wisconsin death trip book pdf

Wisconsin Death Trip

Michael lesy , charles van schaik  ( photographer ) , warren susman  ( preface ).

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

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Michael Lesy

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"Mrs. A. J. Cowles, aged 87 years, died at Beloit. She had been married to Deacon Cowles, who survives her, for nearly 68 years. On the occasion of her last birthday her eccentric husband presented her with a coffin which he had made with his own hands and in which she was buried." [3/16, State]

"Tramps who were refused food at the home of John Ovenbeck in the town of Friendship, Winnebego County, entered the barn at night and cut the throats of 3 cows, which bled to death. A card attached to the horns of one bore the following message: 'Remember us when we call for something to eat again. " (9/21, State]

”Abraham Zweekbaum of the town of Holland committed suicide by battering himself on the head with a hammer. . .. He attempted to take his life a few days ago by cutting his head from his body with a sharp instrument, but was prevented from doing so." 17/12, State]

Bill's law partner, C.R. Johnson, said that one of the first trials that old Jacob Spaulding presided over as Justice of the Peace was a kind of mad hatter's tea party full of mock testimony and false witnesses. The drunk plaintiff falsely accused an innocent man of selling liquor to the Indians, and the drunk jury that found him guilty fined him four gallons of whisky, which they drank on the spot. Colonel C. C. Pope claimed that most court cases began and ended with friendly bottles passed between the judge, the jury, the defendants, the plaintiffs, the witnesses, the lawyers, and spectators who were so suspicious of one another that they came to court with things other than pen knives in their pockets. He recalled a trial in 1886 over the ownership of a cow. He said the testimony and argument were interrupted at least a dozen times by as many drinks, all of which were toasted by the trial judge breaking into a verse from" Old Rosin and Bow."

Tramps are overrunning Grant County, raiding sheep and stealing horses. The farmers [are] organizing a vigilance committee.

Christ Wold, a farmer near Poskin Lake, committed suicide by deliberately blowing off his head with dynamite. He placed a quantity of explosive in a hole in the ground, laid his head over it and touched the fuse, exclaiming, "Here I go and the Lord go with me."

Wisconsin death trip.

By michael lesy.

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Published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik. (Goodreads.com)

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Book Details

Published in, edition notes.

Bibliography: [2] p. at end. Originally presented as the author's thesis, Rutgers. Consists chiefly of excerpts from the Badger State banner, Black River Falls, Wis., for the years 1885-1900 and of photos. taken by Charles Van Schaick from 1890 to 1910.

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Wisconsin Death Trip PDF

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik....

Chapter List (25 chapters):

• Chapter 1: Cover
• Chapter 2: Half title
• Chapter 3: Title
• Chapter 4: Copyright
• Chapter 5: Dedication
• Chapter 6: Preface
• Chapter 7: Introduction
• Chapter 8: Chapter 1
• Chapter 9: 1885-6
• Chapter 10: 1890
• Chapter 11: 1891
• Chapter 12: 1892
• Chapter 13: 1893
• Chapter 14: 1894
• Chapter 15: Chapter 2
• Chapter 16: 1895
• Chapter 17: 1896
• Chapter 18: 1897
• Chapter 19: 1898
• Chapter 20: Chapter 3
• Chapter 21: 1899
• Chapter 22: 1900
• Chapter 23: Conclusion
• Chapter 24: Bibliography
• Chapter 25: About this Book

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Wisconsin Death Trip Kindle Edition

• Print length 381 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publication date September 18, 2016
• File size 48820 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Not Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy. --Gregory McNamee

From Library Journal

" Wisconsin Death Trip has become a cult favorite, an example of hybrid nonfiction narrative about more than an era and its people in Black River Falls. Lesy created a story of the seen and unseen, the spoken and the silent in small-town America at the end of the nineteenth century. . . . In that space between knowing and not knowing, Wisconsin Death Trip becomes mesmerizing."

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01LZ71UFX
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of New Mexico Press; Second edition (September 18, 2016)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 18, 2016
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 48820 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 381 pages
• #282 in History of Photography
• #1,719 in Photography History

About the author

Michael lesy.

