachem that they had a number of squaws array themselves in trousers and cast ballots like the bucks. And it was fortunate, as events proved, that the election turned out as it did, for the oddity of the name has been a permanent advertisement for a very bright community. Oshkosh, as hackneyed "Athens," would have been lost to fame. Nobody would think of going to "Athens" to "have fun with the boys."

The morning air was as clear as a bell,—a pleasant northeast zephyr, coming in off the body of the lake, slightly ruffling the surface and reducing the temperature to a delightful tone. The wind not being fair, the sail was useless, so we paddled along through the broad river, into the lake and northward past a fishermen's colony, rows of great ice-houses, the water-works park, and beautiful lake-shore residences, to Garlic Island. It was half-past twelve, P.M., when we tied up at the crazy pier which projects from this islet of the loud-smelling vegetable. A half-century ago Garlic Island was the home of Iowatuk, the beautiful aboriginal relict of a French fur-trader,—an Indian princess, the old settlers called her; at all events, she is reputed to have been a most exemplary person, well-possessed of this world's goods, as well as a large family of half-breed children. The island is charmingly situated, a half-mile or more out from the main land, opposite the Northern Insane Hospital; it is a forest of ancient elms, surrounded by a bowlder-strewn beach of some three quarters of a mile in length, and occupied by a summer-hotel establishment. The name "Garlic Island" does not sound very well for a fashionable resort, so the insular territory has been dubbed "Island Park" of late; but "Garlic" has good staying qualities, and I doubt if they can ever efface the objectionable pioneer title.

We had our dinner on the sward near the pier, convenient to a pump, and were entertained by watching the approach of a little steam-launch, loaded with a party of "resorters" who had doubtless been shopping in Oshkosh, the smoke from whose chimneys rose above the tree-tops, five miles to the southwest. There were some of the usual types,—the languid Southern woman, with her two pouting boys in charge of a rather savage-looking colored nurse, who dragged the little fellows out over the gang-plank, one in each hand, as though they had been bags of flour; a fashionable dame, from some northern metropolis, all ribbons and furbelows, starch and whalebones, accompanied by her willowy daughter of twenty, almost her counterpart as to dress, with a pert young miss of fourteen, in abbreviated gown and overgrown hat, bringing up the rear with the family pug; a dawdling young Anglo-maniac sucked the handle of his cane and looked sweetly on the society girl, whose papa, apparently a tired-out broker, in a well made business costume and a wretched straw hat, stayed behind to treat the skipper to a prime cigar and arrange for a fishing excursion.

There is a fine view from the island. The hills and cliffs of Calumet County, a dozen miles to the east, are dimly visible. Toward Fond du Lac, on the south, the horizon is the lake. South-southwestward, Black Wolf Point runs out, just over the verge, and the tops of the tall trees upon it peep up into view, like shadowy pile-work. Westward are the well-kept hospital grounds, fringed with stately elms overhanging the firm, gravelly beach, studded with ice-heaved bowlders, which extends northward to Neenah. The view to the north and northeast is delightfully hazy, being now dark with delicate fringes of forest which cap the occasional limestone promontories, and again losing itself in a watery sky-line.

We had two pleasant hours at this island-home of the lovely Iowatuk, walking around it on the bowldered beach, and reveling in the shade of the grand old elms. By the time we were ready to resume our voyage, the wind had died down, the lake was as smooth as a marble slab, and the sun's rays reflected from it converted the atmosphere to the temperature of a bake-oven. No sooner had we pushed out beyond the deep shadows of the trees than it seemed as though we had at one paddle-stroke shot into the waters of a tropic sea. The awning was at once raised, and served to somewhat mitigate our sufferings, but the dazzling reflection was there still, to the great discomfort of our eyes.

