The Plow, a Sharp-Nosed Dog, and Wisconsin’s Discerning Mosquitoes
Young John Muir on the homestead, where his settler family was doing its part to erase Indigenous reality.
David Muir and his three eldest children, John among them, came from Scotland to the United States looking for land to settle. That quest led them to the edge of Euro-American settlement in the newly minted state of Wisconsin. There Muir soon purchased 160 acres of openly wooded land on a glacial lake 20 miles northwest of Portage for just $200, the equivalent of a mere $5,000 now.
Less than 20 years earlier the property fell within the homeland of the Ho-Chunks, a tribal nation that had been battered and diminished by the fur trade, skirmishes with invading miners, and Indigenous defeat in the Black Hawk War of 1832. By the time the Muir family arrived, the military had driven the Ho-Chunks out of Wisconsin across the Mississippi — a Midwestern prequel to the Trail of Tears — and their ancestral lands were offered for sale to settlers like the Muirs.
This was settler colonialism at work: it destroyed the Indigenous people in order to replace them with incoming settlers.
Some of the Ho-Chunks didn’t get the memo, however; they slipped back across the big river to their homeland and took up a shadowy existence on the margins. The returning Ho-Chunks lived silent, secretive lives squeezed onto less and less land as more and more settlers poured in and took up homesteads.
The young John Muir did feel some sympathy toward the dispossessed. The conquest of Wisconsin served, he wrote later, as an example of:
the rule of might with but little thought for the right or welfare of the other fellow if he were the weaker; and that “they should take who had the power, and they should keep who can,” as Wordsworth makes the marauding Scottish Highlanders say.
In other words, white folks called the shots because they had the guns. They also had the plows.
At the south end of the Muirs’ homestead, John discovered a mound edged with grass-thatched Ho-Chunk graves, and more graves appeared down the slope in the direction of the lake. Put behind the plow by age 12, John accorded the buried no special treatment in preparing the land for planting. When he and his father came to the graves, Muir remembered,
we ploughed them down, turning the old bones they covered into corn and wheat.
Living Ho-Chunks impressed John Muir no more than did the dead. On a crisp winter morning, he was walking the family dog Watch — “a good judge of character,” according to Muir — in view of the lake when the dog’s nose questioned the air and his coat bristled. Dog and boy spotted a Ho-Chunk hunter hefting a spear and moving silently from one muskrat den to another. It amazed John that Watch’s keen smell detected the Ho-Chunk muskrater from a half-mile off, but:
had the hunter been a white man, I suppose Watch would not have noticed him.
Scent also guided the mosquitoes that arose in hungry springtime hordes and displayed distinct dining preferences among the district’s inhabitants.
They would drink their fill from brown, smoky Indians, or from old white folk flavored with tobacco and whisky, when no better could be had. But the surpassing fineness of their taste was best manifested by their appreciation of boys full of lively red blood, and of girls in full bloom fresh from cool Scotland or England.
Still, the Ho-Chunks’ skills in finding wild food did amaze young John. Hunters walked directly up to a tree that looked like all the other trees in that patch of woods, chopped into the trunk with tomahawks, and pulled out raccoons that John and his friends had no idea were denning there. The boys also saw few deer even though their tracks were abundant. After the first winter snow, the boys often spotted three or four Ho-Chunks following a fresh trail of hoofprints like coursing hounds. The hunters were “noiseless, tireless,” their pursuit so dogged that rarely did they fail to lay fresh venison on the fire.
What most held Muir’s fascination as a Wisconsin youngster, however, was the wild itself minus human inhabitants, both Euro-American and Indigenous.
Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of spring when Nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! ... Everything about us was so novel and wonderful that we could hardly believe our senses except when hungry or while father was thrashing us.
That sense of newness, and his father’s unrelenting abuse, would soon propel Muir into the deeper wild he longed for.
Still Here
Expected to vanish after the military drove them out of Wisconsin in the decade before the Muirs settled, the Ho-Chunks did no such thing. The strategy of staying under the radar yet continuing to make a living from their homeland worked. The Ho-Chunks now number nearly 8,000 tribal citizens, and the Ho-Chunk Nation is one of the 12 tribal nations with seats of government in Wisconsin.
Coming Book Talk
Tuesday, April 2, 12:30 p.m., Rotary Club of Walnut Creek: This brown-bag event will take place in person at the Assistance League Diablo Valley, 2711 Buena Vista Ave., Walnut Creek, CA 94597 and on Zoom with passcode WCRotary. Free and open to all, Rotary members or not. Please join me.
I would imagine it was a similar story to when my great grand-parents homesteaded the family farm in Minnesota in the 1870's. It's interesting to remember that my father spoke reverently about the Sioux natives who had lived on that land; I don't think he was educated in understanding the impact of the displacement of the First People. However, I remember him often saying, respectfully, "They (Sioux) were here first."