Power of the River

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[gentle music] - When I look at the Fox River, I see 12,000 years of history.

- This is the land of water, and you can't tell the story of the people who've lived in this part of the state without a focus on the water.

- It's an extremely hardworking river because of those elevation drops.

The Fox River has created great opportunity.

- It's about pre-European settlements with the Menominee, the Meskwaki, the Ho-Chunk living along its banks.

It's about the first European settlers coming here.

It's about the industrialization that follows, how that has now evolved.

That evidence, that history is still there.

You just have to look for it.

You have to know where it is.

And once you find it, it's captivating.

- Fox River is really one of the large rivers of Wisconsin and it drains much of eastern Wisconsin, originating in north central Wisconsin, up in the headwaters of the Wolf River.

And it's also fed by the Upper Fox River, which originates in south central Wisconsin.

And then is the sort of major river that the communities of Green Bay and Fox Cities are built around that flows into the southern part of Green Bay.

- The Fox River has probably been an important landscape feature, an important piece of the topography since the first humans came into the area.

- This was a transport route, and it had been a transport route for thousands of years.

- The rivers were the Menominee people's highway 'cause that's how we traveled.

– Peter: The river connects Green Bay, Lake Michigan, goes down through Lake Winnebago, Lake Poygan.

You can get up the Wolf River, which was a very important river also to Native peoples.

From Lake Poygan, you can go up the Fox to Portage, where there is a portage to the Wisconsin River.

The Wisconsin River feeds into the Mississippi.

- That route is an ancient route, an extremely crucial route.

And so the improvements of the Wisconsin and Fox River waterway, you could say has been happening incrementally over hundreds of years, if not thousands of years.

- The Upper Fox and the Lower Fox really are distinct rivers, but it's not an accident that we break the river by Lake Winnebago.

Above Lake Winnebago, the Fox River is fairly low gradient, moving fairly slowly.

The Lower Fox from the outlet of Lake Winnebago to Green Bay, there, it drops much faster.

- The Fox River is a marvelous, brawny river.

It has this beautiful flow that's uninterrupted 24/7, 365 days out of the year.

It also falls 170 feet from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay.

And so there's this natural stair step of falls that creates then, power because the water falling can drive water wheels.

And water wheels are key to successful industrial applications here along the valley.

- The aesthetic parts of the Fox River are really important.

There's no denying that it's a pleasure for most people to live near bodies of water.

And I think people have cities there beyond just the access to drinking water or transportation or mechanical power.

People like living near water.

- Water is a life-giver in terms of fish and waterfowl.

- Water is sacred to our people.

The living things that are in the river, the fish and sturgeon, have cultural and spiritual significance to us.

- I think today we don't realize how massive the migrations of waterfowl used to be.

That was a huge source of food for people, or how large the fish population was.

So those provided an abundant resource for the Native people living here.

- Well, the Fox River is the basis of our whole community here, of course, all based on the fur trade and then the lumber and everything else along the way.

The paper mills that followed, and all industry that grew up around it.

So the 39-mile stretch of the Lower Fox from Winnebago down to Green Bay has really become the center of everything that's grown up.

- It starts out with canoes and then steamers.

Of course, all along the river there are pathways for people to walk.

That ends up being roads paralleling it, villages, towns, cities paralleling it.

And then you build the bigger roads, the highways that follow it.

It starts as a water transport route and then keeps evolving as transportation changes over the years.

- Rivers form because water accumulates and travels in the low spots along the landscape.

In our area, of course, the landscape has been highly influenced by glaciers.

– John: The last few glacial episodes, specifically the last two glacial advances at 15,500 years and 13,500 years ago formed glacial moraines or piles of unsorted debris and sediment.

One at the southern end of the lake near Fond du Lac, called the Eureka Moraine, and one on the northern edge of Lake Winnebago called the Denmark Moraine.

One of the curiosities about the Fox River where it exits Lake Winnebago is why didn't it flow to the north or the northeast?

That's where the bedrock surface is the lowest, and it's the place where one would expect the water to flow out.

It seems that the glacial ice was damming the northern and northeastern side of Lake Winnebago and only allowed for water, melt water from the rest of the system, to be specific, to leak out that northwestern side.

Once it cut through that part of the moraine and went through Appleton and some of the other Fox Cities, there was a preferential flow path.

So once the glacier had melted away, the moraine stood high and that preferential flow path now over the bedrock through the Fox Cities is the only place for the water to go.

It's essentially locked in its channel.

- Once it got a chance to get out of the lake, it began to drain down the dip of the bedrock, which was controlling the direction of drainage which was almost due east, and we would call it a river going down the dip of the rock or down the inclination of the rock.

But then when it turns toward the north and northeast, it's following the strike of the rock, which means it's following an old bedrock valley.

If it weren't for this dam of glacial sediment at the north end of Lake Winnebago, we would probably just have a river flowing through the Lake Winnebago basin and not a lake.

It's this glacial dam here that has created the Lake Winnebago as we see it today.

[gentle music] - People entered Wisconsin as soon as the glaciers began to retreat.

