Wisconsin Death Trip

Small towns are a setting for a host of horrors. It can be a murderous creature in the form of a clown. A murder in which the wrong person is scapegoated because of their beliefs and/or appearance. What is appealing to me in these stories is that it isn't just an isolated incident. It spreads like wildfire through the entire town. Creating a paranoia or even madness in the residents. 

What happened in Black River Falls during 1890 through 1900 can be considered a horror. The likes of hich were captured in Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip published 50 years ago. 

The pictures in Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, are from the collection of town photographer Charles Van Shaick. When taken, the pictures, nor the events, were considered to be unique, extraordinary or sensational. Of the 30,000 images Van Shaick produced, an archivist selected 3,000 to preserve. From those, Lesy judged less than 200 to contain sufficient information to answer the questions about the changes at the end of the entury: what dark thing had changed the ordinary doings of ordinary citizens.

There are dozens of articles and newspaper clippings from the time documenting these occurences. The comination of these news aricles alongside these photographs is overpowering. 

"E.Y. Spaulding who ran a dry goods store in Black River Falls "was last week taken with strong symptoms of derangement, a misfortune doubtless superinduced by overwork and anxiety over business matters."

There were suicides. An article saying the wife of Hans Nelson took her own life by cutting her throat. "She had been deranged for some time" Another article about how a farmer's wife did the same to her throat with a pair of sheep shears. The 80 year old mother of an imprisoned man threw herself in front of a train and was cut into 3 pieces. 

Then you had the homicides. A woman who believed devils were out to get her. She took her three children to the nearby lake and drowned them one by one. A young man shot a woman in the face when she refused his marriage proposal. A German farmer starves his livestock and then blames it on the witches who were after him. A 10 year old boy is sentenced to jail after he and his brother sho a farmer, kept it a secret, and spent all summer treating the farm like their castle. 

People suffered from bad accidents. A man accidentally unhinged his false teeth when chewing a piece of steak, then swallowed them whole. His doctor couldn't get them back up so he had to poke them down. A Mr. M.H. Young came home with a bottle of whiskey, which he set down next to his bottle of carbolic acid, when he reached for one of them in the dark, he got the other and was said to live only 4 minutes after ingesting the acid. 

"A woman was recently found wandering about the streets of Eau Claire with a dead baby in her arms. She was from Chippewa County and had lost her husband and was destitute."

Arson and death from diptheria are prominent, reoccuring items in these accounts. The starkest of images and accounts come from the epidemic of diptheria plaguing children. Lesy manages to construct all of this morbid history into a collage. What he is after almost suggest a spiritual crisis. We have this false nostalgia for the good old America Heartland and this book is a corrective to that nostalgia. Casting a dark shadow over what people think were simpler times. 

The book has gone onto influence several writers. Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer For Dying uses it as the basis for it's story. Cormac McCarthy's last book Stella Maris takes place in a mental institution in Black River Falls. McCarthy is known to have championed the book before. It has even gone on to be turned into a documentary.

These strange things happen all the time, you might say. History, as it seems, had concentrated so much of these occurences on the town of Black River Falls in 1890. A review of the book from a 1973 newspaper by William Gass reports "But it is poetry all the same. A construction. For couldn't we put together our own death trip of any batch of local papers. It would be a different ratio of deaths due to X rather than Y to be sure. A difference which is vital. But the total picture might be equally grim or with the right sheers made to seem so anywhere. Perhaps human misery can neither be created nor destroyed. Merely transformed, distributed and endured."