Pioneer Wisconsin

What in the world is this far?

Scooping clams from the bottom of a lake or digging ditches?

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

[Pause] Pioneer Wisconsin, presented by the Wisconsin School of the Air.

A series of programs for intermediate grades bringing authentic textures of life in the early days of our state.

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

Now to tell you about Wisconsin's old industries, here is Ms. Platt.

Hello boys and girls.

Today we're going to talk about some Pioneer industry.

Some of them still going on in 1959.

When the Frenchmen came to Wisconsin, they found a chippewa or a jibwe Indian, busy harvesting wild rice.

I have the pictures of some of the things the Indians used in their wild rice harvest.

Here is the canoe.

It's really a big, flat boat, not much like a thin canoe because it had to push through the marshes and the reeds.

And here are the paddles.

And again, they're like pushing or punting paddles because you couldn't go fast.

And here are the ricing sticks.

The ricing sticks used to remove the kernels of rice for the harvest.

Now I have some real sticks.

Here are the real ricing sticks.

And these were used by the monomony Indians at Kishina.

Now the two sticks were used by the Indian woman in the boat.

She went out and pulled the heads or the kernels of rice together and knocked them into the bottom of the boat.

And when she had collected 25 pounds or 50 pounds, then she took the rice back to shore.

Now when she got there, the rice was wet and she had to dry it.

It was dried over a fire or spread out in the sun.

If it was placed over the fire, it had to be stirred so that it wouldn't burn.

And then after it was dried, the kernels had to be separated from the hull.

Do you know how that was done?

Well, some of the Indian braves put on clean moccasins.

And then the rice was placed in a big barrel or kettle or a birch bark container.

And then jumped up and down on it.

Now they couldn't jump straight up and down.

They had to make a shuffling motion to remove the hulls from the kernels.

And so they called this rice jigging.

Now I have some wild rice here.

I have it in a mortar.

It's very dark, almost black.

And they're long cylinders or tubes of rice.

Now if you wanted to make some rice flour, and there is wild rice pancake flour even today, the Indians would take this wooden vessel or pounder and they'd put it in the mortar and they'd grind the rice up and get the flour.

We were told that the woodlands Indians had the best diet in America when it wasn't a time of cold or famine because they had their vegetables and their meat from hunting and wild rice and maple syrup.

And they put maple syrup on their rice and their fish even and their vegetables.

And so they had a very nutritious diet.

Now we have some of the things that the Indians used in collecting maple syrup or maple sap and making it into sugar.

One of the things that they had was a wooden paddle to stir the sap.

And this is it.

This came from the Chippewa's at Lach de Flomble in 1888.

And this was used to stir up the maple sugar sap.

Then when it was collected from the trees, there were big containers of birch bark to keep it in.

Now actually birch bark was very wonderful because you could use it for dry rice or for the wet maple syrup.

Pitch or gum was used to take care of the seams so that the birch bark basket wouldn't leak.

Then you know if you were an Indian child, you might have had some very good maple sugar candy.

I have a little cone of birch bark here.

The maple syrup has become hard and dry, but this was fresh sugar at one time.

And then the children also had a little bored frame with indentations in it in the shape of a rabbit or a cross or a diamond or a bear.

And so the syrup was poured in it.

And after a while they would have some molded maple syrup or maple sugar candy just as you have today.

Now maple sugar is still made today and collected in Wisconsin, even as the pioneers did it.

And if you go out in March in the woodlands of Wisconsin, you'll probably see this industry still carrying on.

This picture is not modern times quite, but it's not too long ago.

And you see the wagon starting for the woods.

The horses are carrying the big carts along the roads.

And here you'll see the pales which are collecting the sap.

Today you're more apt to see plastic buckets or bags for sap collecting.

But here you see the tin pales.

Then the pales are dumped into a big container and the wagon carries the big trough or tank back to a little shelter.

