Erika Janik - A Short History of Wisconsin

WHEN YOU SAY YOURE FROM WISCONSIN, you usually get a slight nod of recognition. But mention a particular Wisconsin city, like Menominee or even Madison, and people outside the state may draw a blank.

For people from Wisconsin, however, the states name brings to mind a singular place with unique qualities. Even if much of our landscape has begun to resemble the rest of the countryparking lots, strip malls, interstate highways, housing subdivisionsthere is still something different, even remarkable, about this place. Wisconsinites are unmistakably proudthough in a modest, stereotypically Midwestern way. They dont need to tell you that Wisconsin is betterthey just know it, even as they graciously allow other places to boast their superiority.

I first visited and now live in the state. My parents grew up in Illinois and, like all good Illinoisans, often vacationed in Wisconsin in the summer. Even after they moved to a town just outside Seattle, Wisconsin remained their summertime destination. When I was a child, my Wisconsin was rolling hills, fireflies, farms, blaring tornado sirens (though I had no idea what they were), and lightning that cut across the sky in an angry gash. It was the flashy, touristy charms of the Wisconsin Dells, the quiet grace of Taliesin, the bewildering collections of jewelry, dolls, and pipe organs at the House on the Rock, and the truly bizarre Don Q Inn with its theme rooms, barber chairs in the lobby, and rundown passenger plane out front. It was water towers with town names painted on the sideproclaiming themselves to the fields and surrounding townsand cemeteries located right in town. And it was unlike anything I knew back home in Redmond, Washington.

I came from a place rich in natural beautythe Cascade Mountains, Puget Sound, the towering evergreen trees. Wisconsin is not generally considered quite as magnificent, but this humbler landscape, whose idiosyncratic charm more than makes up for what it lacks in grandness, grabbed hold and never left me. Perhaps that is why I now call Wisconsin home.

Everything I do now is a product of this place and its past: from the produce and cheese I buy at the farmers market to the roads I travel on my bike to the giant pretzel I order at Maders German Restaurant in Milwaukee. I am the beneficiary of all the people and traditions and landscapes of Wisconsin. Wisconsins history is a record of all that has happened here, two hundred years ago and two minutes ago. We can read it not just to find the big events and famous names, but to find ourselves as well. History is what we see no matter where we look.

Natural and human histories are intimately and inseparably intertwined in Wisconsin. Wisconsins landscape has been used for centuries by different people for different purposes: first for subsistence by Indians, then for fur trading, and then for fishing, shipping, logging, mining, farming, manufacturing, and tourism. Wisconsin could claim to be many thingsthe land of beer, manufacturing, and water parksbut it has chosen to be Americas Dairyland, calling to mind a pastoral wholesomeness of green grass and grazing Holsteins. Wisconsin also boasts a rich political history, symbolized most strongly by Bob La Follette and the Progressive Party but also by the states role in the history of the Republican Party and by the sewer socialists who ran Milwaukee in the early twentieth century.

While we tend to think of American history as beginning in the east in 1620, particularly in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and moving westward, Wisconsins story reminds us that our nations history was shaped not only by what happened in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, but in seventeenth-century Green Bay. Wisconsins story is unique, but it is also part of a larger American narrative of development and change.