In the summer of 1827, a Ho-Chunk Indian chief named Red Bird (Figure 1), who lived in a village near Prairie La Crosse, became one of the most notorious inhabitants of the Old Northwest. Tensions had long festered between the Ho-Chunk and American settlers in southwestern Wisconsin. During the War of 1812, the Ho-Chunk had joined forces with Great Britain, their trusted partner in the North American fur trade, against the United States and continued to favor the British after the war’s close. As a result, the Ho-Chunk were not inclined to welcome the Americans with open arms. The situation...

Nathan Myrick’s decision to leave his home in eastern New York and head west in the 1840s was not an unusual choice (Figure 3). Like countless other young men east of the Appalachians, he felt stifled by social conventions and commercial limitations and was eager to escape to a new land of economic opportunity. In 1841, a teenaged Myrick left home and made his way to Prairie du Chien. That same year, after a fruitless attempt to make a living as a fur trader and tanner, he took a chance and followed the Mississippi River north to Prairie La Crosse....

To an average eastern visitor, La Crosse would not have been a particularly impressive sight in the 1850s. The settlement’s population remained small, and the town would have seemed jarringly rustic compared to small communities in New England or the Middle Atlantic states. It lacked even the most basic amenities of eastern life. The Reverend Spencer Carr, who published one of the earliest accounts of the new village of La Crosse in 1854, noted that “the very foundations of all those moral, social, literary and religious institutions, which are peculiar to Christian countries, were yet to be laid; and to...

Perhaps more than any other citizen of La Crosse, Thomas Benton Stoddard recognized the intrinsic overlap between the worlds of government and railroads in the nineteenth-century Middle West (Figure 7). Stoddard had, in fact, long navigated the choppy waters of both worlds. For one thing, he had been born into politics in 1800. Stoddard’s father, Richard, had served as the first sheriff of Genesee County, New York, and been a leading member of the Federalists, an influential political party devoted to the idea of greater federal intervention in the American economy, in the western part of the Empire State.¹ As...

Dr. John A. Renggly had an important task in the summer of 1882. As the newly elected La Crosse city physician, Renggly was charged with monitoring the general state of health in town and then reporting his medical conclusions to the city’s board of health. He was most intrigued by how the busy community’s surrounding environment affected the wellness of its residents. In his opinion, the region’s specific climate and landscape were ideally suited to ensure a hearty local population. Most important, the “possibility of getting the best of drinking water by means of wells and pumps and of larger...

David Frank Powell seemed an odd choice to represent the interests of La Crosse workers when he ran for mayor in 1885 (Figure 13). Powell had never choked on sawdust in a lumber mill, never lost his job in a wave of factory layoffs, and never struggled to live on a common laborer’s wage. Instead, he made a comfortable living as a doctor and was better known for his colorful (and largely invented) past than for his grasp of the plight of working people (Figure 14). By the time he arrived in La Crosse in 1882, he had come of...

In 1845, a few years after Nathan Myrick had arrived in southwestern Wisconsin, Fredericka Levy entered the scene (Figure 16). That year, Levy, her ambitious husband, John, and their young son migrated to La Crosse in search of their fortune. Soon after they arrived, John Levy set in motion a grand plan he believed would ensure his family’s prosperity. He opened one of the first stores and one of the earliest hotels in the frontier settlement. In the 1850s, moreover, he built the burgeoning community’s first boat dock and invested in warehousing, banking, and the grocery trade. His efforts were...