After two miles of distress, a bank of light but sharply broken clouds appeared on the northeastern horizon, and soon a gentle breeze brought blessed relief. In a few minutes more, ripples danced upon our starboard quarter, and then the awning had to come down, for it filled like a fixed sail and counteracted the effect of the paddles. The Doctor, who, you know full well, never paddles when he can sail, insisted on running up into the wind and spreading the canvas. He was just in time, for a squall struck us as he was adjusting the boom sprit, and nearly sent him overboard while attempting to regain his seat. Little black squalls now rapidly succeeded each other, the wind freshening between the gusts; and the Doctor, who was the sailing-master, had to exercise rare vigilance, for the breeze was rapidly developing into a young gale, and the ripples had now grown to be by far the largest waves our little craft had yet encountered. The situation began to be somewhat serious, as the clouds thickened and the white-caps broke upon the west beach with a sullen roar. We therefore deemed it advisable to run into a little harbor to the lee of a wooded spit, and hold council.

It was a wild, storm-tossed headland, two thirds of the distance down from the island, and the spit was but one of its many points. We landed and made an extended exploration, deeming it possible that we might be obliged to pass the night here; but the result of our discoveries was to discourage any such project. For a half-mile back or more the forest proved to be a tangled swamp, filled with fallen timber and sink-holes, while quicksands lined the harbor where the canoe peacefully rested behind an outlying fringe of gnarled elms. We wandered up and down the gravelly beach, in the spray of the breakers, scrambling over great bowlders and overhanging trunks whose foundations had been sapped by storm-driven floods; but everywhere was the same hard, forbidding scene of desolation, with the angry surface of the lake and the canopy of wind-clouds filling out a picture which, the Doctor suggested, could have only been satisfactorily executed in water-colors.

In the course of our wanderings, which were sadly destructive to clothes and shoe-leather, we had some comical adventures. The Doctor hasn't got over laughing about one of them yet. We came to an apparently shallow lagoon, perhaps three rods wide and a dozen long, beyond which we desired to penetrate. It was bedded with sand and covered with green slime. The Doctor had, just before, divested himself of shoes and stockings and rolled his trousers above his knees, in an enthusiastic hunt for a particularly ponderous frog, which he desired to pickle in the cause of science. He playfully offered to carry me across the pool on his back, and thus save me the trouble of imitating his style of undress. With some misgivings as to the result, I finally mounted. We progressed favorably as far as the centre, when suddenly I felt my transport sinking; he gave a desperate lunge as the water suddenly reached his waist, I sprang forward over his head, and losing my balance, sprawled out flat upon the slimy water. I hardly know how we reached firm ground again, but when we did, we were a sorry-looking pair, as you can well imagine. The Doctor thought it high sport, as he wrung out his clothes and spread them upon a bowlder to dry, and I tried hard to join in his boisterous hilarity; but somehow, as I scraped the gluey slime from my only canoeing suit, with a bit of old drift shingle, and contemplated the soppy condition of my wardrobe, I know there must have been a tinge of sadness in my gaze. It was too much like being shipwrecked on a desert island.

As we sat, clad in rubber coats, sunning ourselves on the lee side of a fallen tree and waiting for our garments to again become wearable, the Doctor read to me an article from his medical journal, describing a novel surgical operation on somebody's splintered backbone, copiously illustrating the selection with vivid reports of his own hospital observations in that direction. This sort of thing was well calculated to send the shivers down one's spinal column, but the Doctor certainly made the theme quite interesting and the half-hour necessary to the drying process soon passed.

By this time it was plain to be seen that the velocity of the wind was not going to increase before sundown, although it had not slacked. We determined to try the sea again, and pushed out through the breakers, with sail close-hauled and baggage canvased. Taking a bold offing into the teeth of the gale, we ran out well into the lower lake, and then, on a port tack, had a fine run down to Doty's Island, which divides the lower Fox into two channels. The city of Neenah, noted for its flouring and paper mills, is built upon both sides of the southern channel, or Neenah River; Menasha, with several factories, but apparently less prosperous than the other, guards the north channel,—the twin cities dividing the island between them. The government lock is at Menasha, while at Neenah there is a fine water-power, with a fall of twelve or fifteen feet,—the "Winnebago Rapids" of olden time.

