Pioneer Wisconsin

What were these broad water highways that brought men singing to Wisconsin?

What language are they singing in?

I'll tell you about it today on Pioneer Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin School of the Air, a series of programs for intermediate grades, bringing authentic pictures of life in the early days of our state.

Your historian is Miss Doris Platt, supervisor of elementary school services of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Now here to tell you about water transportation is Miss Platt.

Hello boys and girls.

Today we are starting a second season of programs about life on the Wisconsin Frontier.

How did the pioneers get to Wisconsin from the east or from Europe?

The lakes and rivers were their highways, canoes and barges and keel boats were their transportation.

But long before the pioneers came here, Frenchmen and explorers and missionaries came down the Great Waterways.

You will remember that in 1535, Jacques Cartier discovered Canada and for the next 70 years, French sailors and fishermen from Gaskinian, Brittany came to the coast of America to fish for cod and whales.

And sometimes they came down the Great Lakes.

We don't hear much about them, but we do know that they were equated with a hearing Indians long before Quebec was named.

Quebec was founded in Canada in 168 by Champlain.

The name was a hearing word, "K-Bec," which means a narrow place in the river, and the city was on an island.

From that time on, many explorers and traders started into the interior of America.

Let's look at a map of Wisconsin and the surrounding territory and see the waterways that these men followed.

This is a map of Wisconsin and over to the east of it, the Great Lakes, and just a little bit of Lake Heron.

The explorers from the east, from the Atlantic and Canada, came down the St. Lawrence River into Lake Heron, and then they stopped at Mac and All Island right about here.

Here they rested for a while, and then they changed a canoes and broke up their forces and went in various directions.

Here are some of the ways that they could come into Wisconsin.

They might come down to Lake Michigan and into Green Bay, and here they would follow the Fox River down to Lake Winnebago, and then on further along, down to a place called a "portage."

At first it was just a spot where there was no city, though later it had the name of "portage."

We'll put a sign here on the Fox so that you'll know the way that they came.

After they had carried their canoes across the portage, they went on down the Wisconsin River, until they came to the Mississippi and Prairie Dishin.

The Mississippi River forms the border boundary of our state.

Here it is all the way along the western boundary of Wisconsin.

Another way of coming into the state was through Lake Superior up here at the north.

Here the Voyagers might start out on the Bruell River.

Put a little sign here for the Bruell, and this is about where it would be.

They came down to a place called "Solend Springs," and again they unloaded their canoes and carried them on their heads over to the St. Croix River, which flows into the Mississippi.

Still another way to come into Wisconsin was from Lake Superior down here to the Montreal River, down to a little place which we know today as the Lacta Flambo Reservation.

Then they would portage their canoes and come on down the Wisconsin.

This doesn't seem to want to write.

Then they would go down again to portage, carry their goods, and come on to the Mississippi.

Another famous spot was the Chippewa River.

Again coming into the Mississippi, all of these involving portages.

Let's see, here's a sign for the St. Croix River over here, and one for the Wisconsin River, which comes along to portage and then turns and goes out to the Mississippi.

All of those were famous highways in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin River is 300 miles long, and it was a super highway for missionaries and explorers and traders.

But the famous men who came to Wisconsin, whose names, some of them we even know, were the voyagers of olden days.

Now we say today, "A voyager is a traveler," but "A voyager," which is a French word, meant eventually, "a paddler of a canoe."

When the Frenchmen came to Canada and later to Wisconsin, they were simply delighted to find canoes.

They had no boats like this in Europe at all.

The canoes were light, they could carry heavy weights, they could go over rapids and whirlpools, and not break up.

And these Frenchmen were looking for China, and they thought maybe a light canoe could take them all the way there.

I have a canoe model here, let's look at it.

This was made by Chippewa Indian Bob Pine in recent years.

It's a family style canoe, the model.

Inside, it's made of white cedar, the framework.

