The Chippewa Flowage WI415
In 1921, the Federal Power Commission granted a license to the Wisconsin and Minnesota Power and Light Company for a dam construction on the Chippewa River. The dam was completed in 1923, and provided hydroelectric power and flood control to the area, creating a 15,300 acre reservoir with 233 miles of shoreline. Known as the Chippewa Flowage, this watery area with about two hundred islands has become one of Wisconsin's largest inland lakes. Homeland to the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of the Chippewa Indians, the Band never approved of the creation of the Chippewa Flowage and lost their "Post" village, burial grounds and wild rice beds to the newly created lake. The power company relocated the people to a new village named "New Post" along the shores of the lake. Today, this area of spectacular natural scenery attracts not only many nature lovers, but thousands of anglers to the abundant fishing waters.

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Crex Meadows WI241

During the last Wisconsin glaciation the advance of the Grantsburg sunlobe blocked drainage, resulting in the formation of Glacial Lake Gransburg. Natural succession eventually formed the extensive peat marshes known today as Crex Meadows.

Prior to white settlement in the mid-1800's, the Fox, Dakota and Chippewa Indians used Crex extensively. Large scale commercial drainage, begun about 1890, upset the entire ecological pattern. The vast operations of the Crex Carpet Company, started in 1911, involved harvesting and shipping the native wire grass, Carex stricta, from which Crex probably derived its name. For two decades this industry was economically important to this area.

Exploited to the fullest, Crex has withstood the ravages of time. Today, under the ownership of the State of Wisconsin, prescribed burning and water management are restoring the prairie flora and fauna of Crex Meadows.

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Beef Slough WI230

The Beef Slough was a sluggish branch of the Chippewa River that provided and excellent storage pond for the logs floated downstream by numerous logging companies. Here loggers were employed to arrange the mixed-up logs into orderly rafts to be towed by steamboats to sawmills down the Mississippi.

The Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire sawmills felt threatened when the Beef Slough Manufacturing, Booming, Log Driving and Transportation Company was organized near here in 1867. Camp No. 1 built offices, a railroad depot, post office, church and dormitories to house 600 men during the rafting season.

The competition between the Eau Claire and Beef Slough interests developed into a brief dispute in 1868, sometimes calles the "Beef Slough War." The most important result of the "war" was the earrival on the scene of Frederick Weyerhaeuser, whose Mississippi Logging Company brought skilled management and seemingly unlimited capital into the picture and changed the logging operations on the chippewa from locally-operated activities into a major interstate industry.

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Rafting on the Mississippi WI149

After 1837 the vast timber resources of northern Wisconsin were eagerly sought by settlers moving into the mid-Mississippi valley. By 1847 there were more than thirty sawmills on the Wisconsin, Chippewa, and St. Croix river systems, cutting largely Wisconsin white pine.

During long winter months, logging crews felled and stacked logs on the frozen rivers. Spring thaws flushed the logs down the stream toward the Mississippi River. Here logs were caught, sorted, scaled, and rafted. Between 1837 and 1901 more than forty million board feet of logs floated down the Great River to saw-mills.

The largest log raft on the Mississippi was assembled at Lynxville in 1896. It was 270 feet wide and 1550 feet long, containing two and one-fourth million board feet of lumber.

The largest lumber raft on the river originated on Lake St. Croix in 1901. Somewhat smaller in size, 270 feet wide and 1450 feet long, it carried more lumber-nine million board feet. The last rafting of lumber on the Mississippi came in 1915, ending a rich, exciting, and colorful era in the history of Wisconsin and the Great River.

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Battle of Mole Lake WI122
This is the home of the Sokoagon Band of the Chippewa tribe. According to tradition handed down from one generation to the next, the first chief of the Band was Getshee Ki-ji-wa-be-she-shi, or the Great Marten. Each summer the Sokoagon Band came to Mole Lake to fish and hunt, and in the fall they harvested the wild rice before they followed the deer herds into the swamps of the Peshtigo River for the winter season. About 1806 bands of Sioux from the north and west tried to gain control of the rice beds. A fierce hand-to-hand battle resulted. The Indians, armed with bows and arrows and clubs, fought a long, hard battle. Over 500 Chippewa and Sioux were killed and were buried here in a common mound. The battle was expensive for the Sioux, who retreated westward and never again attempted to return.

