Fort Crawford
Prairie du Chien, WI

By Christy Clark-Pujara

On November 4, 1834, a twenty-year-old “mulatto” woman named Rachel filed a freedom suit in St. Louis, Missouri. She claimed that a military officer named Thomas Stockton held her in slavery at Fort Snelling for two years and then moved her to Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. According to Rachel’s suit, Thomas “took your petitioner to … Prairie du Chien for about two years, holding your petitioner as a slave … causing her to work for & serve him & family at that place during that time as a slave at which place her child James Henry was born.” Rachel argued that her residence and her son’s birth in the free territories made them free people. Slavery was prohibited by federal law in the Northwest Territories. But, despite the ban on slaveholding, Black Americans were held in bondage; in fact, federal military officers were given an allowance to cover the cost of hiring a servant or keeping a slave.

Rachel had been extremely vulnerable at Fort Crawford. She lived in a space dominated by armed white men, and she was regarded as property. Moreover, because Fort Crawford was under construction, Rachel was burdened with serving Thomas’s family, which included two infants (born in 1831 and 1832), in extremely crude conditions. Life on the Midwestern frontier became even more taxing when Rachel became pregnant and gave birth to a boy named James Henry, whose father is not revealed in the historical record. Rachel was not protected by status or race or law or family. She had no legal or social recourse against the sexual advances of the multitude of men who had access to her, especially Thomas. And, in 1834, just months after she gave birth, Thomas took them to St. Louis and sold them to Joseph Klunk, who sold them to William Walker — a local slave trader.

Somehow, Rachel and Henry escaped and made their way to the courthouse. Rachel petitioned for legal representation: “your petitioner prays that your petitioner and said child may be allowed to sue as a poor person in St. Louis Circuit Court for freedom & that the said Walker may be restrained from carrying her or said child out of the Jurisdiction of the St. Louis Circuit Court till the termination of said suit.” Her petition was granted, but Rachel lost the case. The circuit court ruled that slavery was not prohibited in the Territories when enslaved people were put to work serving military officers. Rachel appealed, and in June of 1836, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision. They asserted that Thomas had violated the ban on slaveholding in the Northwest Territories when he purchased Rachel from the slaveholding state of Missouri after he was stationed at Fort Snelling. Rachel’s courage and audacity are palpable, seen especially in her use of a legal system created to disempower her.

I first visited Fort Crawford two years after I accepted a faculty position as a historian in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I knew enslaved people were held at forts throughout the Midwest, but I did not associate Midwestern frontier forts with the larger institution of race-based slavery in the United States.  Mainly, I understood these frontier forts as part of American westward expansion and empire building that violently and viciously displaced Indigenous peoples. The area around Prairie du Chien, where the Mississippi River meets the Wisconsin River, has been home to Indigenous peoples for over 12,000 years, most recently the Meskwaki, Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Dakota peoples who had been repeatedly forced off their ancestral lands. Prairie du Chien had been a center of French fur trading since the 1680s, the oldest European settlement on the Upper Mississippi River. Both the French and British claimed territory in the region. Fort Crawford, founded in 1816, would come to represent American hegemony in the region. Built from local oak timber, it formed a square of 340 feet on each side. In 1826, the fort was severely damaged by a flood. In 1829, construction began on a new elevated fort made of limestone, which was completed in 1834.

Rachel was brought to this contested space. She was enslaved in the hinterlands of the American empire, and she bore witness to the daily realities of the displacement and violence of “manifest destiny.” She literally witnessed the physical building of the American empire in the “West,” and she was forced to contribute to that process in service of Thomas, his wife, and his children. At least seventeen African Americans were held in race-based bondage in and around Fort Crawford between 1820 and 1845. Slaveholding at Fort Crawford, like forts throughout the Midwestern frontier, was a part of the expansion of race-based slavery in America. And slaveholding officers served to undermine the ban on slaveholding and permit its practice in the region. Race-based slaveholding was so embedded in white American culture that its practice persisted even when it was explicitly and legally banned. As a life-long Black Midwesterner whose maternal family settled in Nebraska before it was a state and a historian of American slavery, I was astounded about how little I knew or had even considered knowing about race-based slavery in the Midwest.

