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Benjamin Franklin was a wise man, but he was way off base when he proposed the turkey as a national symbol instead of the eagle.
Why? Because bald eagles are the perfect Americans. They're large, brash, opportunistic and easy to identify. And wherever they go, money follows.
Not long after the pesticide DDT was banned in 1972, bald eagle populations began to bounce back in the lower 48 states. Eagles were hard to spot in the summer, when they spread out over the north woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but in the winter, they'd gather to fish in the open water beneath dams or at the mouths of large rivers.
He was young and dashing, the son of Wisconsin's first millionaire, an Indian trader who became a country gentleman.
She was a beautiful debutante, daughter of a Fort Snelling general who was Custer's commander in South Dakota. The pair loved art, horses and books; after they met in St. Paul and married, they honeymooned in Europe, where they commissioned an artist to cast their handsome faces in bronze.
H. Louis and Nina Sturgis Dousman were frontier nobility, the Kennedys of Prairie du Chien, where their home, Villa Louis, was a kind of Camelot on the river. Today, the estate preserves the history of the family and also of Prairie du Chien, a town that three nations considered the center of trade on the Upper Mississippi and the site of Wisconsin's only War of 1812 battle.
Fat Squirrel. Spotted Cow. Lazy Mutt. Uff-da.
Uff-da? In Wisconsin, say that and you get a great glass of beer. Anywhere else you get . . . a funny look.
Wisconsin may be full of cheeseheads. It may be a party state. But boy, are they drinking a lot of good beer there.
If it wasn't for the climate, Peter Pan would feel right at home in Madison, Wis.
It's the NeverNeverland of the Midwest, a town whose zany exuberance is appreciated by everyone but Republicans, whose
outnumbered governor once called it "57 square miles surrounded by reality.''
Inhabited largely by college students whose political zealotry is matched only by their zeal for a party, downtown Madison is a place where it's easy to get in touch with your inner child.
Since its earliest days, the people of Mineral Point have created beauty out of nothing.
Lead first drew eager frontiersmen, who often lived in the "badger holes'' they dug in their search for "mineral.'' The territory later became known as the badger state, and the town became Mineral Point, the nucleus around which Wisconsin developed.
In the early 1830s, skilled miners began arriving from Cornwall, on the rocky western tip of England. They also were expert stonemasons, and they chipped blocks of golden limestone out of the ground and fashioned handsome little cottages that resembled those of their homeland.
On Wisconsin's new Badger State Trail, no one goes home hungry.
Starting from the edge of Madison, the 33-mile trail plunges into Little Switzerland, taking bicyclists past a gantlet of cheese shops, meat markets, bakeries and breweries.
But the Badger is best known for its 1,200-foot-long tunnel, cut through solid limestone in 1887. It curves in the middle, so bicyclists without a good flashlight will find themselves in total darkness, their nerves shot by pigeons bursting out of hidden crannies.
In a verdant little glen in southwest Wisconsin, the 13th century makes a reprise appearance every year.
It comes with pageantry, bloodshed and a whole lot of noble sentiments, courtesy of the 18th-century dramatist Friedrich Schiller. It also comes in German that’s as meaty as the Landjaeger sausages sold to spectators. As I arrived during the first act of "Wilhelm Tell,’’ a rich Swiss patriot was discussing the horrors of war with his wife.
"Furchtbar schlect ist der Krieg!’’ he cries, to which Gertrud replies, "Den Brand warf ich hinein mit eigner Hand!" — "I’ll throw the first torch myself!’’
In the circus, nothing succeeds like excess. And no one succeeded at that more than the Ringling brothers.
In the last half of the 19th century, Americans clamored to be amazed. Tent shows traversed the countryside; Wisconsin alone
had more than 100.
On the Mississippi, showboats brought entertainment to river towns. In 1869, two circuses — one was Dan Rice’s Own Circus, whose proprietor’s clown character was the inspiration for Uncle Sam — put on performances in the Iowa river town of McGregor. They enthralled the 17-year-old son of a poor German harness maker.
