Wisconsin Death Trip

by Michael Lesy

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. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Lesy teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College. He is the author of numerous books, including Dreamland, Rescues, and The Forbidden Zone. ACCLAIM "Protestants behaving strangely in the 1890s . . . an outbreak of craziness—multiple murders, suicides, ghost sightings, epidemics, guntoting teenagers, schoolmarms hooked on cocaine and general mental illness (well, an insane asylum was nearby)—all in a little town called Black River Falls, populated mostly by German and Scandinavian immigrants." -- New York Times "In Van Schaick's time, ordinary people did not have cameras, difficult contraptions that involved black powder and heavy glass plates; to record the passages of a life--births, marriages, store openings, funerals--so they turned to a professional. Lesy noticed Van Schaicks's many pictures of dead infants and children, dressed in their christening gowns, now placed in tiny coffins. As he looked for the story behind these photos, he found a story of of murder, suicide, farm and business failures, madness, addiction, tramp armies, and the ruin of childhood and the desolation of families by epidemics of diptheria, typhoid, smallpox, and flu. Lesy made a montage, using items from the local paper, contemporaneous regional fiction and poetry, asylum records and the photographs left by Van Schaick, who in Lesy's pages emerges as Arbus's unknown ancestor" -- New York Times "Lesy's reading of rural decay is history with a wrench, unfolding a scenario worthy of Dreiser, Faulkner, or Joyce Carol Oates at their grimmest." -- Newsweek "Compelling both as history and as literature, it is a small masterpiece of the historian's art." -- Chicago Daily News "[This] is an impressive example of the poetry of history. . . . There can be no question that this original work makes us deeply feel one form that misery has taken; and in causing us to feel, as well as consider, Wisconsin Death Trip has enlarged on the uses of history." -- New York Times Book Review

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Photography, True Crime, Art, Horror, Death

381 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Michael Lesy’s books include Angel’s World and Long Time Coming. In 2006 he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellowship recipients, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College; he lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a story inspired by photographs, I realized I had never added this strange and wonderful book to my list. Essentially nothing more than a series of photos and newspaper accounts from the late 19th century, the book depicts a troubled slice of history as it recounts daily life in Black River Falls, Wisconsin and its surrounding areas. The newspaper excerpts tell woeful tales of suicide, murder/suicides, madness and sadness. If anything good ever happened to these people, it never made the pages of The Badger State Banner.

The photographs in this book are what really draw you in, and they leave a lasting impression. Taken over a period of 20 years by photographer Charles Van Schaick, they are a unique chronicle of an American town. Ladies in their Sunday-best sit astride horses, miserable looking families pose in front of their tiny homes, while another man mows the lawn of a gorgeous mansion.



A group of men in black face is shown next to a photo of barbers and their customers. My absolute favorite is a happy looking, hatted lady, holding a snake in each hand, with a third draped around her neck.




Most disturbing are the many photos of dead children in their coffins.



Perhaps the most poignant is the photograph of a living baby posed with the photos of two dead siblings - a grieving mother's only way to get a family portrait.

It's difficult to look at the pictures here, and not wonder about the lives of the subjects depicted. In fact, this book has inspired at least two novels - A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick, and the brilliant, though deeply disturbing, A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan.

Originally published in 1973, this book is still in print and readily available.

[lola · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no better evidence than this book that the concept of a "simpler, happier time" is a straight-up teleological mendacity concocted by some archetypal mom to make us all feel guilty for ipods and Lady Gaga. It's the late 19th century in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and everyone is offing themselves in the most esoteric ways possible, shit is constantly on fire, and roving bands of tramps are basically running everything.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

The time traveller stepped cautiously out of his machine and looked around the wide field. The day was bright, the country fecund. He permitted himself a smile. An elderly man was walking purposefully ahead of him. “Good day to you!” called the time traveller. “Not now, not now,” came the reply, “I have just this moment taken the life of my wife, her sister and three of her cousins, who were visiting. I am in a hurry now to take my own. I intend to swing shortly from yonder elm.” The time traveller reeled back in alarm. What was this? He cast his eyes about and noticed for the first time various dark forms dangling from the larger branches of the nearby trees. But then his eyes were taken up by an altogether gayer sight – it was a cheerful bonfire in the mid-distance. As he approached he noticed various persons frantically throwing water from buckets onto the flames and he realised it was a domestic house ablaze.
“Come help us please!” said one, approaching. “Ralph Chase and his intire family are still within – a local boy known as an incendiary has done this for sure –“ and he handed the time traveller a bucket but suddenly sagged to the ground and began convulsing. A woman ran up and dragged the time traveller away from the moribund : “Keep clear, keep clear – he has the typhoid for sure!” The time traveller turned to her and in terrified tones demanded of her

“What God Forsaken place is this?”