They followed the ice northward from the southern border all the way up to the lake.

- We've got evidence of people living in the Fox Valley, at least 13,000, probably 13,500 years ago, shortly after the ice is out of this area.

And vegetation started colonizing and animals started coming in and eating the vegetation and other animals coming in, eating the animals.

Well, then people weren't far behind.

- People stayed, people moved on.

Who actually stayed the longest are likely the Menominee and the Ho-Chunk.

There are others, but certainly the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin is one of the oldest, if not the oldest Indigenous First Nations community.

- The Menominees are the Indigenous people of Wisconsin and part of upper Michigan.

We have no migration story like the other tribes.

We've always been here.

- Wisconsin has an incredibly rich cultural heritage.

There is evidence for precontact and post-contact occupation everywhere.

- We've got a trade network that has developed by 2,000 years ago that's bringing in obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, bringing in conch shells from the Gulf Coast, taking copper from the upper Midwest, bringing in mica from the southern Appalachians.

So we see a really widespread trade network.

- The reason that Native people lived here was because of the river.

The floodplain of the river would've been great for agriculture.

- The river provided fish and wild rice, and that's what the Menominees lived on.

And that's our name, Omeaqnomenewak, the people of the wild rice.

– Peter: There were a large number of Native burial mounds, effigy mounds, and other features that created a real spiritual tie to the river.

- A mound is an artificial construction created with earth and varying degrees of stone.

- All of the effigy mounds that have ever been excavated have burials or human remains associated with them.

- As time passed, mound building becomes more and more elaborate.

By 750 AD, they were building massive mounds in the shapes of birds and bears and water spirits.

- The panther mounds are very interesting.

Those have a long history in the Americas.

– Jeffery: By panther, we don't mean the cougar; they're not a cat.

This is a mythical animal.

This is one of the supernatural beings.

And I think we can make a good argument that the effigy mounds, at least to a certain extent, are a representation of Native cosmology.

- There was an ongoing battle between spirit beings of the sky and those of the water to maintain a balance on the Earth.

– Jeffery: The Smith Park Mound Group, which is on Doty Island at the outlet of Lake Winnebago, it's only a small portion of the mounds that were once there.

– Amy: The Panther Mounds in Smith Park are effigies that represent water spirits, and the surviving mounds are part of a larger group that extended across much of the eastern part of Doty Island.

The mounds in Smith Park were mapped by a surveyor named Theodore Hayes Lewis.

He was a professional mound surveyor.

He did leave behind his original survey notes and measurements, and those have since been rediscovered.

And his map of Smith Park is pretty on point for what's there now.

– Jeffery: One of the earliest mounds that I know of would be the mound that was once in Fritse Park on the west side of Little Lake Butte des Morts.

- The French gave this location Butte des Morts, which translates to the Hill of the Dead.

Anytime you hear the term Hill of the Dead, it's referring to burial mounds.

- Increase Lapham was Wisconsin's earliest naturalist and our first archaeologist.

He passed by and was struck by the mound enough that he created an engraving of the mound in profile, so it's almost a landscape view.

- Hill of the Dead was a prominent landscape structure.

It could be seen both for people traveling along the Fox River waterway and also the Fox River Trail that ran from Green Bay along the banks of the Fox River to Fritse Park and beyond.

- It was destroyed around the Civil War using fill for railroad grade construction.

But based on the description of the mound and description of what came out of that mound as they were taking it down for fill makes a really strong case that it's probably an early woodland mound that would date around 2,500 years ago or maybe a little bit less.

– David: The Fox River, especially here at the Hill of the Dead or Fritse Park is often described in the literature.

One of the best examples provided would be in the book Wau-Bun .

The book was written by Juliette Kinzie, and she stopped here in what she described as a perilous journey up the Fox River in 1830.

She thought this was one of the most beautiful locations she had ever seen.

[gentle music] - The early European influence in northeast Wisconsin as we know it today really begins as far as we know in 1634 with Jean Nicolet, the landing somewhere along Red Banks along the southeastern shore of Green Bay.

- The Menominees didn't really know who the Europeans were.

Having never saw light-skinned people like that coming into Menominee territory.

They wanted us to set our boundaries.

And it was hard for the Menominee people to do that because we shared resources with other tribes within our boundaries and their boundaries.

- These new waves of settlement and militias are coming here ultimately to control the economic viability.

And in this case, of course, it was fur, and the Menominee played a critical role in that in brokeraging some of those contracts, cure the pelts that ultimately came back to those trading agency houses.

- After going through the French government, the British, finally the American government wanted to enter into agreements called treaties to have these tribes sell these lands so Europeans could have places to live and farm.

– Kevin: At Little Chute, Wisconsin on the Fox River, the Treaty of the Cedars that emerged out of this 1836 event.

This is 12 years before statehood.

It is truly a point of no return for the Menominee.

The United States had the advantage.

They were drafting the treaties, and it was up to the Menominee to accept them or not.

- Menominees had no concept of selling land, no concept of boundaries, and for them to enter into this, it was a new, foreign idea of selling land.