In 1862, a poor Norwegian couple and their four small children, including their infant son Thorvald, joined a wave of immigrants to Wisconsin, eventually settling in the coulees of Vernon County.
Vernon County was an interesting place in the 1860s. Only a generation before, Black Hawk and his band had fled through it, hounded by militia. They ran headlong into a slaughter that remains one of the most shameful chapters in U.S. history; today, 11 plaques mark the route, which ended near the town of Victory.
Norwegians poured into the steep, flat-floored valleys that reminded them of home. Italians fished along the Mississippi from a town they called Genoa. Free blacks already had arrived and were joined by newly freed slaves, one of whom had a son who became an expert builder of round barns, of which Vernon County has the nation’s highest concentration.
In Madison, a visitor is exposed to many messages: Resist corporate globalization. Fight for social justice. Housing is a RIGHT!
But when I was there one November, no one said anything against materialism.
Madison — sometimes called the People’s Republic of Madison — is so anti-establishment and anti-corporate that a Starbuck’s caused an uproar when it opened on State Street. Aside from the Starbuck’s, and a Gap whose windows often are plastered with political graffiti, State Street is nearly franchise-free — meaning it’s lined with small, locally owned, one-of-a-kind businesses.
See the FUDGE sign in blinking white lights. See the plane tail protruding from the faux-ruin façade of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. See the Wax World of the Stars, the Dungeon of Horrors, the Trojan Horse . . .
Yes, it’s Wisconsin Dells. But it’s not the only Wisconsin Dells.
Tourists always have been part of the scenery in this picturesque part of Wisconsin. The first settler was a printer and
publisher, and one of the first residents was a young carpenter who crippled his right hand in the Civil War and became a
photographer.
Over the years, my children have logged many crossings of the St. Croix River.
Like all who are young at heart, we love traveling in Wisconsin. Not only is it beautiful, but it also tends to produce people
who remember how much fun it was to be a kid — Laura Ingalls Wilder and Caddie Woodlawn, whose adventures were recounted
in famous children's books; the Ringling brothers, whose fledgling spectacles in Baraboo grew into the world's biggest circus;
and Tommy Bartlett, whose water-ski thrill show helped turn the Wisconsin Dells into Kid Central.
Thanks to them, it's really fun to be a kid in Wisconsin.
When a small town is about as pleasing as can be, what else can it do?
Why, make sure everyone notices, of course.
In 1972, an old Yankee mill town just north of Milwaukee started a Wine & Harvest Festival. Two years later, it started Winter Festival. Eight years after that, it started Strawberry Festival. And people poured into Cedarburg by the thousands.
At B&Bs, every good innkeeper knows that the quickest way to a guest's heart is through the stomach.
Guest like hot tubs, too, though many don't use them. Elegant decor is appreciated, though many people (well, men) barely notice it.
But everyone eats — and remembers — a great breakfast. That's why B&B proprietors knock themselves out providing one for guests.
In southwest Wisconsin, following the Kickapoo River is a lot like watching a magic act: No matter how closely you pay attention, eventually what you see is going to disappear into thin air.
When it reappears, it will be in a completely different spot, and you'll have no idea how it got there.
"Look, there it is again," said my husband, as we drove Wisconsin 131 through the Kickapoo Valley. "It's meandering like mad."
The forest was quiet and the afternoon still. Unnaturally still.
Fifteen Union Army infantry units were camped around wagons in a meadow, near artillery and cavalry. Along a split-rail fence, a drum-and-fife corps pounded drums and blew trumpets.
Gunners began to load their muskets. The cavalry got on pawing horses. Then a Union skirmish line marched down the meadow, followed by a tight column of infantrymen.
In eastern Wisconsin, the map of bicycle trails is starting to look like the spokes of a wheel.