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Du Bay Trading Post WI121
In 1834 John Baptiste Du Bay established a trading post on the Wisconsin River one mile west of here, for the American Fur Company. His wife was Princess Madeline, daughter of Oshkosh, Chief of the Menominee Indians. According to tradition, Du Bay's father, John Lewis Du Bay, a French-Canadian voyageur, spent the winter of 1790 on the same site, which was known to the Chippewas as Nay-oshing meaning "the Point." Because of the underwater ledge, this was the first place north of petenwell Rock where the river could be forded on foot and therefore became a strategic Indian crossing to the Black River hunting grounds to the west. In the 1860's stagecoaches operating between Stevens Point and Wausau took on passengers here. Lake Du Bay, created in 1942, covers the original site of the trading post. A monument marks Du Bay's grave in Knowlton Cemetery 2 112miles north of here.

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Brule-St. Croix Portage WI120
The Brule and St. Croix rivers provide the natural water highway between Lake Superior and the Upper Mississippi. Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, in 1680 was the first white man to use this passage. Traveling from Prairie du Chien in 1766, Jonathan Carver was advised by his Chippewa guide not to ascend the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers because he lacked enough gifts for the numerous and unfriendly Sioux along that route. Carver's party then detoured up the Chippewa River to Lac Courte Oreilles, portaged to the Namekagon, traveled down stream to the St. Croix and up that river to the passage north of St. Croix Lake. The two-mile portage between the St. Croix and Brule was used by another exploration party led by Henry Schoolcraft August 6, 1832. One of Schoolcraft's companions recorded that the Brule was a brook of clear, cold water "filled with brook trout." The Brule still is one of the best trout streams in the United States.

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Gogebic Iron Range WI113
The Gogebic Iron Range, which may be seen to the south of here, extends for 80 miles from Lake Namekagon, Wisconsin, to Lake Gogebic (Chippewa for "place of diving") in Michigan. Prior to the discovery of iron ore, the area was relatively uninhabited as the land was ill-suited to agriculture. Nathaniel D. Moore uncovered ore deposits in the Penokee Gap near Bessemer in 1872, but it was not until 1884 that the first mine shipment was made. The news spread rapidly, attracting speculators, investors, and settlers. By 1886 there were 54 mines on the range and the area was boomed having "inexhaustible deposits of uniformly high-grade Bessemer ores." For a brief period stocks rose 1200 percent. The crash in 1887 ended the extravagant prosperity.

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Chippewa River and Menomonie Railway WI90
"Crooked, Rough and Muddy" During the middle 1870's, when the great logging era of northern Wisconsin was in its infancy, the Mississippi River Logging Company attempted to float pine logs down the Soft Maple and Potato creeks to the Chippewa River but the streams were too shallow and crooked. To solve the problem the first logging railroad in Wisconsin was constructed in 1875-76 from Potato Lake to the Big Bend of the Chippewa River with a later extension northward. The town road which can be seen to the immediate west of this site follows that railroad grade. Sleds pulled by horses carried the locomotive, cars, and tracks overland from Chippewa Falls. In July 1884, this railroad and a subsequent line constructed through the Blue Hills were formally organized as the Chippewa River and Menomonie Railway Company.

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The Bad River WI70
The Mauvaise (Bad) River was so named by the French due to the difficulties of its navigation. The Indians called it Mushkeezeebi or Marsh River. In 1845 the Rev. L.H. Wheeler, Protestant missionary at La Pointe, planned an agricultural settlement near the mouth of the Bad River where Indians had for many years made their gardens. He named the settlement "Odanah," a Chippewa word meaning "village". About 1850 a determined effort was begun to compel the Indians to move west of the Mississippi. Mr. Wheeler visited the lands to which it was proposed the Lake Superior Chippewa should go. He returned with the conviction it would be a deed of mercy on the part of the government to shoot the Indians rather than send them to the new region. In July, 1853, Mrs. Wheeler wrote her parents; "They (the Chippewa) are fully determined not to go. They have lived two years without their payments, and find they do not starve or freeze." Mr. Wheeler's pleadings were not in vain. The government resumed the payments, and his ideas of justice toward the Chippewa were substantially embodied in a treaty made with them in 1854 providing for them three reservations, at Odanah, at Lac Court Oreilles and at Lac du Flambeau.

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