To begin with, there is the book’s wonderfully
neo-Gothic title: Wisconsin Death Trip.
One glance at that and it’s hard to imagine anyone turning away without wanting
to take a peek inside. Authored by Michael Lesy and published in 1973, this non-fiction
work, labeled by many today as a cult classic, looks at the darker side of the great
American Dream, circa 1890, in rural Wisconsin, and the result is at times both
laughably absurd and strangely unsettling. Whatever personal attachment I have
to this book may be indirect and circumstantial at best, but I’ll get to that
later. First, a little background.
The Author of Wisconsin Death Trip
Author Michael Lesy was born and
raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and is currently a writer and
professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts. In a statement posted on Hampshire’s College’s website, Lesy
describes his working theme to be one of using “historical photographs from
public archives…to tell a variety of difficult truths about our country and our
shared pasts.”
Wisconsin
Death Trip would become his first, and most famous, published effort to
date. And it came about because one day the tireless young scholar got tired of
studying.
Back in
1972 Lesy was in the midst of studying for his masters degree in American
social history at the University of Wisconsin. One afternoon he decided he
needed a break. “I was really quite bored,” he would later say1,
looking back on the day when he started paging through a photography book and
came across an old picture published by the Wisconsin Historical Society that caught
his eye. On a whim he walked over to the Historical Society building on the
Madison campus and asked if he could see some more.
The
object of his curiosity was a collection of portraits taken in the late 1800s by
one Charles Van Schaick, who happened to be the town photographer and Justice
of the Peace in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, at the turn of the century.
From his two-story studio and gallery on 1st Street just off of Main
Street, Van Schaik served his customers, snapping portraits of couples young
and old, women wearing the finest fashions of the day, even dead infants
dressed for burial in their tiny coffins.
For the
rest of that afternoon in Madison, Lesy pored over thousands of Van Schaik’s photographs
and saw something haunting in the unvarnished, downright grim Scandinavian faces
staring back at him. The more he looked at these pictures, the more he began to
think he was on to something. His first impulse was to somehow tell the story
of these pioneering people in the form of a documentary film. But the more
practical approach was to compile a series of these pictures in a book and let
that tell the story instead.
Following
up on his newfound inspiration, he started scouring through newspaper archives
of The Badger State Banner from the
1890s, sifting through and picking out any bizarre reports that best
complemented the dark vision he had seen reflected in Van Schaik’s subjects. What
he found was a treasure trove of stories referencing madness, suicide, disease
and crime in the hinterlands of Wisconsin. Quoting them just as they once appeared
in the local press, these snippets would become the other half of his picture book.
By combining the words and pictures in just the right way, Lesy hoped to create
a black and white montage of images no reader would soon forget.
The Characters
• “James
Carr, residing in the town of Erin, Vernon County, was discovered dead in his
log house recently, having died of starvation.”
• “Mrs.
Carter, residing at Trow’s Mill, who has been in charge of the boarding house
at A. S. Trow’s cranberry marsh, was taken sick at the marsh last week and fell
down, sustaining internal injuries which have dethroned her reason. She has
been removed to her home here and a few nights since arose from her bed and ran
through the woods…. A night or two after she was found trying to strangle
herself with a towel…. It is hoped the trouble is only temporary and that she
may soon recover her mind.”
• “Lena
Watson of Black River Falls gave birth to an illegitimate child and choked it
to death.”
• “Alexander Gardapie, aged 90 years, died at Prairie du
Chien. He walked into a saloon, drank a
glass of gin, asked the time of day, sat down, and died.”
• “G.
Drinkwine, father of Miss Lillian Drinkwine, attempted suicide a few days ago
at Sparta. He swallowed a large quantity of cigar stubs.”
Or
finally, this charming little sketch:
• “Frederick Schultz, an old resident of
Two Rivers, cheated his undertaker by suddenly jumping out of the coffin in
which, supposed to be dead, he had been placed.”