From Green Bay, trails radiate west to Wausau, east to Door County and south toward the Fox Cities. From Milwaukee, trails go
north toward Sheboygan and west to Madison. From Madison, trails head west for Dodgeville. And it won't be long before all of
these trails connect in a vast spider web of asphalt and crushed limestone. See Wisconsin's bike trails: a guide.
"Sometimes, your head is just spinning," says Mike Kading, director of parks and recreation in the Fox Cities town of Menasha, which now is connected to Oshkosh and the Wiouwash State Trail by the Friendship State Trail.
Once, every child in America celebrated Christmas without battery-operated toys.
Instead, they played flap jacks and dominos. They made paper ornaments for the tree. They got an orange brought all the way from Florida.
That’s still what kids do during Christmas time at Old World Wisconsin, where it’s always the 19th century. Danish, Norwegian, German, Polish, Finnish and Yankee families toil there, trying to get ahead on the American frontier.
In Wisconsin, nonconformity is cast in concrete.
In the middle of the last century, a motley collection of ordinary folk — a dairy farmer, a car dealer, a tavern owner, a
factory worker — took a sharp turn away from the ordinary. Out of the blue, they began to fashion fairy-tale characters,
castles, temples and historical figures out of concrete, adorning them with bits of glass, crockery, porcelain and seashells
and toiling until their yards overflowed with figures.
Why? Because they felt like it. Long before the New Age dawned, they had learned to follow their bliss.
No one ever accused Milwaukee of being flashy.
Best known for tractors, motorcycles and beer, it’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of town, stolid and practical like the Germans who built it.
It’s not what you’d call a trendy destination. And yet every time I go there, I have a great time.
In the sloughs around Alma, birds of a feather flock together.
Bird-watchers, especially. On chilly days in late fall, they crowd onto a wooden platform to watch tundra swans paddling around a slough of the Buffalo River called Rieck’s Lake.
For years, this lake provided an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for tundra swans, a big bird that needs a lot of fuel for its
flight from the Arctic Circle to the marshes of Chesapeake Bay. When ponds in southern Canada and North Dakota start to ice
over in October, the swans fly down to feast on arrowhead tubers and wild celery in the sloughs of the Mississippi River before
continuing east.
No one knows how to celebrate Christmas like the Germans.
It's thanks to them that Americans decorate Christmas trees, hang wreaths and put nutcrackers on mantels. Because of them, we bake gingerbread men, open Advent calendars and fill stockings with treats.
Still, not every German Christmas tradition has crossed the Atlantic.
Down comforters, to nestle all snug on a bed. Fleece stockings, to wear with care. Bowlsful of jelly, and a shop full of toys.
These visions were enough to draw six Minnesota women toward the rolling folds of southwest Wisconsin, holiday lists in hand.
Until that trip, my friends and I never had thought of ourselves as power shoppers.
"Wow, I've never done this before,'' marveled my friend Mary, looking on as Becky, Sandy and Adele tried futilely to close the lid of the bulging car-top carrier. "I've heard about women who do this.''
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."
All kinds of paths cross in the Wisconsin village of Trempealeau.
Canoes and cormorants, tugboats and trains, bicyclists and blues fans all are drawn toward this Mississippi River town. It’s just a little burg, but it’s smack in the middle of Mother Nature’s playground.
Perrot State Park starts at the end of Trempealeau’s First Street, with hiking trails that give vistors spectacular views of far-off Winona, the river valley and a hill French explorers called La Montagne Qui Trempe a l'Eau, or "the mountain that soaks in the water.'' To the north are the sloughs of Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge, crossroads for birds and springboard for bicyclists.
People converge on Spring Green, Wis., for many good reasons: To admire Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces. To hear Shakespeare at American Players Theatre. To see world-class kitsch at House on the Rock.
But what brought me to Spring Green? Free stuff.
Spring Green calls itself "The Birthday Town,'' because people celebrating birthdays can go around to its businesses collecting free loot, like trick-or-treaters. It's like having another holiday, except you're the only one who gets to celebrate it.
There are thousands of lakes in the north woods, but the most famous one is a stone's throw from Illinois.
