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The can-do spirit of the 19th century can be felt everywhere along a 19½-mile stretch of the Chippewa River.
Jean Brunet built his own dam and sawmill in 1836 and piloted his first raft of lumber to Prairie du Chien himself. Jacob Leinenkugel arrived in 1867 and founded the Spring Brewery. Ezra Cornell bought up logging and mineral rights in the area, which became the logging center of the world in the 1880s, although the profits went to Ithaca, N.Y., where he’d founded Cornell University.
But a bald eagle was the feistiest of them all. Old Abe was traded to a local farmer by a band of Chippewa in 1861 and sent
into the Civil War as a mascot for the Eighth Wisconsin. He served in 42 battles, where he was said to have spread his wings
and screamed in support of the troops, more fiercely as the fighting escalated.
More than a decade before Laura Ingalls played on the banks of Plum Creek, and 70 years before the fictional Kit Kittredge
solved mysteries in Ohio, a girl named Caroline "Caddie'' Woodhouse roamed the Wisconsin wilderness.
To many readers, Caddie was the first and best American Girl.
She came of age during the Civil War and loved the outdoors, gathering hazelnuts in the woods, dodging rattlesnakes on the bluff and poling a log raft on the lake.
In Chippewa Falls, people owe a debt to two kinds of folks: the bubbas and the geeks.
The first came to harvest the lumber and stayed to drink the beer, or so claims the brewery: "It takes a special beer to attract 2,500 men to a town with no women,'' says Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing, founded in 1867 and now the oldest business in town.
Then came the guys with slide rules. The son of the city engineer spent his childhood in Chippewa Falls tinkering with radios, then went off to war and college. Seymour Cray co-founded Control Data in the Twin Cities but in 1962 returned to Chippewa Falls, where he opened a lab, putting the locals to work on the world's first supercomputer.
When I was a child, I had a wild imagination. Anything would fire it up, especially tales of exploration: in dank, twisting caves; along rushing creeks shadowed by stone bluffs; on sun-kissed hilltops, with the world stretching out all around.
And I loved the tales told by two real-life children’s-book heroines: the resourceful tomboy Caddie Woodlawn, who roamed the wilderness of western Wisconsin during the Civil War, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, who relished life in the Big Woods above Lake Pepin before they became farmland.
Western Wisconsin, it seems, has fired many young imaginations. One September, I took my own two children there, on a 185-mile tour with six spots that appeal particularly to kids.
There are certain bicycle trails that inspire loyalty in those who ride them.
For many, it’s the trail that’s closest to home. For others, it’s the trail that runs by a really fine restaurant. And for some, it’s the route with the most wildlife.
One of my favorite trails, the 14½-mile Red Cedar State Trail out of Menomonie, WIs., has all of these things and more. It’s one of the least crowded trails, because the crushed-limestone surface keeps some people away. And it’s one of the longest, counting the 30-mile Chippewa State Trail, which takes up where the Red Cedar leaves off and continues on to Eau Claire and Durand.
On Wisconsin's Kinnickinnic River, paddling is a lot like playing pinball — except your boat is the ball.
Quickened by springs and creeks as it flows toward the St. Croix, the Kinni is no lazy river. Cold and insistent, it scoops up a boat and gives it a ride, slapping it between boulders, bumping it over rubble and shooting it over rapids. All the person in the boat has to do is sit tight and steer.
On a warm summer day, it's the coolest possible place to play. So one August, my husband and I drove to River Falls, a college town that calls itself "The City on the Kinni."