- In that treaty, they say they have agreed to cede the land along the Fox River Valley and all of Winnebago.

They are essentially asked to move off the landscape and what's left after that treaty is a diminished parcel.

- But they knew they had to do it because if they didn't do it, the military would come in and take the lands away from them.

- Wisconsin becomes a state in 1848.

The Treaty of the Cedars took place 1836.

1848 also was a time when Chief Oshkosh, representing the Menominee Indian tribe was asked to move his entire tribe to Minnesota.

- The government had offered us 600,000 acres over in Crow Wing, Minnesota in exchange for the rest of our lands in Wisconsin.

And their Chief Oshkosh, he said, "Well, I don't really agree with this treaty.

"What the government, you offer us over in Crow Wing, "we have to go look at it and see what's over there.

You promised numerous resources."

They went by water, boat up into what is now Minneapolis and up into Crow Wing country and they looked at the land.

They didn't see the resources that they promised.

– Kevin: Chief Oshkosh comes back and says, "We're not going to Minnesota."

- Said they'll go to Washington and speak to the president, which he did.

They took a delegation of chiefs to Washington and spoke to President Fillmore.

And Oshkosh said, "There's a piece of land "on the Wolf River, it's a wilderness.

"People don't want to live there.

"Let me move my people there.

We know this area."

And it was settled in 1854, Treaty of the Menominee Reservation was established.

That's where we are today, here on the Menominee Indian Reservation.

- That is an amazing story and one of the only First Nations in the United States to be on their reservation in the original landscape of which their ancestors resided for hundreds of generations.

- The Menominees always figured out a way to live, to survive.

We survived smallpox.

We survived a lot of things, termination and restoration of our tribe.

We still have our forest, still have our language and our culture.

We've survived all these years.

- We're at the Grignon Mansion, which is an 1837 Greek revival house built by Charles Grignon for his new wife, Mary, and represents maybe the best example of Greek revival, certainly in Wisconsin, one of the best probably in the country.

The trading post was put here because in the river are a series of five rapids.

They're very rough rapids.

You could never run them with a canoe.

- Kaukauna drops 50 feet more than any other place from Lake Winnebago to Green Bay.

People have to get off the river.

- The Grignons created a company, a portaging company, so they would go and help people unload their goods, put it on wagons.

Horses would pull it down to the spot where they could get back in.

A lot of the Native Americans, from stories I've read, actually helped navigate boats that could not be pulled out of the river through the rapids because they knew how to do it.

- The other reason that a trading post was located here is because across the river in what now is the city of Kaukauna was one of the largest and arguably the largest Native settlement in the Northwest territories in the Great Lakes area at the time that the trading post was built.

It contained a multiethnic, multilinguistic community of original settlers here, but also of refugees who came in from the Iroquois Wars from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois to avoid Iroquois raiders coming into their communities.

So this was a real hub of both early on Native settlement and then later on of European settlement.

- Charles was part of the Treaty of the Cedars.

He was one of the main interpreters for the Menominee.

During that treaty, as the land was kind of being purchased from the Menominee, anyone that they owed debts to would be paid first.

And it is believed that Charles received roughly $10,000, which would have been debts owed to the fur trading company at that time from the Menominee.

People believed that that was the money that he actually used to build this house.

It is a very important spot in the state of Wisconsin.

It sits on the property that was part of the very first land deed that was recorded in what would become Wisconsin.

Charles and his brother Alexander ran the fur trading post.

Even 1837 timeframe when the house was built, the fur trade was dying out.

- The beaver and other animals had been overhunted.

People were making clothes out of other things out East.

By the time this house was built, fur trading was kind of drying up and they went on to other businesses and things they did.

– Patty: With the locks being built, Charles saw an opportunity.

He actually created the quarry that we still have today.

He sold that stone to the company that was putting in the locks.

They also donated stone for the foundations of St. John's Church and eventually Holy Cross Church here in Kaukauna.

He also rented out the empty buildings that they had on the property to the gentlemen who were building the locks so that they would have a place to stay and places where they could store their equipment and supplies.

[bright music] - Morgan L. Martin was born in Martinsburg, New York.

He came from a fairly wealthy family, and his plan was to study law and practice law.

A lot of the politics was saying that Green Bay might end up becoming kind of a territorial government, and he ended up coming to Green Bay in 1827.

- The dominant political and economic influence in Wisconsin were from Yankee migrants: New York State, Vermont.

A lot of early Wisconsin figures came from those two locales.

- When Morgan Martin got here, the river was set up in French long lots, so your property was long and narrow and you lived very close to the river, and then what was behind you was just usually kind of a wilderness or wild because the river was the means of transportation.

That's how people got through here.

He invested in boats, he invested in sawmills, and particularly in land.

Almost right after coming in 1827, he felt that the river was very important for this area.

He became extremely passionate about making sure that there was a way that steamships could get up and down the river.

- The notion that private entities would control the waterways is a very alien notion in 21st century.

Certainly here in Wisconsin, we hold our waterways dearly and they are in the public space, in the public realm.

That wasn't always the case and it certainly wasn't the case in the emerging development of the state in the 1850s.

