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One hundred years ago, the white-pine forests around Hayward were the domain of a special breed of man.
They were swampers, sawyers and skidders. They were deckers, chainers, undercutters and riverhogs. They were dwarfed by the colossal trees they had to wrestle out of the forest, and their lives hung on their own brawn, nerve and dumb luck.
Six days a week they worked, dawn to dusk, all winter long. In spring, they'd roar into Hayward for whiskey and wild women; their brawling earned the town a reputation reflected in a train conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!''
To most people, Superior, Wis., is nothing more than a series of traffic lights to endure on the fast track to the Apostle Islands or Upper Peninsula.
It's sprawling, ugly and utterly devoid of interest.
Or is it?
More than any other river in Wisconsin, the Bois Brule has a pedigree.
They call it River of Presidents, but it also attracts senators and millionaires. Named for pines charred by lightning strikes
— “burnt wood’’ in Ojibwe, then French — it rises from conifer bogs near Solon Springs and flows
toward Lake Superior. Its cold, spring-fed currents harbor trout, and well-heeled fishermen discovered the river long before
loggers moved in.
They built the first lodges in the 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant came to visit, followed by Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. In the 1890s, St. Louis oil and rail tycoon Henry Clay Pierce amassed 4,160 acres along the river and built a fishing retreat.
For a long time, people in Superior, Wis., observed mostly Scandinavian traditions.
And then the dragons arrived.
In China, the works of poet Qu Yuan inspired dragon-boat races, which are held worldwide and have been popular in Canada for many years.
Just two miles from the start of the Bois Brule, another famous river flows in the opposite direction.
It's the St. Croix, flowing out of Upper St. Croix Lake and toward the Mississippi River. The two rivers are separated by a continental divide but became an important water highway for Indians, explorers and fur traders. Today, their two-mile portage trail is part of the North Country National Scenic Trail and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
On the western edge of Upper St. Croix Lake, 23 miles from the town of Brule, Solon Springs is a small resort village that makes an excellent weekend getaway. Right in town, Lucius Woods County Park has camping, a sand beach, a playground, a nature trail and a splendid bandshell where regional and national acts perform on Saturday nights in summer.
Deep in the forests of Wisconsin, and Potato River Falls was nowhere to be found.
A sign pointed to an observation deck, from which I glimpsed a bridal-veil falls in the distance. But the path down the Potato
River led only to a cobblestone beach.
Finally, I left the path to climb down a steep hillside, slippery with clay and choked with the roots of spruce trees that flecked my hands with sap.
At the turn of the last century, as Wisconsin’s pineries were vanishing into sawmills, the vast fortunes they produced fell to the heirs of the Knapp, Stout lumber company.
Operating in the Red Cedar River valley, it was for a time the largest in the world, and Menomonie was its company town. The heirs gave it schools, churches, an auditorium; James Stout, son of the president, endowed the institute that became the University of Wisconsin-Stout.
His brother Frank found a different use for his money; he plowed $1.5 million in 1915 money into a 26-acre island estate near the town of Rice Lake, on Red Cedar Lake. With trainloads of cedar logs from Idaho, redwood from California and white pine from local dams, he built his family a rambling, 35,000-square-foot compound, adorned by Bavarian carvings of pelicans and oak leaves, Gothic arches and medieval-Norwegian dragon’s heads.
In the forests and lakes around the northwestern Wisconsin town of Cable, the reds, oranges and yellows of fall are mere gilding on the lily.
This landscape, much of it part of Chequamegon National Forest, is beautiful in any season. In winter, cross-country skiers glide along forest paths and the 52-kilometer Birkebeiner trail, on which North America's largest and most famous Nordic-skiing race is held each February. In spring, the mountain-biking season starts, culminating in September with the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival, the nation's largest.
But fall is for lingerers. It's hard to move fast when there are so many glowing colors to gape at.
In winter, ice comes with the territory. You can curse it — or you can play with it.
Kids know how. Climbers and skaters know how. And skiers know how — to stay away from it, that is, at least when they have waxed planks on their feet.
One New Year's Day, after an ice storm turned northern Wisconsin ski trails into screaming luge runs, I cut short a ski weekend and headed home through glazed forest. But Amnicon Falls State Park was on the way, so I stopped to explore.
From the beginning, Hayward has been a rough town.
It sprang up in Wisconsin's north woods along with the logging camps, and its saloons and brothels gave it a reputation that was reflected in a rail conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!"
After resorts replaced logging camps, muskie wranglers joined lumberjacks as mythic figures. The fishing feats are enshrined at the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame, home of a 143-foot fiberglass muskie, but the lumberjacks — many of them graduates of the Hayward Log Rolling School — still are chopping, sawing and birling for tourists at the Lumberjack Bowl.
In Ashland, Wis., the ghosts of the past appear in living color.
Once, these lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks and lieutenants lived only in the history books. Now, they're painted onto Ashland's walls, where they serve as backdrop to shoppers, college students and tourists going about their business downtown.
The first mural, painted for Wisconsin's sesquicentennial in 1998 by local artists Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen, featured the snowshoe-clad figure of pioneer Asaph Whittlesey as well as editor Sam Fifield, Ojibwe Chief Buffalo and other characters from the town's early days.