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The Real Story Behind Eerie Wisconsin Death Trip

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Photography provided by Wisconsin Historical Society | WHS-29160

Some very unsettling things were happening in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, from 1890 to 1900: epidemics, insanities, suicides, burnings, bank closings, early deaths. This darker side of life was chronicled in the 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip , a poetic and disturbing collection of photography and newspaper accounts about life in small-town America.

The tome struck a cord and quickly became a cult classic. And now, 45 years later, the fascination continues. But why? “I’m not really sure,” confesses author Michael Lesy. “The book took on a life of its own for reasons beyond me.” Now a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the 73-year-old surmises that “maybe it reminds people of their own predicament, this gigantic, relentless nightmare of being alive.”

It all started quite by accident in 1968, when Lesy was a college student in Madison. Bored one day, he found himself at the Wisconsin Historical Society. He remembers the space was dark and empty. Janis Joplin was playing somewhere in the distance. He met curator of iconography Paul Vanderbilt, who introduced him to an archive by turn-of-the-century portrait photographer Charles Van Schaick. “I thought some of the studio portraits were pretty amazing.” Lesy recalls. “The whole experience that day seemed like a separate universe.”

Intrigued by these striking images, he wanted to know more. So he scoured spools of microfilm and read countless newspapers from that time period. What he found were often haunting, dryly written accounts of the harsh existence in this small Wisconsin town: banks closing, children dying of disease, admissions to the local asylum — the American dream gone wrong.

Photography provided by Wisconsin Historical Society | WHS-28724

The Photography

Van Schaick was the ultimate small-town photographer, in the business of creating visual records made to order: births, marriages, families, businesses, homes, even horses as visual proof of their breeding potential. He wasn’t trying to be an artist, just a competent county photographer. His portraits show basic ideas of form and composition but were intended simply to freeze a moment in time, to preserve a likeness. “Commercial photography, as practiced in the 1890s, was not so much a form of applied technology as it was a semi-magical act that symbolically dealt with time and mortality,” Lesy writes in the book’s introduction.

This description is particularly apt when it comes to creating postmortem portraits of children. Heartbreaking images of small babies posed inside their tiny, satin-lined caskets. Even side-by-side coffins of siblings who had died together. Although these images may seem harsh to modern eyes, back then they were acts of love. So many children were dying of diphtheria in the 1890s, and grieving parents wanted physical records that their children had existed. Family snapshots had not yet been invented, so these formal portraits of death were the only visual reminders of what their loved ones looked like.

All told, Van Schaick left behind 30,000 glass plate negatives when he died in 1940. They sat in his studio for 30 years until the Wisconsin Historical Society salvaged 8,000 of them. Of those, Lesy chose fewer than 200 for his book. We see a stern-looking woman with a vacant glare posing in a doorway. Young men in formal suits standing amidst a sea of deer mounts. A young mother’s face with searching eyes. These seemingly timeless visual touchstones are the kinds of images that stay with you. “The idea of trusting what you see is crucial to this kind of work,” posits Lesy. “It’s neurological — registering in the present, but it’s about the past.”

Photography provided by Wisconsin Historical Society | WHS-28597

The Written Word

The Badger State Banner was a weekly newspaper tasked with reporting both the mundane and the morose goings-on in Black River Falls and surrounding Jackson County. It was edited by Frank Cooper and his son George. They told their stories in small chunks of copy, written in a pared-down, matter-of-fact style. Nuggets of daily life chronicled tales of arson, murder and madness swirling around this small Northern town.

Often they were turning deeply personal matters like suicide and mental illness into public conversations, confirming the many whispers people had already heard. And yet, these news tidbits were also a way for the community to collectively share in their plight. This weekly dose of reality was delivered in a most distinctive tone. “The major voice that drones throughout the 10 years of loss and disaster — cold, sardonic and clear, like black marble — belongs to Frank Cooper,” Lesy writes in Wisconsin Death Trip. “His blocks of prose are veined here and there by the acute, sensual style of a novelist.”

As it turns out, there were many of these news nuggets from which to choose. All across America, financial difficulties were causing banks to close. This depression hit Black River Falls hard. Area businesses were closing down; people were out of work. The mostly German and Norwegian immigrants endured long, bleak winters in this isolated landscape. And when disease ravaged the community, all seemed hopeless. This was not the new opportunity they had traveled across an ocean to find.