And in this shelter the maple syrup is boiled down and made into actual syrup that you can use on pancakes.

Now another sort of syrup is also made in Wisconsin and that is sorghum syrup.

We find that even right today sorghum is being made near Gays Mills at Captain Stuce's farm.

Captain Stuce has a large acreage of sorghum.

It looks something like corn when it's growing but it doesn't have any ears on it.

And the sorghum is collected and brought into the sorghum mill.

And there it's piled up and we see here the process of how the sap is made into syrup that's used not so often on pancakes plain as to flavor baked beans or things that need a sort of molasses flavor.

And some people are very fond of it.

Here you see the juice being squeezed out and collected in great big tanks that look something like horse troughs.

And then after it's been collected it's taken inside and boiled it's heated to about 236 degrees.

And it takes 8 to 10 gallons of the sap to make the thicker syrup that's used in cooking.

After it's been heated then it's strained and poured into milk cans and sold.

And we find that even today people are very eager to buy it.

And Mr. Stuce says he could sell even more.

He doesn't have all that people want.

Another famous industry in Wisconsin is the cranberry industry.

The Indians also were the first ones to use cranberries and when white men came they learned about them.

They called them cranberries.

Now the Indians picked them, picked them by hand and collected them in boxes.

And about 1880 was the time that the cranberry industry came to its height after the Civil War.

Berlin was the first area, Berlin, Wisconsin, where the cranberries were picked and then shipped to Chicago and sold.

Here's a shelter with the cranberry boxes or crates inside being protected from the sun.

The cranberry farmers were very eager to learn about the weather because until they were able to protect their berries from the frost they didn't know quite what to do.

And you know you couldn't get a weather report over the radio or television as we do and they were eager to know about the frost.

And so sometimes a train would come through with a little red sign in the corner and this was a frost warning.

And it said get some smudge pots going in those cranberry marshes so that nothing will happen to them.

Now there was a contest in 1937 and Black River Falls where a Winnebago Indian, Jesse Mike, was the winner in a contest.

And here you see him using this cranberry rake and the water is rushing out and he was able to pick 40 quarts of cranberries in 20 minutes.

And that was very fast.

Now I showed you the rake earlier this afternoon.

This is the cranberry scoop or rake.

You have to use two hands, one on the handle and one here.

And the berries come into this portion and the water rushes out as you scoop the cranberries out of the water in the marsh.

Wisconsin is second in the cranberry industry in the United States and this too is an industry that's still going on.

Wisconsin was also noted for her woodworkers or cabinet makers.

You've heard of the famous circus wagons built by the Miller brothers at Baraboo are the young brothers of Shiboygan.

And in addition to the wagons there were many other wonderful things made of wood, furniture, barrels, wooden shoes.

I have some of the Carpenter's tools here.

These happen to come from Fort Crawford about 1835.

This is a drawknife and this is the blade here and the two wooden handles.

This was used for making barrel staves or hoops.

Here is a drawknife that's straighter, straight blade and again the wooden handles.

Now although we don't wear wooden shoes today, these tools are for wooden shoes.

I have a wooden shoe here and you can see that it's very smooth.

Now if you're making a wooden shoe you would start with a gouge.

This tool has a wooden handle and the iron piece at the bottom.

You'd start with a block of wood for your wooden shoe and you'd put the gouge in it and you'd take out some of the wood to make the portion where your foot was going to go.

After you had gouged out the main portion of the wood and then you really wanted to make it fit.

You would take this next tool again with a wooden handle and I don't know whether you can see the little scoop in the iron at the bottom.

Now this scoop is placed in the shoe and chips of wood come out with it.

Now for the final rarefication of this, here's a very long handle tool, wooden handle and the gouge that will go right into the tip or the toe.

Put it right inside the toe and scoop out the last portion of wood.

Then to smooth off the shoe on the outside, you have this tool which is known as a rasp and it has a corrugation in the iron and it can smooth out the shoe.