The outside is made of yellow birch.

There are no nails or metal in it, it's sewed together with the root of a red spruce tree.

And it has gum or pitch from pine on it to keep it waterproof.

This gum or pitch was often reapplied as the canoe hit a rock for a rapid and broke up.

There were many types of canoes, but the main one, made by the Algonquin Indians for the early French traders, was a long canoe about 35 feet long, made of yellow birch, and it could be paddled by 14 men.

The equipment it contained was this, the paddles for the men of different lengths, because those who sat in the middle didn't need so long a paddle as those at the end of the boat.

A toe rope to pull a canoe along the rapids, a sponge, in case the canoe struck a leak, the sponge could pick up several quarts of water at once, and tracking poles.

When a canoe went along against the current, sometimes the canoe men had to track or push with their poles.

And when they finally arrived at a place where the streams went to the west, with a joyous ceremony, they threw their tracking poles away, threw them over their shoulders, and didn't need to use them anymore.

In the bottom of the canoe, where the sacks are bags of goods that the men were carrying, they were about 90 pounds each, and tied up with little ears like sacks of flowers, so the men could lift them.

And they were placed on poles at the bottom of the canoe, so they wouldn't break through.

These big canoes, weighing less than 300 pounds, but capable of carrying five tons of trade goods, were used on the big rivers and lakes.

Smaller canoes were manned by eight paddlers, and were perhaps only 25 feet in length.

The voyages were French-Canadian.

They were short men, about five feet six inches tall.

Otherwise, their legs were too long and took up too much room in the canoe.

In fact, if a French boy grew tall, six feet, he was very unhappy because then he could never be a voyager.

The voyager had to be strong.

He lifted from 200 to 450 pounds of goods on his shoulders and carried them over the portage.

And he had to be fast.

You know he could paddle a stroke a second, making five to six miles an hour in his canoe.

And we were told by one traveler who came to Wisconsin in 1826 with some voyagers, that his men had started paddling at three o'clock in the morning.

At seven o'clock at night with very few rest stops.

He said to them, "It's dark, you must be tired.

Don't you want to stop?"

And they said, "No, we're fresh yet."

And he figured out they had paddled 57,600 strokes with their paddles, but they were still fresh.

And they were very fast these voyagers.

They could unload their canoe if it had a hole or a leak in it and mend it, put it together again, cook breakfast, eat shave, and get back in the boat in less than an hour.

And they had their own terms and their own songs.

They had a great sense of humor.

They called certain little patches of the trip pipes.

They could stop and smoke their pipe when they got a signal.

And then they went on again.

And so their voyage was so many pipes long.

And when they went to a portage, they had so many rest stops which they called "poses."

We have the word "repose" today, meaning "to rest."

The voyagers counted everything in "poses" about a third of a mile between rest stops.

And we find that one portage which came from Lake Superior to Locke de Flambeau was 145 "poses" which actually was something like 45 or 50 miles.

The voyager came along then singing his happy songs, laughing, smiling, even though he had very hard work.

And maybe he had bruised ankles from those heavy packages he had to carry.

He very often had long hair to keep the mosquitoes away from him.

He came then singing as he came, keeping rhythm, keeping happy, just as these men were singing that you heard this afternoon.

We have a picture of a canoe here with Marquette and Joliette coming down to the Wisconsin River in about 1673.

They may have been the first white men ever to appear on this river.

And with the explorers came their voyagers and their tradesmen.

And they came to trading posts along the river.

Some of them at Prairie De Chine, some at Portage.

These little trading huts were a man by officers of the company.

The voyagers themselves didn't sell the things.

They carried them.

They were the paddlers, but they didn't sell them.

The Indians brought their packs of furs into the little store.

And there they exchanged them for beads, or kettles, or many of the things that they treasured so dearly and did not have.

Dave McNamara of the State Historical Society Museum is dressed as a voyager today.

And he's going to show you some of these trade goods.