Midwestern frontier forts, like Fort Crawford, are places that illuminate and expand understandings of American slavery and Black people’s tenacious pursuits of freedom. People like Rachel are part of a larger history of slaveholding in the United States. Stories like hers transform how we experienced these places. For me, these forts have become archives, places to contemplate Black history and experience. And while I am frustrated that stories of people like Rachel have only recently — and often marginally — been included in the historic presentation at these sites, I am inspired when I imagine that maybe I have walked where Rachel walked, maybe touched a wall she watched being built. My current book project Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Bondage and Black Freedom in Wisconsin, 1725–1868 seeks to tell the stories of people like Rachel and expand how we understand American slavery, the social-cultural formation of the Midwest, and Black people’s pursuits of freedom and liberty.

Christy Clark-Pujara is a Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press), and her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in small towns and cities in northern and Midwestern colonies and states in British and French North America before the Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Freedoms, 1725–1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, Black settlement, and debates over abolition and Black rights shaped race relations in the Midwest.

Rachel’s petition and other documents related to Rachel v. William Walker (1834) can be found on the Digital Gateway of the Washington University in St. Louis.

The image is a detail from a painting by A. Brower, circa 1840, that was reproduced on a 1908 postcard published by A.C. Bosselman & Co.

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River Cabin
Blackhawk Island, WI

By Shanley Wells-Rau

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

______for a wing-bone

What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The cabin was a writing sanctuary for Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), said to be America’s greatest unknown poet, who will forever be linked to Blackhawk Island in southeast Wisconsin.

Look at Blackhawk Island on a map and you’ll see it’s actually more of a peninsula that points into what is called Lake Koshkonong, an open water area that is really just the Rock River being messy all over its flood plain. The river likes to outstretch itself and in its flood-prone ways created a recreational haven for boaters and fishers.

Placed less than 100 feet from the Rock River, Niedecker’s cabin was bought as a kit from a catalog and assembled by her father in 1946. He sited it closer to the road than the river in hopes of preventing displacement during the regular floods of spring. Elevated on concrete feet, the 20×20 one-room house hovers over four cement steps. The front and only door faces east, away from the river, as if to shrug off the idea of annual flooding. This one room contained her life: bed, books, table, typewriter, sink, pencils, hand-held magnifying glass. With no running water, she hauled buckets as needed from her parents’ house across the road. That was the house she grew up in. The house she needed to escape.

Her father, a congenial carp seiner and fisherman’s guide who was inept with finances, was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor close in age to his daughter. This neighbor and her husband were milking Henry Niedecker of property and money. Her mother, Daisy, had lost her hearing after her only child’s birth and turned her head away from her husband. Her “big blind ears” couldn’t hear what her eyes couldn’t see. A lifetime of fighting flood mud, “buckled floors,” and increasing poverty seem to have settled around her like a mourning shawl.

Niedecker left the area a few times—for college until the family’s finances made her quit (early 1920s), for artistic and romantic companionship with a fellow poet in NYC (early 1930s), for work as a writer and research editor for the WPA in Madison (1938-1942), and finally for Milwaukee in 1963 when she married a man who lived and worked there. But that spit of land brought her back after each exodus. Once married, Niedecker and her husband, Al Millen, returned to the river every weekend, eventually building a cottage riverside just steps from her cabin. They moved into the cottage for good in 1968 when Millen retired. Niedecker lived there until her death on Dec. 31, 1970.

In the opening lines of her autobiographical poem “Paean to Place,” Niedecker submerges herself deep inside a location she said she “never seemed to really get away from.”

Fish

____fowl

________flood

____Water lily mud

My life

____

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

_________________born

____

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Painted green when built, the cabin today is chocolate brown. Sturdy wood, unfinished inside. A brass plaque by the door shines with the lines: “New-sawed / clean-smelling house / sweet cedar pink / flesh tint / I love you.” Her signature is embossed below. When I visited, it was hot and dry. The riverside window was open, allowing a breeze to push stifling July heat into the plywood corners. A lovely space. I could see myself writing there. I told myself I could even manage life with “becky,” as she called her outhouse.

It’s not hard to imagine the constant cleanup from the river’s yearly ice melt and flooding. Tall maples and willows accustomed to watery life block the sun over a dirt yard that would easily mud with rain. The only access to sunshine seemed to be on the riverbank or in a boat on the river itself. The tree canopy jittered with life, a “noise-storm” as Niedecker once wrote to a friend. I looked to see what birds were holding conference, hoping to meet one of the famous plovers so linked to her work. I saw none. Just movement, shadows, and chittering, and I thought of her technique to overcome her own failing eyesight by memorizing bird song. She could see birds as they took flight. Sitting still, they were invisible to her except through their calls and conversations with one another.