- Finally, when he was in politics, he and other businessmen formed the Fox Wisconsin Waterway Improvement Company.

- The river was not a trustworthy river.

To tame the river, so to speak, required improvements like dams and locks.

People were making improvements incrementally and Morgan L. Martin wanted to take it on kind of all at once from Green Bay to Portage.

- They were successful to start with.

It was only a few years that things really made headway and then they really started to lag.

So he said that he would invest his own money, his own finances.

With 500 men, they took on working from both ends.

- Photographs as we know them were really not prevalent in that time.

Portraiture was the tradition.

Samuel Marsden Brookes and Thomas Stevenson were both born and trained in England, artists.

And like many, came to America.

One of the stops for Brookes and Stevenson on their grand tour of Wisconsin was Green Bay.

Most of the portraits they were selling of the leading citizens, the citizens who had the most financial means were in the $50 range.

Morgan L. Martin wanted the full body scene, which cost $100.

That was very exceptional.

He also then wanted to promote his Fox Wisconsin River Improvement Company's efforts and paid a huge sum of $200.

They essentially arranged the deal to capture 12 scenes from the mouth at Green Bay to the headwaters near Portage, Wisconsin.

And the value of those paintings is that they are a fairly faithful replica of a specific point in the development of Wisconsin.

They're in color.

They're a snapshot, if you will.

Show me other imagery of the Fox River in those days and there really isn't.

And so they've always been valued historically when you can get those snapshots into the past.

- In 1852, there was a new governor who said that he felt that this was all illegal.

And he figured out a way of not paying Morgan so Morgan lost a great deal of money, as did the other merchants.

- Both the company and Morgan L. Martin never achieved the financial wealth, let alone viability that he imagined.

- Morgan at the end of the Fox Wisconsin Waterway felt that he had been taken advantage of by the government.

He was very bitter about it.

He felt that it had ruined him.

[gentle music] - The government purchased the Fox Wisconsin Waterway in 1872.

The Corps of Engineers managed commercial traffic on the waterway.

Into the 1930s, shipping began to decrease.

- The lock system basically became of age with the rise of the railroad.

And the railroad pretty much took over all the industrial and commercial traffic significantly enough in the 1950s for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to start at that point considering to shut down the locks.

- The mission changed after we placed the locks into caretaker status in 1982.

The Fox River Navigation System Authority was created in 2001 by the state of Wisconsin.

In 2004, we transferred the locks to the state of Wisconsin.

- The state owns the locks.

Fox River Navigational System Authority operates, manages, and rehabilitates.

What I like to tell people when I'm talking about the locks is that this is the only fully restored, hand-operated lock system in our entire nation.

We've got 17 locks on the Lower Fox River.

We've got 15 of those locks operational.

No place else in the nation is there 15 locks that have been fully restored and that are hand-operated.

Each one of these locks has different gears, has different templates, has different fittings, has different anchor systems.

These were hand-forged items on the site.

Basically if something breaks today, we have that piece and we can build a template.

The walls that are standing today by and large are the original walls that were built in the late 1800s.

Like an elevator on water, so you drive in and then the lock door is shut, and the lock tenders open the valves and you raise up from the hydraulic pressure of the water that's being pushed into the lock chamber, and then you drive out.

Each step is worth at least 10 feet.

Where we're at right now at Kaukauna 5, this is the last of five locks in Kaukauna.

The other place where we have locks stacked is in Appleton, Appleton 1 through 4.

The locks that combine locks were formed to address the need to drop down 20 feet in a short distance.

It takes a lot of water.

Each one of our locks runs between 400,000 to 500,000 gallons each.

So when you cycle combined locks, you're roughly cycling a million gallons of water.

Over the years, the duties haven't changed a lot for lock tenders.

But historically just to tend a lock, they lived in houses, they brought their families here, and they lived in a lock tender house.

The requirement was that they were available 24 hours a day and as a boat approached, no matter what time it was, they would need to come out in short order and operate the lock.

- I first lived at the Princeton Lock, Princeton, Wisconsin.

When I was between freshman and sophomore year, we moved to the Menasha Lock.

It was at 82 Broad Street.

In Princeton, my father did not have an office.

There were daily reports every day and then at the end of the month, there was a report.

My mom actually did it with her penmanship rather than his.

And so every month this report would go out on the number of lockages, the type of weather.

In Menasha, it was mostly pleasure boats, people going to the yacht club, or people out for a nice boat ride.

There was the big boat from Neenah, Frank Shattuck's boat, the Pilgrim .

That was a big, beautiful boat.

My dad said that was the most beautiful boat that ever went through the lock ever.

We had a lot of rules.

To open the locks, you were supposed to toot your horn four times.

The poem was one for danger, two for the dock, three for the bridge, and four for the lock.

But people just tooted their horn and we know they wanted to go through.

One time in the Menasha Lock, it was a hot day and there were just tons of boats going through, going up, going down.

And my mom just was helping Dad, and one of the photographers from the local paper took their picture.

Well, when the boss saw that, he called and wasn't happy.