Dave is dressed in typical fashion.

He has a deer skin jacket.

And the voyagers also wore deer skin leggings and moccasins.

This jacket has many beautiful beads on it.

Will you turn around Dave so we can see these beads?

You know the traders sold the beads to the Indians, and then the Indians put the beads on jackets and sold the jackets back to the voyagers.

Dave has a bando on his head.

He doesn't have the long hair from mosquitoes, so he's using this scarf or a bando to keep them away.

The voyagers also wore them around their waist as sashes.

And the Indians love those as trade goods too.

They especially, however, prize metals such as the kettle that Dave has.

This belonged to Winnebago Indians and was a trade article.

Other articles here came from the Hudson's Bay Trading Post in O'Night of County at Trawlake in our own Wisconsin.

There are harpoon heads and points made of metal used for fishing.

And there are trade beads.

These beads are large.

They're very early beads.

They are not the kind sold on the jacket that Dave is wearing.

There's also an axe head because the Indians valued the metal for arrows and axes rather than the flint and stone that they used themselves.

When the Indians came in, they very gladly exchanged the beautiful furs that they brought for what we might call inexpensive articles that they valued in return.

They often brought in beaver skins.

Beaver skins were highly prized in France to make hats for the fashionable gentlemen.

And so they were one of the rare and choice skins from Wisconsin.

Next is an otter skin.

This is a very lovely one.

Very long.

You see the skin both sides.

We'll turn it over for us so we can see the other side too.

You see it's good on both sides.

And next is the tiny muskrat.

This was valued by the traders because they could carry so many of them.

They could pile them up and put them all together and take them along.

And last we have a timber wolf.

This was not the most ordinary type of fur, but it was still one of the things that was collected.

The voyages traveled through Wisconsin and sometimes when they grew old, they decided to settle and live there.

And more often, their descendants lived there.

And the voyages and their descendants knew about the waterways and the canoes.

We do have a few stories of canoeing in early Wisconsin.

You've heard the expression "tippy canoe."

One school teacher who came here tells us that she was so afraid when she was in the canoe that she sat as still as a mouse.

And she didn't dare touch her tongue or move it from one side of her mouth to the other for fear she'd tip the canoe over.

I guess that means she was a silent rider.

She wasn't talking very much.

Back in Prairie de Sheen, in about 1770, Mrs. John Marie Cardinal has left us this note about her canoe travels.

She says, "The water was so high in the Mississippi and the herds of buffalo so thick my husband and I had to wait to cross with our canoe until the herd had passed by.

Can you imagine buffalo on the edge of Wisconsin long ago?"

And finally, one of our famous travelers who was a governor, Doty, and with Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan, traveled all over Wisconsin in a canoe in 1820.

But after all, other boats came into being bigger boats and boats that were perhaps even more useful in a canoe.

Let's look at the Batot.

I have a picture of one here.

The Batot was the next boat used by traders.

It's a long, flat wooden boat and it carried more men and more freight than a canoe.

And it didn't sink far down in the water so it could be used on very shallow streams.

This was in favor in the early 1800s, but in 1825, even another boat became more used by the traders and the voyagers.

This boat was called a Durham boat.

It was actually invented in the east, but was introduced into Wisconsin by John Arndt of Green Bay in 1825.

This boat was pulled and not paddled.

Men could walk around the edge of it and push it along and it too rode high in the water.

Another favorite boat used by soldiers and settlers was the Keel boat.

This Keel boat had an enclosed deck.

You could sleep in it, you could even cook in it.

Nathan Myrick was at LaCrosse in 1840 and he tells us he borrowed a boat like this from the army.

Nathan was only 18 years old, but he was going to trade with the Indians.

And he put his Keel boat together, put more wood in it, and fixed it up so that if he were snowed in all winter, he could still live on it very comfortably.

And he was very successful in this.

He worked along and managed to trade and make money and didn't get snowed in after all.

