Wisconsin Dells: Sandstone Canyons and the Birth of the Tourist Trap
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
The waterparks are the first thing most people know about Wisconsin Dells, and the last thing worth discussing. The real story here is geology and one stubborn photographer.
The Dells of the Wisconsin River were carved by glacial meltwater at the end of the last ice age. As the ice sheets retreated, torrents of meltwater cut down through soft Cambrian sandstone, creating a canyon as deep as one hundred and fifty feet and stretching for fifteen miles along the river. The current river is far smaller than the floods that shaped it, leaving behind a labyrinth of narrow gorges, arching rock formations, and freestanding columns that early boatmen named Black Hawk's Head, Chimney Rock, and Witches Gulch.
The town that became Wisconsin Dells was originally called Kilbourn City, named for the president of the railroad that arrived in eighteen fifty-seven. It was H. H. Bennett who turned it into a destination. Bennett was a Civil War veteran who had been badly wounded by the accidental discharge of his own gun, making him unable to work his trade as a carpenter. He bought a portrait studio instead and began photographing the river canyon. What made him famous was a single image: his son Ashley leaping across Stand Rock, a sandstone column rising out of the river. To capture it, Bennett invented an early high-speed shutter he called the Snapper, and Ashley had to hold the leap while his father got the shot he wanted.
Bennett hung his prints in railroad stations across the upper Midwest. Excursion trains began stopping at Kilbourn City specifically to see the scenery his photographs had made famous. By the eighteen eighties, the Dells were one of the most recognized natural attractions in the region.
The city officially changed its name from Kilbourn to Wisconsin Dells in nineteen thirty-one. The waterparks came later, in the nineteen seventies and eighties, building on a tourist infrastructure that a one-armed photographer had built with a homemade shutter and an obliging son.