Photography provided by Wisconsin Historical Society | WHS-28921

The Alchemy

It’s hard to categorize Wisconsin Death Trip. Is it history? Poetry? Photojournalism? There’s something about the way the images and text are combined. We see pages of compelling photography, yet no captions to indicate who these people are. We read newspaper snippets and wonder which faces might possibly connect with which stories, if any at all. It’s all left to our imagination. It’s an “alchemy,” as Lesy calls it, of carefully chosen fragments of history layered together. “It’s a way of using pictures and words to tell a story, a history,” he notes. “I wanted to provide people with an experience.”

The author explains that the book’s overall theme is “death and rebirth.” It’s divided into five distinct parts: The introduction and conclusion have to do with being born and dying young, while the middle three chapters delve into how men and women come together and apart. There are also five distinct voices that guide readers: the father-and-son newspaper editors, a medical-records keeper for the state mental asylum, a town historian and a town gossip. When asked about the book’s title, Lesy pinpoints the phrase to the time period and the counterculture cravings of the 1960s. “Oh yes, my friends and I did drugs, certainly acid,” the author admits candidly. “We all tripped.”

Photography provided by Wisconsin Historical Society | WHS-23745

Lesy has always insisted that Wisconsin Death Trip was not just a portrait of one particular town but rather the psyche of a group of people who lived in a certain time and place. “It was the state of the whole region,” the author reminds us.

“The book is about all of us; it’s our shared history — the whole catastrophe.”

In the 45 years since the book was published, he has not returned to Black River Falls. And while it’s been more than a century since these particular inhabitants of this Northern town were alive, he wonders if the emotional history hasn’t lingered all these years later. “All that dreadful stuff is likely still alive and well in terms of trauma memory,” he posits.

There has always been something cinematic about the sequencing of the book: patterns and rhythms of life. Simultaneous dream and nightmare. In fact, Lesy first imagined Wisconsin Death Trip as a movie back in 1968; a lack of financing prevented it from coming to fruition.

But in 1999, a movie was made. Not by Lesy, but by British director James Marsh. The mostly black-and-white docudrama combines re-enactments of the book’s newspaper accounts accompanied by distinctly dry narration. An arthouse success, it has been featured on Netflix in recent years and is available for viewing on YouTube.

Although these days Lesy is busy working on other books, Wisconsin Death Trip continues to send tentacles out into the world. It has inspired a number of musical works, including opera, bluegrass and even a song from a British post-punk band. It has been made into a dance. Many novelists have cited it as inspiration, among them Stephen King, who credits the tome as an influence for the novella 1922 . Even the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There used visual elements from the book. “The only reason to do art is to make more art,” Lesy concludes. “The book has spawned dozens of different art forms. It’s radioactive; it has a life.”

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

Tags: black river falls , death , history , summer 2018 , trip , Wisconsin

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Wisconsin Death Trip Summary

Unveiling the haunting tales of tragedy in rural wisconsin, michael lesy.

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Description, free pdf download, chapter 1 | overview, chapter 2 | wisconsin death trip offers a haunting glimpse into the dark side of america's past, exploring themes of despair, isolation, and the devastating toll of hardship on individuals and communities., chapter 3 | the book serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of mental health and social support systems, and highlights the consequences of their absence., chapter 4 | through its photographic and historical documentation, wisconsin death trip captures the fragility of human life and the profound impact of societal challenges on the human spirit., chapter 5 | wisconsin death trip review.

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Wisconsin Death Trip

By William H. Gass

• June 24, 1973

History passes over them like the angel of death: not only these people of Jackson County, Wisconsin, the occupants of this book, alive and dying in Black River Falls and en virons during the two decades around which the century turned, but also the enormous anonymous mass of men who have perished that we might be here, in our turn, to perish too.