“Why sir,” she said, “this is Black Ferry, Wisconsin, 1896.”

*********

This book is :

an affront to good taste
a stone thrown into a pond
a diatribe
an indictment of human beings in general
a patchwork quilt of blood and death
an exercise in a particularly unpleasant form of voyeurism
an original and extraordinary history essay
a ripe example of the hipster’s fascination for the outre for its own sake
a vision of Hell


*******

What you get is :

a) snippets from a couple of local newspapers from this small area of Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900. All the snippets are about suicide, murder, insanity and disease. Check the name of this book – that’s right. It’s not called “A Pleasant day Out in Wisconsin”.

b) interpolated quotations from a couple of novels

c) snippets from case studies of inmates at the Mendoza Asylum for the Insane.

d) some bizarre photos by a local Wisconsin photographer, all posed, many featuring mannish women and men with frankly absurd tastes in facial hair – e.g. you shave all your face EXCEPT under your chin and your throat, so where your chin ends there’s a big hair explosion – hmm, attractive! Note to self – must try this.
Oh yes, several photos of babies in coffins.

e) pompous essays by the author/compiler and his professor pal Warren Susman (if my old professor had written a piece this patronising for my first book I’d have photoshopped his face onto some S&M porn and posted it on the university bulletin board).
The final essay by Michael Lesy might actually be pretty good but you know what? By the time I got to it I’d had enough.

******


Random example 1:

“A wild man is terrorising the people north of Grantsburg. He appears to be 35 years of age, has long black whiskers, is barefooted, has scarcely any clothes on him, and he carries a hatchet. He appeared at several farm houses and asked for something to eat. He eats ravenously, and when asked where he came from, points to the east. he secretes himself in the woods during the day and has the most bloodcurdling yells that have ever been heard in the neighbourhood.”

Random example 2:

“Henry Ehlers, a Milwaukee butcher, died from nosebleed. His nose had been bleeding for 9 days… He was 37 years of age and had been a great meat eater.”

Random example 3:

“The family of Henry Miller of Cedarburg is sorely afflicted. A 6 month old child died of diphtheria a week ago and now a 7 year old boy is dead. A few weeks previous, 2 children had died, all of the same disease. One child survives out of a family of 5 children and that too is down with the disease.”


*********

There's a great American traditional song called Railroad Boy which in retrospect encapsulates the casual brutality of many of these jarring anecdotes of damage - I would have given the link for the great performance by Dylan and Joan Baez taken from Renaldo & Clara, but Youtube deleted that, so here's just the words :

She went upstairs to make her bed
And not one word to her mother said.
Her mother she went upstairs too
Saying, "Daughter, oh daughter, what's troublin' you?":

"Oh mother, oh mother, I cannot tell
That railroad boy that I love so well.
He courted me my life away
And now at home will no longer stay."

"There is a place in yonder town
Where my love goes and he sits him down.
And he takes that strange girl on his knee
And he tells to her what he won't tell me."

Her father he came home from work
Sayin', "Where is my daughter, she seems so hurt"
He went upstairs to give her hope
An' he found her hangin' by a rope.

He took his knife and he cut her down
And on her bosom these words he found:

"Go dig my grave both wide and deep,
Put a marble stone at my head and feet,
And on my breast, put a snow white dove
To warn the world that I died of love