I grew in green

slide and slant

_____of shore and shade

Neighbors saw her walking, always walking, stopping to peer in close at some flowering plant. She bent in—nose distance—to see past her own bad eyesight. Before her marriage to Millen, she worked as a hospital janitor in Ft. Atkinson. Her failing eyes required that she work with her body, no longer able to serve as a librarian’s assistant as she did in in the late 1920s or a magazine proofreader as in the late 1940s. Her eyesight wouldn’t allow her to drive. If a ride wasn’t available, she walked the four miles to work. Four miles home again.

Out-of-place electric guitar riffs float past underbrush the afternoon of my visit. Someone is listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” seemingly not at peace with bird song or tree breeze. The blaring music makes me think of Lorine’s struggle with disrespectful vacationers and rude neighbors. She persisted in centering poetry inside her hardworking life in a community slowly turning blue-collar loud. Her neighbors didn’t know she was writing her way into the poetry canon.

The current owners are descendants of the couple who bought the property in 1986 from Millen’s estate. They kindly allow poets on pilgrimage, and they seem to care lovingly for the property. As I walked to the river to meet it up close, the owner appeared with a genial greeting. He asked if I’d noticed the 1959 flood marks on the wall inside the cabin. I hadn’t. Eagerly, he guided me back to Niedecker’s “sweet cedar pink” to show me that and other details. After friendly conversation, I decided to head back to town. I didn’t need to meet the river up close. I’ve already met it many times in her poetry.

After a career in the oil industry, Shanley Wells-Rau earned her MFA in poetry at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming in The Maine Review, Bluestem Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Plants & Poetry, among others. She teaches literature and writing for OLLI and OSU and lives with her husband and a clingy dog outside town on a windy hill, where she wanders the prairie to visit with native flora and fauna.

_____

For further reading, digital archives, and more, please visit the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Special thanks to Amy Lutzke, who spent a very hot day driving me around and showing me Niedecker’s personal library.

Photograph by Jim Furley, April 1979. Permission granted by Dwight Foster Public Library.

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Rail Bridge
Sauk City, Wisconsin

By Kassie Jo Baron

Sauk City, Wisconsin, is best known as the home of the first Culver’s. Then probably the annual Cow Chip Throw, where residents spend Labor Day weekend seeing who can throw dried cow poop the farthest. Then, finally, for author August Derleth, who was born in Sauk City in 1909.

Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Derleth. We were told he was a kind of Mark Twain meets Henry David Thoreau of Wisconsin. We never read his work in public school, even though the locations were, quite literally, in our backyards; instead, we fell asleep on our assigned copies of A Sand County Almanac.

But what I do know of him was that as an 8-year-old, I would hold my bowl of orange slices in the back of my mom’s car as we crossed August Derleth Bridge over the Wisconsin River and passed Derleth’s state historical marker on my way to soccer games at August Derleth Park. On other days, we’d head to Leystra’s, a local restaurant, and pass the massive pie case to head into “Augie’s Room,” where we could enjoy our slices surrounded by Derleth memorabilia.  

About a half mile downstream from the August Derleth Bridge stood a disused pony truss railroad bridge that was built in the 1901. One of Derleth’s portraits shows him walking across this bridge, a part of his regular route sauntering around the town he dubbed Walden West. “It was a good place to be alone,” he wrote, “I could meditate on any subject I chose…. How many poems came into being in that place! How much my view of Sac Prairie was expanded there!”

By my own childhood, the brown trusses were out of place and certainly out of time. In 2002, much to the delight of certain pyromaniacal children (I will not say if I was among them), the center portion of the bridge was demolished. In 2018, the remainder of the bridge was taken down, but I wasn’t there to see if it exploded. The spot is now the trailhead for the Great Sauk Trail, a bike path that runs through town. A chain-link fence erected in the same rusted brown of the bridge is now all that prevents visitors from stepping out onto the remaining span, which juts precipitously over the rush of the river twenty-some feet below. Wisconsin & Southern Railroad’s “No Trespassing” sign stands in front of extra trusses strewn haphazardly—if such a thing is possible—across the sun-bleached wood of the tracks.

It wasn’t until I started my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa that I discovered Derleth might not just be a hometown boy after all. During a standard ice breaker, a professor shocked me by saying “isn’t that where August Derleth, the Lovecraft guy, is from?” I promptly went home and fell down an eldritch rabbit hole. It never occurred to me that Derleth did anything more than write a book about a mystery on Mosquito Island (which you can see if you look upstream from August Derleth Bridge).

