A Canoe Voyage Up the Minnay Sotor

A Canoe Voyage Up the Minnay Sotor
Author: George William Featherstonhaugh
Publisher: St. Paul : Minnesota Historical Society
Total Pages: 502
Release: 1970
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

This detailed travelogue, the concluding part of a two-volume work written primarily for a British readership, discusses the United States' geological resources and offers critical observations about the manners and customs of its different peoples. It was written over a decade after the author explored St. Peter's River--the "Minnay Sotor" of the book's title--in 1835, and draws upon the journals he kept along the way. A Canoe Voyage (volume 2) deals with Featherstonhaugh's return journey to the east coast. His route, interrupted by many detours and excursions through what is now the state of Wisconsin, took him from Fort Snelling and Galena to St. Louis and its environs. Traveling by steamer along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Paducah, Kentucky, Featherstonhaugh then journeyed down the Tennessee River to Tuscumbia, where he caught a train to Decatur. From this point, he journeyed by steamer, stage, and dugout canoe, to areas described as "Cherokee country," then onward to Georgia, the Carolinas,Virginia, and Washington, D.C, his ultimate destination. In this volume, Featherstonhaugh inveighs against fraudulent land speculators, slavery, the treatment of the Cherokee, and the bad manners of fellow travelers. He found much to admire in the beauty of the Southern Appalachians and the hospitality of John C. Calhoun, the celebrated Southern statesman.

Fifty Years in the Northwest

Fifty Years in the Northwest
Author: William Henry Carman Folsom
Publisher:
Total Pages: 868
Release: 1888
Genre: Frontier and pioneer life
ISBN:

Chapters start with historical information about a county or places within the county followed by biographies of people from those localities.

The St. Croix

The St. Croix
Author: James Taylor Dunn
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1965
Genre: Saint Croix River (Wis. and Minn.)
ISBN: 9780873511414

Story of the waters that divide Wisconsin and Minnesota, from the days of the Sioux and Chippewas to their contemporary status as a "wild" preserved vacationland.

The Wisconsin Frontier

The Wisconsin Frontier
Author: Mark Wyman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780253334145

From French coureurs de bois coursing through its waterways in the seventeenth century to the lumberjacks who rode logs down those same rivers in the late nineteenth century, settlers came to Wisconsin's frontier seeking wealth and opportunity. Indians mixed with these newcomers, sometimes helping and sometimes challenging them, often benefiting from their guns, pots, blankets, and other trade items. The settlers' frontier produced a state with enormous ethnic variety, but its unruliness worried distant governmental and religious authorities, who soon dispatched officials and missionaries to help guide the new settlements. By 1900 an era was rapidly passing, leaving Wisconsin's peoples with traditions of optimism and self-government, but confronting them also with tangled cutover lands and game scarcities that were a legacy of the settlers' belief in the inexhaustible resources of the frontier.

Haunted Wisconsin

Haunted Wisconsin
Author: Michael Norman
Publisher: Big Earth Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781931599047

Retold from personal interviews, newspapers, archives, and other sources, stories of ghosts, apparitions and othe supernatural occurences ranging from historical tales embedded in 19th century superstition to contemporary accounts of strange occurences in modern-day homes. This revised edition includes new stories and revisions to some of the tales original to the first edition. In addition, a few stories have been dropped for various reasons.