It was into Neenah channel that we came flying so gayly, before the wind. There is a fine park on the mainland shore, with a smartly painted summer hotel and half a dozen pretty cottages that would do credit to a seaside resort. To the right the island is studded with picturesque old elms, shading a closely cropped turf, upon which cattle peacefully graze, while here and there among the trees are old-fashioned white cottages, with green blinds, quite after the style of a sleepy New-England village,—a charming scene of semi-rustic life; while to seaward Lake Winnebago tosses and rolls, almost to the horizon.

Doty's is an historic landmark. The rapids here necessitated a portage, and from the earliest times there have been Indian villages on the island, more or less permanent in character,—Menomonee, Fox, and Winnebago in turn. As white traffic over the Fox-Wisconsin watercourse grew, so grew the importance of this village, whatever the tribe of its inhabitants; for the bucks found employment in helping the empty boats over the rapids and in "toting" the goods over the portage-trail. The Foxes overreached themselves by setting up as toll-gatherers. It is related—but historians are somewhat misty as to the details—that in the winter of 1706-7 a French captain, Marin by name, was sent out by the governor of New France to chastise the blackmailers. At the head of a large party of French creoles and half-breeds, he ascended the lower Fox on snowshoes, surprising the aborigines in their principal village, here at Winnebago Rapids, and slaughtering them by the hundreds. Afterward, this same Marin conducted a summer expedition against the Foxes. His boats were filled with armed men and covered down with oilcloth, as traders were wont to treat their goods en voyage, to escape a wetting. Only two men were visible in each boat, paddling and steering. Nearly fifteen hundred dusky tax-gatherers were discovered squatting on the beach at the foot of the rapids, awaiting the arrival of the flotilla. The canoes were ranged along the shore. Upon a signal being given, the coverings were thrown off and volley after volley of hot lead poured into the mob of unsuspecting savages, a swivel-gun in Marin's boat aiding in the slaughter. Tradition has it that over a thousand Foxes fell in that brutal assault. In 1716 another captain of New France, named De Louvigny, is reported to have stormed the audacious Foxes. They had not, it seems, been exterminated by previous massacres, for five hundred warriors and three thousand squaws are alleged to have been collected within a palisaded fort, somewhere in the neighborhood of these rapids. De Louvigny is credited with having captured the fort after a three days' siege, but granted the enemy the honors of war. Twelve years later the Foxes had again become so troublesome as to need chastisement. This time the agent chosen to command the expedition was De Lignery, among whose lieutenants was the noted Charles de Langlade, Wisconsin's first white settler. But the redskins had become wise, after their fashion, and fled before the Frenchmen, who found the villages on the Fox, lower and upper, deserted. The invaders burned every wigwam and cornfield in sight, from Green Bay to the portage. This expedition appears to have been followed by others, until the Foxes, with the allied Sacs, fled the valley, never to return. Much of this is traditionary.

The widening of the Fox below Doty's Island was called Lac Petit Butte des Morts,—"Lake Little Hill of the Dead," to distinguish it from the "Great Hill of the Dead," above Oshkosh.

It has long been claimed that the thousands of Foxes who at various times fell victims to these massacres in behalf of the French fur-trade were buried in great pits at Petit Butte des Morts,—near Winnebago Rapids. But modern investigators lean to the opinion that the "little hill of the dead" was merely an ordinary Indian cemetery, and the mound or mounds there are prehistoric tumuli, common enough in the neighborhood of Wisconsin lakes. A like conclusion, also, has been arrived at in regard to the Grand Butte des Morts. However, this is something that the archæological committee must settle among themselves.