She helped, she cut grass, we all picked up garbage.

We did a lot of things to keep up the locks.

- I started lock tending about 10 years ago.

I came up on my bicycle just to watch the lock tender on duty.

And as I watched and watched and watched, finally he asked if I wanted to give it a try.

After that, I was tending the very next season.

It's real low-tech.

It's pretty much me looking upriver, downriver, and when they show up, when they come around the corner, we help them push through.

In between those times though, there's always routine maintenance.

There's grass to cut, railings to paint.

Best part of the job by far is the people.

We always get the same reaction, it's, "Oh, my God, I had no idea.

"I had no idea the river dropped as far as it does.

"I had no idea it's all manually operated yet.

I had no idea it's so old."

Just simple, elegant design is what has kept them going for 100, 150 years.

- The very first national park, Yellowstone National Park was designated in 1872.

The locks were being built in Wisconsin in 1848 before the Civil War, before Yellowstone was established, before the National Park Service was even created, and they're still here today.

I would have to say that the Fox Locks are the crown jewel of the state of Wisconsin.

[gentle music] - Henry Rogers first gets involved in the paper industry in the 1870s.

His first paper mill is located just below Hearthstone on the dam.

It's called the Appleton Paper and Pulp Mill.

And Henry Rogers and his partners, along with Kimberly and Clark, are really the gentlemen who drive the creation of the paper valley.

Its location is important because it's right between all the woods up north that they used for pulp, and it's just north of all the markets down south in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis.

And places like in Chicago with the Tribune cannot keep pace, they need to have pulp and they need to have paper.

And so there has to be a new supply.

There's already these mills standing here 'cause they were originally flour mills.

And then they were lumber mills.

And now they can be converted to paper.

And as importantly, they're populated with millwrights, people who can do the work and are familiar with harnessing the raw power of the water.

And they change the scale of papermaking operations to really make it much more efficient and effective.

Henry Rogers becomes enamored with electricity in May of 1882.

He's in the process of building this beautiful mansion on the hill overlooking his paper mills.

He's a typical Gilded Age businessman, a paper baron.

He sees opportunities that other people see.

He just exploits it a little faster, maybe a little bit better.

But he's also a visionary, and one of those things is the importance of electric lighting.

Now he knows already the mechanical power of the river because he controls the locks and dams along with John Van Nortwick, his partner.

But he also understands utility because he's the president of the local gas company.

And he sees in electric lighting, a way to escape the perils of fire in paper mills in particular.

And when we think about it, paper mills are simply stuffed with kindling.

There's wood, there's rags, and they're all lit by open flames.

Fire is an unmitigated hazard that happens all the time, and these paper mills burn down constantly.

Lighting becomes the key.

Now before Hearthstone is lit, there's three other homes in America that have electricity.

Henry Vanderbilt in New York City has electricity.

So does J.P. Morgan in New York City, and so does John Doane, an industrialist in Chicago.

And the lighting that they produce is not the primary source of lighting in each of those homes.

It's used more as a parlor trick.

Invite people over, turn on the electric lights for an hour, and have them marvel at this, you know, revolution of the age.

Henry Rogers sees things entirely differently.

He wants to have a central system that can be used for his home and other homes, that would be used for his plants and other plants.

And so he can create this really revolutionary idea that you can walk into a room and flick on the lights and you have on-demand lighting because the power comes from somewhere else.

It first starts in Hearthstone, first starts at the Appleton Paper and Pulp Mill.

We're fortunate to have a wonderful piece by J. Frank Waldo, who is a well-known artist of the day.

It's essentially the view out the bedroom window from Hearthstone.

It captures the dam that Henry Rogers and his partners manage as well as the paper mill that they own and the Vulcan Mill that is owned by Kimberly and Clark.

And why is it so important?

It's because the water power from that dam is turning the dynamo that lights those three buildings, the paper mill that Henry Rogers owns, the Vulcan Mill, and Hearthstone.

We're probably the only, maybe the only place in all of North America, if not the world, that has original Edison wiring still in situ.

The houses that were electrified prior to Hearthstone, the Vanderbilt home, the Morgan home, the Doane home no longer exist.

The only building that still survives from the dawn of electricity is Hearthstone.

[gentle music] - The river does not maintain a steady flow.

It varies with the time of year, the amount of precipitation we've had, and what our gate settings at Neenah and Menasha are.

How much we're discharging down the Lower Fox River.

We can see low flow times below 2,000 cubic feet per second and high flow times in excess of 16,000 cubic feet per second.

To put the 16,000 cubic feet per second into some type of perspective, that gives us a discharge of about 10 billion gallons of water per day down the Lower Fox River into the bay of Green Bay.

The Marshall Order was established in 1886 as a guidance for how we should manage the system.

The Marshall Order set rules for system management, giving us a low level, which is the crest of the dam that retains the pool, and a high level, which was studied for Lake Winnebago specifically.

And it was determined that 1 foot, 9 1/4 inches above the crest of the Menasha Dam was the ordinary high water limit that we should not exceed.