*****

Although in Wisconsin in the 1890s they were dying of a whole lot more things than mere love.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trust me, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP is one of the weirdest, wackiest, and most horrifying stories you are ever likely to read, and no one has ever been able to explain the mystery at its core to this day. Also odd is that Hollywood has never made a feature out of this all-American terror tale. At the end of the nineteenth century for about a year in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin (I needed a magnifying glass to find it) both the murder and suicide count went through the stratosphere. Even more bizarre is that there was no pattern to the killings: strangers killed strangers, or sometimes themselves, family members killed other family members, and/or at times complete strangers, along with multiple suicides in one family, and newcomers to Black River Falls were as likely to die by foul play as immigrants. Coincidence? Mass hysteria? Strangers in town? What little narration there is comes from experts on Midwestern pioneer life. Michael Lesy tells this sordid drama through photographs of the dead and death notices in the local paper. This is not a detective story. The reader must think for herself and himself. Lesy wants to shatter the illusion of the peaceful settler community that is at the heart of the American dream. Was he vicariously commenting on the violence of late Sixties America when he published this book in 1973? Perhaps. WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP is still assigned in American history, psychology, and criminology courses at university. A small, chilling masterpiece is this documentary.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ran across this book when I was about 15 and it seared my teenage brain like hell. Definitely had a visceral impact on my whole neural pathway development and all. Looking back on it now, I think I'd have to relegate it to the dustbin, at least as far as it tries to be a "history". As an "artwork", it sticks.

Michael Lesy wrote his morbid Death Trip as a 20-something grad student at the University of Wisconsin, after he discovered Charles Van Schaick's glass-plate negatives in a reading room. Lesy actually said that Death Trip was written as a subjective surrealist photo montage of text and image, not genuine history. (Van Schaick's work simply provided the gloomy visuals to unrelated news clippings). Unfortunately, most people who pick up the book will read it as history. It's actually an experimental art piece, an artifact of the LSD generation that produced it and of surrealist theory. Death Trip strikes me as being more about Lesy's private dark fascination with death, crime, and disappearing things than it is about "Wisconsin". Given that caveat, it's incredibly interesting as a personal existential statement, a "soup bowl" to be "combined and sucked on and enjoyed," as Lesy wrote. But it's not good history. Lesy is a killer literary journalist and experimental artist, but Death Trip shouldn't be taken at face-value as local history.

Van Schaick (a small-town photographer who flourished around the turn of the century but who died as recently as 1942) wasn't out to document angst or mass hysteria. Lesy uses Van Schaick's photos to make a personal statement. I've looked at most of Van Schaick's thousands of photos (all of them are now digitized on the Wisconsin Historical Society's website). Lesy pilfered the weiredest of Van Schaick's photos to use as a kind of theatrical backdrop in this book about people going crazy in small North Woods towns during an economic crisis. Shit burns down, people kill their families, teenagers get lonely and lovelorn. Honestly, that sounds like a pretty good description of America in 2014, or human beings at any stage: why Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in the 1890s?

Actually, the majority of Van Schaick's overall body of photos is a really interesting documentation of the destruction of the North Woods and of the Winnebago Indians. (Probably close to half his photos are remarkably honest studio portraits of Native Americans, whom he had an immense respect for and whom he portrayed as real people, not as fantasized Noble Savages like Edward Curtis did. And unlike Van Schaick's predictable studio portraits of his white neighbors, his photos of Native Americans just jump out of the frame.) Van Schaick was definitely not out to document a "creepy" little town and the human weirdness there, and I think the use of his photographs in a book alleging mass insanity is a pretty flawed idea. Van Schaick was a realist in the vein of Carl Sandburg, who saw the reality of small-town life like the great Midwestern poet did, the people as "hero and hoodlum, phantom and gorilla", but to call his work "macabre" as some do or to say that he depicted characters in an insane asylum is really stretching it. His career was as interesting and remarkable as the much-lauded Mike Disfarmer of Heber Springs, Arkansas. Unfortunately, because he's been hitched to Michael Lesy since Death Trip came out in 1973, it's been hard to see Van Schaick through a less surreal lens.

Lesy later wrote about his first encounter with the images that he used in Wisconsin Death Trip that "What I’d done was to discover a massive amount of pain, suffering, and death in the middle of America. In fact, what I’d described was a holocaust without Jews..." A better book might have used Van Schaick's work to look at the dark memory of environmental destruction going on all around the Midwest, and really all of North America, at a time when everything old about the place except the rocks was being changed or outright obliterated. (The time period covered in this book was truly a Holocaust of nature.) Moreover, a frightening book about the human experience doesn't have to be historical, or as subjective and experimental as Wisconsin Death Trip. It could be as contemporary as last week's CNN coverage. But imagine piecing together a history of New York in the '50s from Diane Arbus' freak show, or the history of America in 2014 from the most dismal news reportage, and tie it together with some strange photographs, and you have Lesy's book here: a scream of a statement pieced together from detached journalese, but not very accurate "history."