And although there'll be photo graphs which embalmers (for a fee) will guarantee to take of our rouged and cottoned cheeks, photographs of the coffin banked by glads and guarded by wire‐rigged wreaths; and even though there'll be brief notices of comfort and commemoration (paid for by the grieved) placed in columns beside the Want‐Ads and resembling the For Rents, like the one here from The Badger State Banner; and though we shall no doubt leave behind us albums of images, snaps of us in all our ages, with weddings, births, and vacations by the Lake or at the Dells predominating; still, history will ig nore these traces just as it always has before—because historians want their documents to state sums or be signed by ministers and kings; be cause we belong to the poor and nonpolitical and cannot pay them; because we are among those whom George Eliot described as living faith fully a hidden life and resting in unvisited tombs.

“Wisconsin Death Trip” represents an effort to recapture the conscious ness of a neglected people and in this way contribute to the understanding of an old contrast—city vs country —a polarity so traditionally impor tant to the interpretation of American history. Michael Lesy has collected and arranged a number of remark able old photographs; he has culled accounts, principally of death, depres sion and disease, from local papers, recorded a little local gossip, snipped pertinent paragraphs from the re gion's novelists, then to accompany these composed a brief though elo quent and perceptive text, and put all this handsomely and artfully be fore us.

The result is an impressive exam ple of the poetry of history, linear in form as history naturally tends to be, yet curiously still and fixed like piece of statuary or one of those stiffly posed photographs he's both reproduced and doctored here. As we read, we do not so much pass from death to death as we more deeply enter one life on its painful way there, and we enter it the way water enters stone, through the steadily re peated smack of similar little facts spattering on its face to dissipate into the air.

Photographs represented occasions once. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money; they recorded important moments; you faced front; you seldom smiled, or the film was exposed at that hour of the day when even a city's wooden sidewalks and dirt streets seem as empty and endless as a wilderness; or a woman in her best black would be stood against a white clapboard wall, the lines behind her already folding into one another at infinity, to make so negative a space you'd think she was the entrance of a cave; and though the younger men's faces seem beautifully stupid and naive sometimes, the sunken mouths and eyes of the older women wear their suffering the way clothes and furni ture show theirs, the skull behind the skin burning like a dim bulb.

The loneliness trapped in these since levity was not the mark you wanted put across your face forever; yet the result of this resolute Egyp tian solemnity was to separate peo ple as they sat or stood together, man and wife or members of a band, to emphasize the withdrawn, inward look they all had, because there was nothing in front of them but a lens as cold and darkly caped as God's eye. Even the dogs were docile, cow‐jawed, stiff as porcelain. There were, of course, no cats.

The people were often strangely posed: if not before a painted drop, then in the middle of a chicken scratch or vast infertile field, chair and occupant put down there as if by a terrible wind; now and then storefront or a string of fish was taken, people and fish alike overlap ping, and an entire family snapped stoically sitting in a yard of weeds; figures is overwhelming, and one thinks of the country, and how in the country space counts for some thing, and how the individual is thrown upon his own resources, how he consequently comes to sense his essential self; and then you notice with a guilty twinge three genera tions posed in front of a small un painted shack, and you realize that these families are as closely thrown together as potatoes in a sack; that, like men on a raft, space is what confines them; and that the tyranny of the group can here be claustro phobic, crushing, total.

Times were tough, the earth was not easy, businesses failed, banks went bust. Tramps roamed the coun tryside—stealing, burning. The men drank. The women relied on patent medicines and madness. Diphtheria and other epidemic diseases, as Lesy says, “inverted a natural order—that is, they killed the youngest before the oldest; they killed the ones who were to be protected before their rightful protectors; they killed the progeny before the forebearers; they killed the children before their parents.”

There were open fires, faulty chim neys, careless cooks, lamps, candles, kerosene, log and board buildings, brush, scrub, barns full of grain, hay in stables, wood in sheds, each easy to set afire and difficult, once burn ing, to put out. For it was often a long way to water, and then it lay in wells; there were few brigades; and there were hungry men roaming the woods, so calloused their bodies were clubs, women and even children who had nothing more in their hearts but malice and nothing to live for but revenge, so that although fires were set for profit, by accident, or to cauterize a house infected with disease, arsonists were always feared, invariably suspected, inevitably blamed.