We have a really loose rule of thumb that one foot of a gate equals 1/10 of a foot of water level behind the dam.

But there's a lot of factors that go into that, wind, flow, what the utility company is taking for water at that point or not taking.

There's a lot more art that goes into making gate adjustments or water level adjustments than there is science sometimes.

So any water that is above the crest of the dam is considered to be in the water rights area and can be used for generation purposes.

[gentle music] - The term Electric City was coined many, many, many years ago because of the hydro production in Kaukauna.

So it's got a lot of history, all associated with hydropower.

- We have 7 sites with 19 hydro units.

We have sites all the way from the College Avenue Bridge in Appleton to just before Wrightstown.

And we have everything in between.

By producing almost 25% to 30% of our power needs with our hydro units, we save our customers a substantial amount of money on their utility bills.

- Kaukauna Utilities was formed in 1912, and at that time, the citizens got together and voted to form a municipal electric utility.

There was a Badger paper mill on this site.

The first hydro unit built here was called "Badger."

It was built in 1908, actually built by the Green Bay Mississippi Canal Company.

Kaukauna Utilities ended up purchasing power from that facility.

The Badger hydro had two turbines that could produce about 1,000 kW for each one, which was enough power to serve about 400 homes each.

So Badger plant in 1908 was serving the entire city of Kaukauna.

- The basic technology's the same.

Water passes through a wheel and turns a turbine.

The water just basically came in from the top, fell over these wheels and spun 'em, and then fell out the bottom.

And that's what turned it.

And that unit ran up until we shut it down in 2011 to build the new hydro plant.

– Jeffery: As part of getting our license for the Badger plant, we're required to keep the old Badger.

– Mike: What you're seeing here is the generator.

It's a one megawatt generator.

This generator spun when it was operating at about 112 RPMs.

And then over here, what you'll see is one of the turbine wheels that we took off when the shaft broke on unit number one.

There are three wheels total in the flume which we can't see, but this is typical of what all six would look like.

It's really cool.

I mean, seeing something that old that ran that long, you know, over a hundred years and still made power.

– Jeffery: The Fox River is run-of-river.

What that means is we cannot store water, we cannot back water up.

Whatever water comes in has gotta go through the hydro and then back out.

It's unlike some of the dams you see out West or even in Wisconsin where they have storage.

This is a run-of-river system.

We've automated everything.

All of our hydros can be operated out of our main headquarters.

We have a highly trained group of mechanics and electricians that maintain those units for operation 'cause we expect these units to run a hundred years.

– Mike: The advantage of using hydro is it's the first clean, renewable energy source there ever was and it still is.

– Jeffery: The Fox River, it's a great river for hydro.

We got the low head, we got the high flows.

It's an excellent river to have hydropower and it's got the drop.

- It's environmentally friendly.

There is no issues with pollution or anything like that.

Carbon footprint's basically zero.

[gentle music] - The Clean Water Act, which was passed in 1972, was really designed to set standards for our surface waters and our groundwater.

People recognized as far back as the 1920s that the river had issues with water quality and humans were impacting it and that something needed to be done.

- Since the Clean Water Act went in in 1972, we have seen a large turnaround.

A lot of the non-point issues still remain, but a lot of the point sources, which were the chemicals and waste, have been addressed.

- Looking back, it was basically simple in my mind.

It got to the crux of things that we can be able to enjoy our recreation, enjoy our water out there, and to secure it for many generations thereafter.

- One of the big things that we look for is we look for that biodiversity.

At one point in the river's history, we were working it pretty hard with a lot of industry, a lot of development, and we did see a decline in that biodiversity.

- Communities and industries were then expected to meet certain restrictions on what could be discharged or dumped or disposed of in the river.

We have made big progress on reducing point sources, our wastewater treatment discharges to the river.

We've also begun to make progress on reducing urban runoff to the river.

So a work in progress is reducing runoff from our working lands, our agricultural lands as well so that we can meet those goals of swimmable and drinkable water.

- It was a prelude to the actual cleanup have taken place along the river itself here from Neenah going all the way up to Green Bay.

- PCBs were a compound that was used in the development of carbonless copy paper in northeastern Wisconsin.

Through the process of recycling that carbonless copy paper, PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls were released into the wastewater from the paper mills and from our wastewater treatment plants into the river.

They don't break down very rapidly naturally, so they accumulate.

So the PCBs accumulated in the sediments, particularly in areas directly downstream from some of our paper mills that recycled and used PCBs.

Those contaminated sediments impacted the quality of the water, impacted the food chain.

That is the organisms that fed the fish and the birds that ate the fish and accumulated up the food chain.

The real problems and concern about the PCBs took off in the 1980s.

And the Fox River, the Lower Fox River, and the lower part of the bay was designated as an area of concern by the International Joint Commission that really identified the cleanup of the contaminated sediments, mainly contaminated by PCBs, as a major objective.

The process involved removing the contaminated sediment and processing that contaminated sediment, moving it to a safer place in the environment.

By removing those PCB contaminated sediments, the river is much cleaner, and we've removed the exposure of the aquatic organisms to those PCBs.