Gotta say, Lesy does leave a deep impression. I won't deny that he writes strange and wonderful books. (Get his later non-photo book, The Forbidden Zone, a journalistic foray into the "death industry", from the Omaha stockyards to an Asheville pathology unit and a Florida crime beat.) But that's really all this is, impressionism. Where Wisconsin Death Trip really triumphs is in giving the definitive jackhammer treatment to dreamy-eyed fantasies about a Ken Burns America where everything is in golden technicolor and evening light. The Wisconsin of the 1890s was dark in the same way the times we live in are barren and depressing. Strip away fashion and hair-dos and it's not hard to look around and see the sadness in the faces of Charles Van Schaick's sitters gradually becoming ours.

In some ways, I'm glad Lesy did what he did -- it was bold and beats dry American Studies Department political correctness any day. (As a cult classic, the book has been influential enough to spawn a hard-rock band, an opera, and a "fiction documentary" by filmmaker James Marsh with soundtrack by Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor.) Look at it context and Death Trip is still a powerful ride on a loose powerline, but the book is a creature of its own and has to be read that way.

[Z.]

"It was found that Christian had been killed, his body cut in small pieces, part of the remains burned, part placed in a sack and thrown in a creek, and others packed in a valise and carried away by the murderer . . . . In his confession . . . Kuhni says that he killed Christian because he ridiculed his religion and laughed at him for reading the Bible."

Less a "book" per se than a sort of morbid art project combining real-life photographs (mostly studio portraits, but also horses, corpses, street scenes, etc., some of them manipulated), newspaper clippings (almost exclusively pertaining to suicide, murder, disease, madness, and arson), asylum records, and other texts from a seemingly arbitrary region of Wisconsin in the 1890s and 1900s. First published in 1973, the general idea seems to be to capture a snapshot of what Greil Marcus famously termed "the old, weird America": the unsettling, grotesque, de-idealized version of the nation's past which had, for instance, been evoked sonically two decades before in Harry Smith's influential Anthology of American Folk Music. If you're wild for the books of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy or the songs of Tom Waits and Nick Cave, you are the ideal audience for Wisconsin Death Trip.

If, like me, you have a slightly more complicated relationship to those figures and their art, your feelings on WDT will likely be more ambivalent too. I'm always attracted to this sort of Gothic Americana in theory (I think the Gothic can be a very productive lens through which to view American history), but in execution I often find it feels disingenuous at best, and at worst leering and fetishitic: an aestheticized projection onto the past rather than a serious attempt to understand or inhabit it. All the more so with something like Lesy's book, which uses real photos, real names, real moments of sorrow and heartbreak from real lives (accounts of diphtheria epidemics that killed off entire families' worth of children, photos of infants dead in their coffins) stripped of context and tossed together in service of… what? A spooky, semi-ironic collage to be flipped through by disaffected weirdos like me?

Lesy claims in his rather high-minded introduction to be exploring a historical question. He thinks that something has shifted in the American psyche between the period depicted in these accounts and the period in which he is compiling them, something that has rendered these people and events virtually incomprehensible to the modern viewer:

"What was strange was that in the seventy years between then and now, in the time it takes a healthy man to live, learn a few lessons, grow old, and die—in that short time, in one lifetime, all of [these photos and newspapers] were changed from the most ordinary records of the most ordinary events into arcane remnants, obscure relics, antique mementos. What dark thing had changed the ordinary doings of ordinary citizens into messages received by radio telescope from a nebula judged to have exploded a million years ago? How did it happen? Why did it happen?"

Nor does he accept the explanations of contemporary historians, who might cite, for instance, the social upheaval of the industrial revolution, mass urbanization, economic depression, the closing of the American frontier, the modernizing advances of 20th-century technology, or the approaching socio-political dividing line of World War I—such causes aren't esoteric enough for Lesy, I guess. But personally I'm not convinced these entries read like "messages received by radio telescope" at all. If you clipped a decades' worth of only the most bloody and shocking headlines from any regional newspaper today and showed it to someone from 70 years in the future, they'd have a vision of early 21st-century life far more macabre than anything these small-time farm folk were getting up to. Hell, within minutes of waking up yesterday morning I'd already skimmed an L.A. Times story straight out of one of the nastier parts of Wise Blood , and that was barely front-page news.

