Black River Falls: Lumber, Loss, and the Ho-Chunk Return

Black River Falls, the seat of Jackson County in central Wisconsin, carries two distinct histories, and for most of its existence, only one of them got told.

The first is the familiar settlement story. In eighteen thirty-nine, a New Englander named Jacob Spaulding erected a sawmill on the Black River and established the first permanent Euro-American settlement in the county. The valley he had found was extraordinary: Jackson County held some of the largest white pine in Wisconsin, some trees reaching six feet across at the base. The lumber came down the river to mills; the mills multiplied. Before logging collapsed around nineteen oh five, more than fifty sawmills had operated in the county. Boomtown, bust, the usual Wisconsin arc.

The second history belongs to the Ho-Chunk Nation. The Ho-Chunk, People of the Big Voice in their own language, had long inhabited this country along the Black and Wisconsin Rivers. Federal removal policy targeted them repeatedly through the mid-nineteenth century, forcing them to Iowa, then Minnesota, then to a reservation in South Dakota in the eighteen sixties. The government assumed the removals would stick. They did not. Ho-Chunk families walked back to Wisconsin again and again, at personal risk, unwilling to leave their homeland. By the eighteen seventies, enough had returned that the removal policy was finally abandoned.

In nineteen seventy-three, a young scholar named Michael Lesy published a book called Wisconsin Death Trip. It used photographs taken in Black River Falls between eighteen eighty-five and nineteen hundred by a local photographer named Charles Van Schaik, paired with newspaper accounts of violence, suicide, and madness, to construct an argument about rural despair in the Gilded Age. The book became famous and influential. What critics have since noted is what it omitted: Van Schaik had made roughly two thousand portraits of Ho-Chunk families, some of his most consistent customers, people navigating forced removal and return with dignity and continuity. Lesy barely mentioned them.

The full story of Black River Falls has two chapters. Today, the Ho-Chunk Nation District Headquarters operates here, an acknowledgment that one of those chapters never really ended.