The weather didn't help, but Lesy has no clippings about high winds, heavy snows, deep freezes: the long oppressive winters in which cold filled the space you were supposed to be so free in and drove you, as the dark did, under the blankets early. In his best paragraph, he writes: “In winter, the only men left in town were either so young they were in school or so old they were in bed, or so spineless they sold things to ladies. Everyone else was off in the pineries.” Surely there were tales of thaw and freeze, but Lesy says: “I concentrated only on the stories and accounts that con cerned the psychology or personality of events.”

Perhaps for that reason we learn nothing of how the animals died, ex cept for the man who gave “a col ored boy $1.00 to shear a big New foundland dog and anoint him with kerosene oil,” a fuel they later set alight (although there are photos of a shy‐cocked horse with a mane like Goldilocks); there is nothing a poli tician said; while perhaps for other reasons there are no reports of wed dings, christenings, sewing bees and circles, the length of the year's long est pike, or what might be called amusing anecdotes of human inter est: what the band played in the park on the 4th of July, or how many fell sick eating chicken salad at the Norwegians’ picnic.

Still, there is the tantalizing his tory of Mary Sweeny, the compul sive window breaker, another, equal ly compulsive, who was a woman hugger, some misers, a few charges of rape and incest, a little lesbian by‐play, an ossified man, a charming bit about a woman who expelled frog from her stomach, the Negro barber who had given himself over to startling opinions, and several stories of misfortune falling so thick ly on a single sad head you had to affront Job by laughing. Things reach us in this work which normally never do, yet, in general, the world which can't be quoted in the weeklies can't reach history. The rest we must infer.

People became “shack‐wacky.” No wonder. At any rate they went insane with a frequency which would be significant if one knew what was meant by it. There were hearings; a judge determined the matter; and you were sentenced to asylums as people were to prison. The in habitants believed in madness as they believed in arson. As we once believed in Communist conspiracies. They were crazed. They knew it certainly, the way doctors knew diphtheria, and what Lesy gives us is a record of their convenient, resolute, excited diagnoses. The photo graphs encourage us to see it .. to pass through those en larged eyes into the desolate outdoors.

The lovely countryside was filled with suicides. They hung themselves from trees, of course, and exploded their brains from their heads with guns. They threw themselves in front of trains, cut their own throats, used morphine. They ate the heads off matches, swallowed cigar stubs, carbolic acid, arsenic, paris green. They drowned themselves in rain barrels, rivers, ponds, wells (as, in pique, a child did). They hammered in their own heads, set fire to themselves as they had torched that dog, and with dynamite blew apart their pain ful being. Occasionally they murdered others first. Or ran away into the woods. They be came hermits. They froze to death. They starved. But the plague of man was as relentless that of nature.

They died, in addition, by ac cident. We all do. Through inadvertence. By mistake.

Unfortunately Lesy's snippet method encourages the sense, combined with a dose of nos talgia and a dash of quaint, that you are reading an an thology of weird tales culled from from the Readers’ D, the kind of lives you find in small print at the bottom of pages; but eventually this feeling dis appears, awe overcomes every scruple, and you really try to penetrate these pictures to the pianos pictured, the dresser scarves, the curtains, doilies, and the lamps... the large eyes like dials... the funeral wreaths, the hats....

But it is poetry all the same —a construction—for couldn't we put together our own death trip out of any batch of local papers? There would be a different ratio of deaths due to X rather than to Y, to be sure (a difference which is vital), but the total picture might be equally grim or, with the right shears, made to seem so, any where. Perhaps human misery can neither be created nor de stroyed, merely transformed, distributed, endured. In any case, there can be no question that this original work makes us deeply feel One form that misery has taken; and in caus ing us to feel as well as con sider, “Wisconsin Death Trip” has enlarged on the uses of history.

Author's Query

For an authorized biography of novelist Rex Stout, I would appreciate receiving reminis cences, clippings, letters, bib liographical data, memorabilia or suggestions of any sort.

JoHN J. MCALEER 121 Follen Rd. Lexington, Mass. 02173.

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Wisconsin Death Trip (1999)

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Wisconsin Death Trip

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First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small, turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected photos taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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Incorrect order, saw this book once and searched for it for years, a very one-sided--and thus limited--review, my favorite book, mesmerizing, vivid truth of agrarian white american history, taking a look at an era not unlike our own, popular categories.

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