Outside of Sauk City, Derleth is best known as H.P. Lovecraft’s publisher and the founder of Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in weird fiction that is still located in Sauk City, but is now all but defunct. A minor scandal arose when Derleth published stories as a “posthumous collaborator” with Lovecraft, viewed by others as an inappropriate imposition into the mythos. And Derleth’s scandals didn’t end there. In 1951, he was engaged to 16-year-old Sandra Evelyn Winters. In 1953, Derleth told a reporter from the Rhinelander Daily News, “We hope to be married Easter Monday—that’s April 6.… I’ll be 44 on Feb. 24 and Sandy will be 18 on March 1.” Residents certainly raised eyebrows, but they weren’t scandalized enough for me to hear this vital piece of hometown gossip until 2021, four years after I’d left the state.

Leystra’s restaurant closed in 2017 after 30 years, marking the end of Augie’s Room. Two years later, Sauk City completed construction of a splash pad and playground in what used to be August Derleth Park. The park was creatively renamed Riverfront Park and the formerly rustic sign at the entrance replaced with a significantly larger sign featuring cartoon turtles and racoons with, I am convinced, murderous impulses in their fiberglass hearts. During construction, the state historical marker was taken down.

These signs now decorate the walls of the August Derleth Society, currently in the building where I used to take tap dancing lessons. I visited the society for the first time earlier this year. “The only thing left is the bridge,” I joked with Jon Caflisch, the society’s treasurer, a man so passionate about Derleth he convinced me to join even though, until then, I had never read any Derleth (it’s only $25/year, and I get the newsletter now). Jon pointed to the green “August Derleth Bridge” sign, hanging just over a bookshelf filled with Derleth hardcovers. The bridge, it seems, doesn’t have a name anymore.

Derleth’s legacy was a fixture in the Sauk City of my childhood, even though no one I knew could tell you a single thing about him. Piece by piece that legacy evaporated, replaced with Culver’s relics and those Lovecraftian wildlife statues. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to erase Derleth from the region he wrote so fondly about, but I’m not not saying that either. If you’re passing near Sauk City, make some time to visit the August Derleth Society because, as Jon told me, “We might not be here much longer.”

Kassie Baron is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of white, female New England mill operatives’ bodies during the first US industrial revolution. She is a native of the Sauk Prairie area, a newly minted member of the August Derleth Society, and has never competed in the Cow Chip Throw.

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The Leopold Shack
Baraboo, Wisconsin

By Marc Seals

I am not a Midwestern native — I was raised in the woods and swamps of north Florida, far from the Driftless Region of Wisconsin (where I now live). As a result, I was not familiar with Aldo Leopold or his work when I moved to Baraboo sixteen years ago. Soon after arriving, I picked up a copy of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, and I had not finished many pages before realizing that literature lost a fine nature poet when Leopold decided to dedicate his career to forestry. For example, Leopold writes, “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” Or “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” And don’t get me started about the chapter where Leopold remembers watching the green fire fade from the eyes of a dying old wolf.

Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published the year after he died in 1948, has been recognized as a foundational text in the field of environmental ethics for over fifty years. It has been ten years since I finally made the pilgrimage to the Leopold shack, riding my 1973 Peugeot road bike to Leopold’s farm just outside of Baraboo. I dismounted and peered in the windows, where I could see bunkbeds, a stone fireplace, the rustic kitchen — calling it “simple” would be an extreme understatement. Regardless, I knew that I was standing on sacred ground. This might seem an odd pronouncement, given the fact that the shack is a converted chicken coop (since no other building on the property was worth salvaging), but hear me out….

Leopold purchased the ruined farm on the shore of the Wisconsin River in 1935 for a mere eight dollars an acre to use the land as a sort of laboratory — he wanted to restore the natural forest and prairies. The experience helped him finalize what he terms the “land ethic.” Leopold calls for a new relationship between humanity and nature, writing, “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members.” He demonstrated this respect in his efforts to restore the property to its natural state. Leopold and his family planted over 40,000 trees on their frequent retreats from Madison, and the land is unrecognizable today. This “sand county” farm was not much good for farming, but it makes a great forest and prairie.