The cleanup of the PCBs in the Fox River is probably one of the largest sediment remediation projects in the country and maybe in the world.

A lot of money has been spent on it, nearly $1 billion in total.

And I think by nearly all accounts, it's been highly successful.

I know that there's already been good evidence that they're seeing improvements in PCB concentrations in fish, particularly in the upper part of the river, where the cleanup started 15 years ago.

The evidence that as we remove these contaminants from the environment, the ecosystem responds and we're seeing cleaner fish and therefore cleaner environment.

[gentle music] - The Fox River has a really unique fishery.

It makes it special.

It makes it world renowned in some areas.

The walleye fishery on Green Bay, we have folks coming here from all over the country to fish walleye in the springtime.

What's nice about the Fox, it's one of the first rivers that open up in springtime, so the guys can get out in boats in late February, early March.

It's not unusual for the folks fishing in springtime to catch 50 to 75 walleyes in a day.

In the early 1970s after the Clean Water Act was enacted, fish biologists of the time began to stock walleye into Green Bay.

By 1984, the biologists started to see that there were improvements in the fishery.

It looked like there were some natural reproduction going on so he halted stocking.

The walleye population responded very quickly to stocking.

It's one of the tools fish biologists use to reclaim fish populations.

Today we're lifting our fyke nets to look at the captured musky.

The purpose is to study the movements of musky in the Fox River and Green Bay and collecting biological information on the fish.

UW-Stevens Point is over, putting transmitters in these muskies that we've captured.

Generally the things that we're looking for, for musky spawning, is water temperature.

When water temperature approaches 60 degrees, that's when they start to run into the Fox River and get ready to spawn.

The status of the musky in the Fox River is pretty good.

We started stocking them as a rehabilitation plan back in 1989.

We've been stocking almost every year since.

The goal is to establish a self-reproducing population in Green Bay.

At one time, musky were very prevalent in Green Bay in the Fox River.

They disappeared from the system probably in the early 1900s due to pollution.

And now we are trying to rehabilitate native fish and it's also one of the largest predator fish that we have in the bay.

- We've found in the large rivers that come into Green Bay, the Menominee, the Peshtigo, the Oconto, and the Fox, the sturgeon tend to come into the rivers mid April, and then they'll stage near the spawning grounds.

They're queuing in on the temperature is really what they're doing.

We tend to see them spawning when it gets 55 to 60 degrees.

– Steve: Sturgeon began in the mid '90s spawning in the Fox River.

The numbers were maybe a dozen or two.

So far this year, UWGB, who's been doing sturgeon work on the Fox, caught nearly 150 spawning sturgeon, so that's quite an increase.

- When they're actively spawning, we usually are pretty good with getting in close to them.

They've got spawning on their mind.

And so if we can sneak up behind them and just work a few fish off that spawning pod, we're usually pretty successful.

- The tags that he put in the fish are called PIT tags.

And PIT is an acronym, so it's passive integrated transponder's tag.

Those tags aren't activated, they don't have any battery associated with them.

They're the same kind of tag that veterinarians put in dogs and cats so that people can track 'em.

- Right here is a male that we had captured last year and so this is a recapture this year.

So this fish is actually really important for us so we can get some growth information because we have data from consecutive years.

- The habitat they prefer is large rock.

It's logical that the dams were built where you had a change in elevation in the river and there was a rock there, there was a reef there, there was a spawning site there.

So the fish are queuing back into that spawning area.

And what we found in these rivers is these juvenile fish move out of those rivers by the fall.

By August, September they're out and then they're out in Green Bay until they mature and return back to the rivers.

We have a lot of information on the sturgeon population in Lake Michigan.

And by far the Green Bay population, including the Winnebago system, is the largest population in Lake Michigan, probably pretty close to the largest in the Great Lakes itself.

So there's a very important population of lake sturgeon here in Green Bay and the Fox River.

[gentle music] - We're here at 1000 Islands Nature Center.

It's one of my favorite spots along the Fox River.

You can hear in the background certainly the crisp sound of the river flowing out there.

- 1000 Islands Environmental Center is a nature center here in downtown Kaukauna.

At this section of the Fox River, we do have a number of different islands, which is how our nature center got its name as 1000 Islands Environmental Center.

- Buffers are very important along the way.

They soak up water from our watershed.

They store it for a slow drainage.

As I look at it as a biologist, wildlife in general needs those corridors in order to exist along the way.

– Debra: One of our greatest things right now is our wintering bald eagle population.

So those islands create a huge roosting area for the eagles overnight.

- The reason for a return of the eagles is how well we've taken care of our river out here.

We've certainly eliminated some of the harsh pesticides which impacted eagles' eggs out there which caused their demise.

We've cleaned up the PCBs out there, the mercury or the lead contaminants that had impacts on those birds.

Those birds responded so readily back to that.

And so in the latter part of the '80s, we received our first pair of eagles not far from 1000 Islands.

We finally are getting some accomplishments from the Clean Water Act.

And the eagles just totally responded.

The eagles that we see here during the wintertime are eagles that probably are coming from the north, are trying to look for open water areas where there's good food resources.