Now these shoes were worn especially up at Ustburg on the coast of Lake Michigan and although we don't wear them much today, it's fun to know how wooden shoes were made.

Now there was a home industry that the ladies were particularly interested in and that was hat making.

Now sometimes this was carried on in a millenar shop in the town and there the ladies found out about the latest styles from France or from Italy in hat making.

The road is stop of the Stadest Archaeal Society Museum is going to show you how these hats were made in a little millenary shop.

She has all the tools here that she needs to make flowers and she has braid and feathers and tafft and silk so that she's going to make the roses and the pretty leaves that you see on the hats.

Now she has a little tool used for cutting out a leaf that has a sharp edge and this tool she will put on a little piece of cloth and she takes the hammer and gives the tool a sharp blow and the edge of the little tool cuts the piece out and makes it into a leaf.

Now she has other tools to make veins and petals in flowers.

This one perhaps you can see looks like something like a pansy and there are others that put flutes and crimps in the cloth and these are goffering irons and they make a little hole in the center where the little stamens and little yellow centers can be placed.

Now a road is going to show you how a petal for a rose would be made.

The petal is cut out and they're all different shapes and then she puts some glue or paste on it to give it stiffening we call it starch.

After she has spread this glue or paste all over the petal then she holds it over a little top or tea kettle and there's steam rising from it and this makes it moist.

Then she has it starched and she has a little wet and then she places it over the iron and she presses down and all the little veins and petals show.

They don't really show on this piece of cloth but that is the way that the actual flower was made.

Now we'll show you a hat with the flowers on it.

It's a pretty big hat isn't it?

I wish you could see it.

It has lovely white feathers and it has the petals of the flower.

Perhaps you can show them the petals.

There are many of them sewed together.

The petal also has red roses and green ribbons which you like to try it on for us so that we can see how you look with this great big hat on.

You'd have to find a pretty narrow door when you were wearing this hat.

But this was just the sort of hat that the ladies of Wisconsin in the 1850s wanted to know about.

Incidentally, Rhoda is wearing an 1855 dress that belonged to Mrs. Burrs.

Now once you show us one of your other hats, Rhoda.

This hat is made of braided straw and came from Italy and it has green flowers and green velvet streamers that she could tie under the chin.

This hat doesn't stick out quite so far.

It would be a little bit easier to wear when you were stepping into a carriage wouldn't it?

You have another hat there that you could show us.

This is a straw hat of red and has big red tath of bows.

This one doesn't happen to have any flowers on it at all.

Well thank you.

That's certainly a very fine fashion show that you've given us with your hats and you've showed us how it is that you could make a hat at home and have very fancy flowers on it.

Or you could go to a little hat shop down the street and buy one and select just the colors and the kinds of roses that you wanted to wear.

Now there were other home industries or industries that we especially find in Wisconsin.

One of them is bee raising.

The Indians just got their honey from a tree.

But today we do make bee raising an important industry.

And as you travel over the countryside you'll sometimes see places where bees are kept.

And you know Wisconsin is one of the outstanding places in the country where bees are raised.

Another industry that we have and this is not something that you eat is raising fur, fox fur or perhaps mink.

And this is done especially in Marathon County where the fron brothers have their fur farm and raise fur that are sold all over the country.

We're also noted for cherries and for apples and you find that there can be lots of very wonderful apples and apples saws from our wonderful gaze mills or door county apples.

Those are some of the industries that took place in Wisconsin long ago and some of them still today.

And some of those industries were especially brought here by immigrants from other countries.

We're going to learn about some of those immigrants in the weeks to come and next week we're going to talk about the Frenchman.

Who was the first Frenchman in Wisconsin?

John Nicolay?

Oh no, long before that.

Before Joliath, before Marquette?

Well, who discovered Canada?

Maybe you can find out before next week.

Goodbye boys and girls.

I'll see you then.

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

Miss Platt is a supervisor of elementary school services or the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

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

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