Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

Several afternoons this week, as we experienced a welcome spate of warm days and blue skies, I rambled with my daughter in the UW–Madison Arboretum, less than a mile from my home. As we fashioned secret forts in our favorite spot among the draping firs in Longenecker Gardens, I told my six year old stories about Aldo Leopold, who planted trees here in the 1930s and 1940s when he was a professor at UW–Madison—stories gleaned from Matt Blessing’s article on Leopold that appears in this issue. Walking through Curtis Prairie, I described how the native grasses had been restored from the horse pasture that used to be there. Prescribed burns, like the ones Leopold’s graduate students took part in during those early days at the Arb, made this change possible,…

THE YEAR WAS 1856, AND A TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTION WAS coming to the upper Midwest: not the rapid expansion of railroads branching west, nor the passenger steamer that, since mid-century, had ferried travelers across the Great Lakes. Neither solved the problems of travel during the great North’s winter months. But now, a revolutionary invention promised to free Wisconsin and surrounding lands from the dark isolation of winter. The Midwest’s 26,000 miles of rivers and lakes—long regarded as useless for travel in the frozen months—would provide new avenues to bring people together and enable them to access markets. Not only would the towns of the Midwest be connected, or so the promoters claimed, but people would soon be able to travel via frozen river to the Rocky Mountains and beyond in just…

YOU CAN TRAVEL WISCONSIN from tip to tail and never set foot in Wisconsinapolis. Despite the fact that it only exists on paper, the city shown on this map was once one vote shy of being named the state capital. The land situated on the northwest shore of Swan Lake just east of Portage was platted by James Duane Doty and John Suydam while they travelled from Green Bay to the First Wisconsin Territorial Legislative Congress in Belmont in 1836. Doty owned land at the site and also held interest in a canal project connecting Swan Lake to the Wisconsin River; his aim was to make Wisconsinapolis a shipping boom town. Wisconsinapolis was not alone in its narrow defeat as state capital. Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Mineral Point were contenders,…

Twenty centuries of “progress” have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.—Aldo Leopold, Game Management (1933)1 Aldo Leopold was a forester, a professor of wildlife management, and an advocate for wilderness preservation who achieved national standing in each endeavor. Generations of readers have admired the lyrical quality of Leopold’s writing. The author of three hundred publications, Leopold conveyed complex scientific ideas in a succinct and accessible style. A Sand County Almanac, posthumously published in 1949, eventually emerged as a touchstone of the environmental movement and sold more than two million copies. “The Land Ethic,” the book’s capstone essay, extended the ethics of…

YOU CAN TRAVEL WISCONSIN from tip to tail and never set foot in Wisconsinapolis. Despite the fact that it only exists on paper, the city shown on this map was once one vote shy of being named the state capital. The land situated on the northwest shore of Swan Lake just east of Portage was platted by James Duane Doty and John Suydam while they travelled from Green Bay to the First Wisconsin Territorial Legislative Congress in Belmont in 1836. Doty owned land at the site and also held interest in a canal project connecting Swan Lake to the Wisconsin River; his aim was to make Wisconsinapolis a shipping boom town. Wisconsinapolis was not alone in its narrow defeat as state capital. Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Mineral Point were contenders,…