Lake Geneva has been the favorite retreat of Chicago folks for 150 years, and everybody who was anybody had a place there: the Wrigleys, Maytags and Schwinns, but also cartoonists, actors, brewers and bottle-cap makers.
Geneva will seem citified to people who vacation on woodland lakes. There's a good reason to go there, though: It's entertaining to gawk at extreme wealth, and there's no better place to do it than Lake Geneva.
We'd been in La Crosse for barely an hour, and everyone we'd met was a certified character.
In Riverside Park, Frank and Faith Rimmert and Jonathan and Barb Rimmert were decked out in top hats, waistcoats and crinolines to meet the Mississippi Queen paddlewheeler, portraying the 19th-century locals who would have assembled.
"If your relatives were coming for a visit, you'd come to greet them," said Faith Rimmert, a volunteer for the La Crosse County Historical Society. "People picked up things being shipped in, or maybe you'd be looking for a servant — you'd say, 'I want that person for a servant in my house.'"
In its marshes and woods, John Muir first discovered the joys of wilderness. On its sandy plains, Aldo Leopold became a pioneer of land stewardship. On its meadows, two young ornithologists created a haven for cranes.
The natural world found some of its greatest allies on a swath of rolling, glaciated land in south-central Wisconsin. Muir went on to found the Sierra Club and is known as a father of America’s national parks. Leopold inspired legions with such books as “A Sand County Almanac.’’ George Archibald and Ron Sauey founded the International Crane Foundation.
Wisconsin often is called the cradle of conservation. It was the first state to ban the use of DDT, before it was banned nationally in 1972, largely thanks to Lorrie Otto of suburban Milwaukee, who put native plants in her front yard in the 1950s and became known as the godmother of natural landscaping. Earth Day was founded in 1970 by yet another Wisconsinite, former Sen. Gaylord Nelson.
In Wisconsin, a bunch of rocks sets hearts aflutter.
They enchant geologists, of course, but also scuba divers, rock climbers and botanists. The rest of us, too — hikers, birders, campers, Boy Scouts.
We all go to give Devil's Lake its due.
The Cornish have been good to Mineral Point.
In the 1830s, skilled tin miners from Cornwall, England, came to southwest Wisconsin, replacing the rough frontiersmen whose "badger'' digs gave the state a nickname but the town an unsavory atmosphere.
"They'd start fights just for entertainment,'' says Lisa Kreul, a tour guide at the historic site Pendarvis. "Not until the Cornish came in 1837 did the town start to settle down.''
When people think of bicycling in Wisconsin, the famous Elroy-Sparta State Trail often is first to pop into their minds. But
the state has added many, many trails since the Elroy-Sparta debuted in 1967, and it's time to try them.
All of the trails listed below use finely crushed limestone, except as noted. They're suitable for touring bikes, though a wider tire is better. Chip-sealed trails are like asphalt but softer, and can be nearly as smooth because they don't become pitted.
On state trails, passes are $4 daily, $20 annual; passes also are good in winter on ski trails. Rates on county and city trails vary; many are free, including the Interurban and Oak Leaf.
Once, people went through hell to get to Stockholm, Wis.
It's different nowadays. It's only a joy ride away from the Twin Cities, and the streets of this pretty hamlet on Lake Pepin are lined with sports cars and motorcycles on weekends. There are shops, galleries, inns, a pub; it's the place to go for a room with a view or vroom with a brew.
In 1854, this bit of land at the foot of the Mississippi bluffs was the destination of more than 200 emigrants from the impoverished village of Bjurtjärn, Sweden. Promised "paradise on earth," they instead endured cholera, deprivation and betrayal.
In southwest Wisconsin, it is natural that people gather in Mineral Point to smash plates, snip glass and cover themselves in cement dust.
Not far to the west, a German-born priest built the Dickeyville Grotto from conch shells, china cups, quartz, petrified rocks and glass. Just to the east, an Austrian-born cheesemaker encrusted his house with glass "jewels'' and filled his yard with concrete fairy-tale figures.