But of course, the boats that brought people to Wisconsin were bigger boats.

The first boat on the Great Lakes was the Griffin.

This boat came in 1679 and here we see it coming to Green Bay with the Indians welcoming it and shouting.

And LaCrosse, the explorer, was there.

He saw to it that the Griffin was packed with lots of lavish birds and he was going to become rich when the boat returned to Canada and to France.

Alas, it went into a storm and never was seen again.

That's one of the mysteries of Wisconsin, what happened to the Griffin.

We have a picture of a wooden anchor such as might be used on the Griffin or other boats of this type.

Then if we skip a few years, we know that the Voyager and his canoe is gone and the bigger boats, the steam boats, are coming into the country across the Great Lakes with people to live in Milwaukee and Madison and other little towns and villages that were just growing up in the 1840s.

If we have a model here of one of these steam boats, this is called the Milwaukee and it has a paddle wheel, but it was a steamship, it was in use in about 1840 and came across from Buffalo to Milwaukee and Chicago and other Lake Port.

We have a picture of the dining room on one of these Lake steamers.

How would you feel if you were eating at that table, little bit seasick wouldn't you, as the boat was wobbling back and forth.

We also have some pictures of the tickets and the freight bills that were used on the ships.

The steamship tickets were little pieces of paste board, yellow or purple.

This one is for the steamship war eagle for a passenger and for a cabin as the person came along across the lake.

We also have some freight bills and lading bills.

This is one for a grocer who lived in wild losing and he's contracting for materials to be sent from Galena up the Mississippi River to him.

On the bill we see price of apples and coffee and even for a bag of lead.

You know the lead was mined in Galena and mineral point and Dodgeville and places near there and could be sent up the river up the Mississippi to wild losing and other places in the north.

We also have an ad for shipping from England to Milwaukee, from Liverpool to Milwaukee way across the ocean.

One of the Canadian lines and Montreal ocean steamship line advertises that daily each week the ships are sailing and are bringing goods from way across the water to Milwaukee or Chicago or places of that sort.

Those of course were all boats for freight and for lots of people but we also had smaller boats on the Fox River and on some of the other tiny rivers and lakes in Wisconsin which were still important waterways for the settlers.

In 1856 people were very interested in building canals and the Fox Wisconsin waterway was made then.

It was finished and when it was then you didn't have to portage a canoe but you could ride in a boat down the Fox River through Lake Winnebago past portage and on down the Wisconsin.

And so we had a number of boats that at that time were used for passengers coming into the interior.

I have the steamboat whistle here from one of these smaller boats.

The captain of the ship would blow his whistle or the pilot when he came to a lock when the boat needed to go through the locks then he would say well we'll have to wake up that sleepy lock tendered.

And he would blow his whistle and the lock tender would go out and open the locks for him.

People also had to ride ferry boats because there were no bridges at that time and they had to put their horses in their wagons and all their goods on the ferry and be pulled across the rivers.

Sometimes one man would pull them across.

Sometimes very famous people had to ride those ferries.

The Kinzies who came to portage, Governor Dodge, all sorts of people in the early days had to use ferries which were just rafts or tiny little boats, not like ferry boats at all today.

The ferry at Ashcash finally went out of use when we find that a floating bridge was built instead.

But many of the pioneers in Wisconsin built their cabins far from the water.

They weren't near a river or a stream and then they needed solid roads under their feet and under their horses feet.

How did they build those roads?

How did they survey them and mark them so that other people could follow?

Maybe you'd like to look up something about a famous Wisconsin surveyor, increased lapen, before next week.

Goodbye boys and girls, I'll see you then.

Miss Doris Platte is your historian on this series of programs, Pioneer Wisconsin, authentic pictures of life in the early days of our state.

Miss Platte is supervisor of elementary school services for the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

Pioneer Wisconsin is a presentation of the Wisconsin School of the Air.