The Winnebagoes succeeded the Foxes, and Doty's Island became the seat of their power. The master spirit among them for a quarter of a century previous to the fall of New France was a French fur-trader named De Korra or De Cora, who had a Winnebago "princess" for a squaw. They had a numerous progeny, which De Korra left to his wife's charge when called to serve under Montcalm in the defence of Quebec. He was killed in a sortie, and Madame De Korra and her brood relapsed into barbarism. One half of the Winnebagoes now living are descendants, more or less direct, of this sturdy old fur-trader, and bear his name, which is also perpetuated, with varied orthography, in many a northwestern stream and hamlet. During the first third of the present century Hoo-Tschope, or Four Legs, was the dusky magnate at this Winnebago capital.[5] Four Legs was a cunning rascal, well known to the earliest pioneers, but he at last fell a victim to his greatest enemy, the bottle. Last month I was visiting among the Winnebagoes around Black River Falls. Desiring to have a "talk" with Walking Cloud, a wizened-faced redskin of some seventy-two years, I went out with my interpreters over the hills and through the valley of the Black, nearly a dozen miles, before I found him and his squatting in their wigwams at the base of a bold bluff, fronted by a lovely bit of vale. Cloud's decrepit squaw, blind in one eye and wofully garrulous, hobbled up to us, and sinking to her knees in front of me, held out a dirty, bony hand, with nails like the claws of a bird, murmuring, "Give! Give!" I dropped a coin into the outstretched palm; she grinned and chattered like an animated skeleton, and crawled away on her witch-like crutch. This was the once far-famed and beautiful princess of the Winnebagoes, the winsome Champche Keriwinke, or Flash of Lightning, eldest daughter of Hoo-Tschope. How are the mighty fallen!

We portaged around the island end of the Neenah dam and met the customary shallows below the obstruction. But soon finding a narrow, rock-imbedded channel, we glided swiftly down the stream, through the thrifty town, past the mills and under the bridges, just as the six o'clock bells had sounded and the factory hands were thronging homeward, their tin dinner-pails glistening in the sun. Scores of them stopped to lean over the bridge-rails, and curiously watched us as we threaded the shallows; for canoes long ago ceased to be a daily spectacle at Winnebago Rapids.

Little Lake Butte des Morts, just below, is where the river spreads to a full mile in breadth, the average width of the stream being less than one half that. The wind was fair, and we came swooping down into the lake, which is two or three miles long. A half-hour before sunset we hauled up at a high mossy glade on the north shore, and had delightful down-stream glimpses of deep vine-clad, naturally terraced banks, the slopes and summits being generally well wooded. A party of young men and women were having a camp near us. The woods echoed with their laughing shouts. A number, with their chaperone, a lovely and lively old lady, in a white cap with satin ribbons, came down to the shore to inspect our little vessel and question us as to our unusual voyage. We returned the call and played lawn tennis with fair partners, until the fact that we must reach Appleton to-night suddenly dawned upon us, and we bade a hasty farewell to our joyous wayside friends.

It was a charming run down to Appleton, between the park-like banks, which rise to an altitude of fifty feet or more. Every now and then a pretty summer residence stands prominently out upon a bluff-head, an architectural gem in a setting of oaks and luxurious pines. At their bases flows the deep flood of the Lower Fox, black as Erebus in the shadows, but smiling brightly in the patchy sunlight, and thickly decked with great bubbles which fairly leap along the course, eager to reach their far-off ocean goal. But swifter by far than the bubbles went our canoe as we set the paddles deeply and bent to our work, for the waters were strange to us, the night was setting in, and Appleton must be made. It will not do to traverse these rivers after dark unless well acquainted with the currents, the snags, and the dams, for disaster may readily overtake the unwary.

Cautiously we now crept along, for in the fast-fading twilight we could just discern the outlines of the Appleton paper-mills and a labyrinth of railway bridges, while the air fairly trembled with the mingled roar of water and of mighty gearing. Across the rapid stream shot piercing rays from the windows of the electric works, whose dynamos furnish light for the town and power for the street railway. A fisherman, tugging against the current, shouted to us to keep hard on the eastern bank, and in a few minutes more we glided by the stone pier which buttresses the upper dam, and pulled up in a little dead-water cove at the base of the Milwaukee and Northern railway bridge. The bridge-tender's children came down to meet us; the man himself soon followed; we were permitted to chain up for the night at his pier, and to deposit our bulky baggage in his kitchen; he accompanied us over the long bridge which spans the noisy apron and the rushing race. A misstep between the ties would send one on a short cut to the hereafter, but we safely crossed, ascended two or three steep flights of stairs to the top of the bank, and in a minute or two more were speeding up town to our hotel, aboard an electric street railway car.