And in Mineral Point, the very air — faintly chalky from damp limestone — is thick with artistic impulses.
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.
The pelicans and cormorants of the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge are used to train whistles and the distant popping of trap guns. But they're even more used to the whir of bicycle gears.
Each fall, birds and bicyclists migrate to the same place along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Here, the 24-mile Great River State Trail starts in the refuge, skirts Perrot State Park and goes through the river town of Trempealeau before entering the Upper Mississippi River Wildlife and Fish Refuge and then the prairie outside Onalaska.
Onalaska, just north of La Crosse, grew up around a lumber mill and today is where the citizens of its hemmed-in sister city come to dine, shop and fish.
For some people, “Wisconsin wine” is a puzzling concept, like “New York nice.’’
But grapes do grow in Wisconsin, primarily on the high ridges of the Wisconsin River, near its confluence with the Mississippi. There, vines bask in sunlight and frosts sink into valleys. What vintners can’t grow they truck in from other states, adding a Wisconsin je ne sais quoi to the grapes during blending, fermentation and aging.
Wisconsinites now are enthusiastic supporters of their local vineyards, thanks largely to the late Bob Wollersheim, who
resurrected the state’s first vineyard in 1972. He made good wines, but more importantly, he made wine-buying fun,
holding tasting events and festivals at his oak-framed hillside vineyard.
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.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Wow! An SNA, it turns out, is a fantastic place to see spring at full throttle.
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.
In Wisconsin, people build whole trips around the roads less traveled.
Their destination? Nowhere. And on one of the state's lovely Rustic Roads, nowhere usually is enough.
Across the state, brown-and-yellow signs point to lightly traveled roads that preserve remnants of the past — piebald llamas (R-92, south of River Falls), an 1870 lighthouse (R-38 in Door County), Amish farms (R-56, south of Ontario).
In the Upper Midwest, the Swiss are insignificant — in numbers. Not many left the Old World. But the ones who did have had more success transplanting their traditions than nearly any other immigrant group.
In the southwest Wisconsin town of New Glarus, Germanic platitudes unfurl in Gothic script on the plaster of half-timbered chalets, over window boxes overflowing with geraniums. A little baker hangs over the doorway of the Bäckerei, where glass cases display almond-flavored brätzeli and anise springerle cookies. The sign over the town fire department reads "Feuerwehrhaus," and Railroad Street is Bahnhofstrasse.
In the 1840s, the Swiss canton of Glarus, southeast of Zurich, had been hit hard by the Industrial Revolution and recession, and it couldn't support all of its weavers and cloth printers. So it formed the Glarus Emigration Society and sent two trustees to buy land in the New World.
H.H. Bennett wanted tourists to come to the Wisconsin Dells, and thanks to him, they came.
Boy, did they come.
In Bennett’s day, they stayed for weeks, playing croquet and checkers and going on picnics, boat excursions on the Wisconsin River and perhaps to a magic-lantern show of stereoscope slides from Bennett’s studio.
In a state where people flaunt foam cheese wedges on their heads, you don't expect the cuisine to be timid.
The cheese, brats and beer for which Wisconsin is known are as robust as the Cheeseheads themselves, who invented the hamburger and the sundae but are best known for Old World flavors.
One of the best places to find them is in the southwest corner, where the state began. Mineral Point was a boom town when Milwaukee was just a few shacks; the first brewery was built there, and the new state acquired its nickname from the first lead miners, who dug shallow dwellings dubbed badger holes.
In the land of Velveeta, Wonder bread and Miller Lite, a chunk of southern Wisconsin is an Old World holdout.
Home of North America’s last Limburger factory, Green County is the big cheese in a state of cheese makers. It’s still famous for the pungent Limburger and Swiss on which it made its reputation. It’s weathered the advent of processed cheese food and gummy white bread. It’s survived the tide of bland beer and low-fat diets.
In Green County, people always have gone for the gusto.