To these and
other macabre little stories it might be all a good Norwegian could do to shake
his head slowly and say, “Uff da.”
(Personally,
death by cigar stubs wins the prize for me.)
Setting aside the peculiar tenor of what
passed for responsible journalism in those days, the question remains - were
these incidents just isolated oddities or were they more telling of what life
was really like back then? Michael Lesy figured
the answer to both questions was yes.
Reading through the accounts in Death Trip one is left to wonder – only
half in jest – if the entire countryside wasn’t awash with crazies. Well, times
were indeed tough back then, especially for the farmers and homesteaders who
had little money to begin with. All across the country in 1893, a run of bank
failures and the depletion of the gold reserve set off an economic depression that
quietly became “one of the worst in American history,”2 and many
folks in Wisconsin felt hardship like never before. Doubtless a fair number did
fall prey to madness and suicide as a result.
And why
not? Faced with a crippling money crisis and a child rasping for dear life from
diptheria, or looking out over a season’s failed harvest, with precious little else
to fill one’s mind but the incessant sound of the wind or the ticking of a clock
on the mantel, who wouldn’t question their ability to make it through another
day?
In an
interview in 2003, Lesy said that the aim of any book should be to allow the
reader “the ability to free associate and not be lost.”3 That’s pretty
much what the reader is invited to do with Death
Trip once the pages start turning. The mind starts to skim across the photographs
and wonder what was going on in the life of each of these people when their
picture was taken? What could have pushed some to such grisly extremes written
about in the local papers? From there it’s not much of a leap to think about the
challenges in one’s own life today. Then at some point the focus comes back to
the book and the reminder that maybe the good old days weren’t always so good
after all.
As books
go, Death Trip defies convention in
nearly every way. For one thing none of the pictures carry any captions or
descriptions, so the faces one sees throughout the book are nothing more than nameless
ghosts. The text has no clear beginning or narrative structure. The pages
aren’t even numbered.
Black River Falls
Much of
my interest in this stems from the fact that part of my family tree runs right through
Black River Falls at the same time period detailed in the book. At the turn of
the century, my grandmother, Margaret Stamstad, was a girl growing up in the rural
township of Irving, ten miles southeast of Black River Falls and Charles Van
Schaik’s photography studio. Fortunately for my mother – and me – she went on
to marry and raise her family, though in her time she endured burdens and hardships
that, with lesser women, might have easily derailed all that.
While
only in her teens she had to endure the death of one of her sisters from an
unknown digestive ailment. Then some years later, tragedy struck again when her
own son was born with a congenital birth defect with his esophagus that basically
prevented him from keeping food down. Soon thereafter, young Adolph Harvey
Thompson succumbed to starvation and
died when he was only four months-old.
That any
mother could find the resolve to go on after such terrible darkness seems
nothing short of a miracle, but maybe miracles of that sort were somehow more
commonplace back then.
My
grandmother had to run the family farm without her husband after he suffered a series
of debilitating strokes and died in 1946. Then on top of all that was a
diagnosis of breast cancer and a slow and painful recovery from a radical mastectomy.
So…tough
times? Most of us today have no idea.
The book
takes a strangely entertaining look at the journey which brought our
descendants and ultimately each one of us to where we are today. What’s more, it
invites us to reflect on what we consider the trials and tribulations of our
own lives and measure them against all that came before.
It’s a powerful
history lesson, one worth revisiting now and then, as the author reminds us
when he writes in the conclusion to the book:
“Pause
now. Draw back from it. There will be time again to experience and remember.”
And
remember we should.
-----
For more on Michael Lesy and his book:
1 www.identitytheory.com,
interview of Michael Lesy by Robert Birnbaum, September 16, 2003. URL: http://www.identitytheory.com/michael-lesy/
2
Whitten, David. “Depression of 1893”. Economic History.Net Encyclopedia, edited
by Robert Whaples. August 14, 2001, URL: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-depression-of-1893/
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