To begin with there is the book’s wonderfully
gothic title: Wisconsin Death Trip. One
glance at that sucker 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.
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 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 in the newspapers 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.
A few
samples:
• “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, who committed suicide few days
ago, attempted suicide a few days ago at Sparta. He swallowed a large quantity
of cigar stubs.”
Or
finally, this macabre 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.”
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? For Michael
Lesy the answer to both questions was yes.
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 the folks of Wisconsin, like those
everywhere, 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 maybe looking out over a season’s failed harvest, with precious little
else to fill one’s mind but the sound of the wind outside or the ticking of a clock
on the mantel, who wouldn’t question their ability to make it through another
day?
(Though
when contemplating the method of one’s suicide surely there were better ways to
choose than swallowing fistfuls of cigar butts, but to each his own end.)
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. There were no counselors or support groups back then. No
prescriptions to help get through the tough times; not even a telephone or
next-door neighbor to call on. For some, old age came too early; for them the endless
days of toil meant death and despair could not be defeated.
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 that 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. From a happenstance encounter with images taken a century
ago in a town he had never heard of, let alone set foot in, one young author published
a book that would be his greatest success, indeed would become the calling of
his life’s work. (The book went on to enjoy enough notoriety that a feature film adaptation
of Wisconsin Death Trip was made in
1999.)
Much of
my interest in all 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 young girl growing
up in the township of Irving, not more than ten miles southeast of Black River
Falls and Charles Van Schaik’s photography studio. Fortunately for my mother -
and me - she went on to live a long and fulfilling life, though she carried her
own share of hardship. Growing up she watched helplessly while her youngest sister took sick and couldn’t keep food down, ultimately dying of malnutrition. Incredibly, a similarly tragic fate later befell her own two-year-old son. She
had to raise her family without her husband after he suffered a
debilitating stroke and died in 1946. Then on top of that there was a diagnosis of breast cancer.
Tough times? Relative to what life was like back then, most of us today have no idea what those words mean.
Tough times? Relative to what life was like back then, most of us today have no idea what those words mean.
What the book does is take a hard
look at the perilous journey that brought each of us to where we
are today. It invites us to think of the trials and tribulations of our own lives and realize all that came before.
Michael
Lesy makes much the same point 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 with that we close the book - for now - on Black River Falls and draw back from the grim images of its past. At its core, Wisconsin Death Trip is about life, how ridiculously tenuous and wonderfully uncertain it can be - for all of us, no matter what the time or place.
And with that we close the book - for now - on Black River Falls and draw back from the grim images of its past. At its core, Wisconsin Death Trip is about life, how ridiculously tenuous and wonderfully uncertain it can be - for all of us, no matter what the time or place.
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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/