A Sand County Almanac is a memoir, a journal, a philosophical treatise, and more. Leopold honed his environmental philosophy on this property, and that’s why it’s sacred. There are not many chicken coops that helped give rise to a system of ethics. Beyond that, I struggle to convey what the shack means. I built a birdhouse replica of the shack last winter, and it turned out so nicely that the Aldo Leopold Foundation has supplied me with wood from trees planted by Aldo Leopold so that I can make birdhouses as a fundraiser for the Foundation. I’ve taken literature classes to the shack just after we finished reading A Sand County Almanac, where I was able to witness the wonder on the faces of students who drank water from original pump. I have driven out to the shack with Noah, my biology professor friend, on a ten-degree January day; we stood on the shore of the Wisconsin River and read our favorite passages to each other (for as long as we could take the cold). And I rarely cycle past without stopping in for a visit.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation, located in a wonderful visitor’s center just down the road, is continuing Leopold’s work, restoring the surrounding prairies to their original state. In short, every visit to the shack — and every rereading of A Sand County Almanac — feeds my soul.

Marc Seals is a professor of English at the Baraboo campus of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he teaches courses in American literature, composition, and film. He has published articles and book chapters on authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dashiell Hammett, and Zona Gale. A native of the Deep South, he has grown to love the Midwest.

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Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant
Sister Bay, Wisconsin

By Jenna Goldsmith

Before Americans were obsessed with the Swedish practice of fika, Norbert Blei was perfecting it at Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant and Butik in Sister Bay, Wisconsin.

“I must go to Al Johnson’s for coffee . . . for conversation, camaraderie, my late morning break,” Blei declares in his 2002 essay “Counter Culture.” But it had snowed all night in Sister Bay, so much so that the road from Blei’s home to his beloved coffee counter at Al Johnson’s was impassable. 

Blei’s destination sits at the bottom of a hill, the focal point of Sister Bay, which is itself a hub of the scenic Door Peninsula. The restaurant, which began as a humble operation—just breakfast and dinner, cooked, served, and bussed by Al Johnson himself—is now a bustling terminus for locals and vacationers alike. It is not uncommon for diners to sit down for a meal of Pytt I Panna (Swedish hash) a full two hours after putting their name on the waiting list. Servers dress in traditional Swedish dirndls, just as they did a half century ago, and the food is served on dishes from Persgrund, Norway. During the summer months, there are goats on the roof. 

No matter how many times I visit Al’s, I never stray from my usual short stack of Swedish pancakes, Swedish meatballs, and lingonberries (and lots of coffee). Though he has been gone for nearly seven years, I inevitably find myself staring at the coffee counter nestled in the restaurant’s northeast corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of Norbert. I like to picture him there, hunched over a cup of coffee and a folded-over Door County Advocate, or his manuscript in progress, knowing full well that if he were actually there, I wouldn’t have the gumption to approach him and risk interrupting his beloved fika. Still, I play this hologram game. I ask my mom to describe to me for the hundredth time my eccentric distant cousin Chuck Clemensen, another counter sitter, who Norbert called “Wall Street Charley.” “Well, Chuck was tighter than the bark on a tree,” my mom would remind me. “He died with the first nickel he ever earned, and he claimed to know the original recipe of Coca-Cola because he worked as a chemist for the company.” Chuck frequently fika-ed alongside Norbert and Al. I imagine they spoke about Door County’s rapid transformation, influx of vacationers, and their shared history as native Chicagoans.

Though I never met Norbert, I feel that we are kindred spirits, tied together not just by our mutual Chuck, but by our alma mater Illinois State University, our vocations as writers, and our love of counter culture. As of late, I can’t help but relate to the ambivalent Norbert of “Counter Culture” sitting in his warm, safe home, debating whether or not to brave the elements for fika at Al’s. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my own writing practice relied heavily upon a coffee counter down the street from my apartment in Bend, Oregon. This practice, along with many others, has been completely upended. And though I think of myself as flexible—professional enough that I can work anywhere—my writing life has suffered. I find myself wondering how Norbert would have fared without the respite of the safe, welcoming coffee counter at Al’s. 

Norbert eventually made it to Al’s coffee counter that snowy February day. Did I ever really doubt him? Even February in Wisconsin is no match for fikasugen.

Jenna Goldsmith is the Assistant Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Illinois State University. She is the author of two chapbooks, Genesis Near the River (blush books, 2019), and Suppose the Room Just Got Brighter (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her poetry can be found in New Delta Review, Tildé, and Sheepshead Review. In 2019, she was honored to be named a Mari Sandoz Emerging Writer by the Story Catcher Literary Festival at Chadron State College. Learn more about Jenna at jennalgoldsmith.com.

Photo courtesy of Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant.

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