And there are about 17 dams along the river here in the Lower Fox, which keep water open and opportunities for good hunting for them for fish.

- Eagle nests are very, very impressive.

They are used year after year, so they don't build a new nest each year.

They usually choose one of the tallest trees in an area, usually in an area that's good for feeding so they don't have to go very far to find that food source.

– Dick: Within each mile of the river, we could probably have a nest out there, provided there's habitat of trees.

– Debra: Eagles will more closely bond with a nest than they do with a mate, and that all has to do with their success rate.

If they find a nesting area and they're successful, they become fairly attached to that nest and they will defend that nest from other eagles.

So if you have a pair of eagles that are successful at this one nest, it appears as though the eagles are paired together, but more likely they are both bonded to that nest.

So they will continue to work together and mate together until that nest is no longer successful or one of the mates dies.

Nests very easily can be 6 to 7 feet across, 3 to 4 feet deep.

They can weigh a ton or more.

They're great architects as far as fitting these together.

Each year, they'll add to it a little bit, maybe add a little bit more nesting material inside the bowl of it.

So the longer the nest is used, typically the larger the nest becomes.

- When I first arrived here in 1980, the river smelled.

It really wasn't appealing, but as it was cleaned up, there's been eagles, which we had thought always were a wilderness type of species.

We've gotten our beaver back on Little Lake Butte des Morts.

We see pelicans now since the turn of the century.

We've witnessed a lot of migratory birds utilizing this corridor off here.

We have ospreys in the springtime.

Just a whole host of birds capitalize on this corridor of the Fox River.

[gentle music] - Today we've got a public paddle event.

We've been doing these public paddle events for almost 20 years now.

- Our main function is to teach safety and interest people in paddling.

– Jeff: One of the reasons we started doing these paddle events so long ago is to get people out on the water.

And we found that when people see their community from the water, they get a whole different perception of it.

And then over the years as paddling sports grew, a lot more people joined in for the social part and the recreation part.

– Dave: Today, we've got probably more than 100 paddlers that are going to launch here at Bomier in De Pere, paddle down the Fox River to the Tall Ships festival, and right between the ships, and we'll take out on the other side.

– Jeff: With a public paddle group like this, we have a real variety of boats, a real variety of skill types and that, so we normally plan on traveling about two miles an hour.

So it'll take us probably 2 1/2 or 3 hours.

One of the fun things over the years has been to see how many boats we can get in a lock.

We set a record in 2006 or 2007 of 169 boats.

A few years ago, we broke it at 189.

I don't think we'll do that again.

That's pretty crowded.

– Dave: Yeah, there really is something for everyone on the Fox.

You know, there's power boaters, there's kayakers, there's standup paddlers, there's tour boats, just about anything you want.

Or you can just sit in a park and enjoy the water.

– Jeff: Deep in the middle of a quarter million people like we'll be today, you'll pretty much always see an eagle.

You certainly see pelicans.

The noise is kind of subdued from the city.

You're a little bit lower 'cause you're on the water and you have a lot of treeline thing, and a lot of people are really surprised at how pleasant it is.

And they're also surprised often at how clean the water looks too.

One of the things that's fun about this is as you're going down the river, you're getting to places that very few people see, and you discover things, maybe fishermen bump into some of those areas and scenes, but a little bit different when you're closer to the water and perhaps near shore on it.

So I think people find those special places along the way.

That's pretty cool.

[gentle music] - The river still has power.

It's the power to draw you in and to make you want to be near it.

- The waterway is how so many people over so long a period entered Wisconsin and traversed Wisconsin.

- This isn't just our state.

That this state has belonged to many generations before us.

- A cultural history that goes all the way back to the first Native peoples who were here and the rich resources that were available associated with the river.

- That anything this diverse, anything with that much water in it is gonna be home to all kinds of plants and animals in very large numbers.

- To this day, the Menominee are still with us in that role as caretakers of incredibly important land.

- It's the quiet, it's the wilderness.

I love looking for wildlife.

- I grew up in Kaukauna.

The Fox River is just part of our lives.

- When I look at a lock, I see a piece of history.

The immigrants that came over here back in the early 1800s.

We have essentially a living monument.

- Grain mills were located all along here to process wheat.

Those grain mills turned into paper mills.

And we can even see industries like packaging goes back to making barrels.

And now we have cardboard and packaging industry here.

Understanding all of that, I think just enriches our lives.

- It's been a working river.

You just have so many stakeholders.

- Now that there's been a great effort to clean up the Fox River and other rivers as well, people are flocking back to this system.

- It's not only have a healthy fish community, but be able to see the public utilize it.

– Peter: And of course for recreational purposes, you'd want a river that's clean enough to jump in and to swim in.

- How can we prevent pollution?

How can we get people to understand the aquatic ecosystem that's going on here?

The more we appreciate, the more we'll protect down the line.

- There's a painting that Paul Kane, he was a artist that came to the Fox River and he painted a picture of Menominees spearfishing sturgeon.

Even though that's not the same anymore, that's the way I picture it.

[gentle music]