I don't deny that there's a certain... old-time flavor to the particular brand of violence and unease on display in WDT (a pervasive fixation on religion, hysteria about the ever-present threat of arson, fear of roving "tramps" and the killing of prized farm animals) but most of the underlying social currents (unemployment, xenophobia, addiction, untreated mental illness, unstable family units, unchecked capitalism, disregard for the natural environment, poor understanding of epidemiology) are still defining national characteristics today, well over a century later. A few of the reviewers on here mention that the book is a good corrective to rose-tinted fantasies of some noble American past, and that's probably the most convincing justification for the thing's existence beyond providing a bit of grim fun for the nerdier sort of goth; but let's face it, it's not like anyone who wants to make America great again is going to seek this out in the first place.

Before I come off as a too much of a hypocrite, though, I should remind that it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into. I have a sense of morbid curiosity at least as active as the next person's, even if I usually regret indulging it, and I dove into WDT gleefully enough. (Some people do true crime, I read scandalous newspaper clippings from 1891—we all have our vices.) But the feeling didn't last long. If you approach this with any empathy at all, it becomes apparent quickly enough that even with their antique poses and quaint hangups these aren't the cartoonish grotesques of a Flannery O'Connor story; just human beings, with all the baggage that condition has always entailed. And that can only make the reader of this sort of thing a kind of voyeur at best, at worst a tourist of human suffering.


Studio portrait of Mrs. William W. "Fannie" Hendricks in formal dress, including a fur scarf and feather hat, in front of a painted backdrop. (ca. 1893)

Occasionally, after a succession of puckered-up WASPish faces, Lesy will interpose a studio photograph of a Black or Native person from the same period. It's possible he thought these would add to the general impression of "foreignness" he strove to create—I really couldn't say. But looking into these faces, trying to read the emotion in their eyes, guessing what their lives in this place with these neighbors must have been like (and you have to guess, because Lesy rarely supplies these stories himself), recalling the framework of genocidal settler colonialism and racial capitalism which underpins everything else depicted her... well, suddenly my interest in the whole enterprise dried up. Whatever sacred cows are being struck down here, they're only being replaced with new myths, no less selective or incomplete. Or white.

I was a little less than halfway through the book when I had to return it to the library. I wasn't disappointed; I'd seen more than enough.

[Karin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book after reading that it served as the inspiration for "A Reliable Wife," but it was just a bit too strange for me. As a history buff, I appreciated the photographic portraits and newspaper stories demonstrating the dark side of rural, turn-of-the-century Wisconsin. But it felt as if the author was trying too hard to present the book as an experimental, sociological art project, which sometimes worked well, but sometimes bordered on the ridiculous.

[Nikki in Niagara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reason for Reading: In the book A Reliable Wife by Roderick Goodwin, the author mentions in a note that this book gave him the idea for the atmosphere to set his own book in. His characters read from the newspaper regularly and his description of this book made want to read it. So I put an ILL request in for it right away.

Comments: This is a very unusual book. It is a collection of both photographs and newspaper clippings from the period of 1895 to 1900 from a newspaper called the Badger State Banner which covered local Jackson County news as well as having access to state wide news. During this period, the author contends that a certain presence of death, and tragedy loomed over the agricultural towns of the American Midwest. What became a mundane part of their everyday lives as reported in the newspapers, now, to us looking back, seems to be a macabre era of history.

The newspaper articles which run from one-liners to several paragraphs report on suicides, diphtheria deaths, baby deaths, insane declarations, window smashers, arsonists, found dead bodies, deaths, funerals, charges of obscene letters sent through the mail and much more plus repeated instances of the same over and over with each one different and many the same. Suicides are rampant, men shooting themselves in the head, hanging themselves in the barn and one guy blew his head off with dynamite. Women poisoned themselves with the plenty of rodent killers found on the farm, drowned themselves in barrels and rivers or set themselves on fire, one lady in a bath of kerosene. The asylum must have been filled to the rafters with all the reports of committed people. How many times I read of women with 8 to 13 children being committed as insane with symptoms of despondency and men who lost their jobs and wouldn't do anything were declared insane. Of course then there were also the usual religious insanity, the tobacco insanity, the "thinks the neighbours are after him" insanity, too. All this and the other topics make for absolutely fascinating reading of a time when life must have been a hard road to travel.

Then along with the text between each year, are sections of photographs which were taken by a local studio photographer, Charley Van Schaick. It was the finding of the glass negative slides that prompted the compilation of this book. None of the photos are snapshots, they are all photos taken because someone wanted them taken. They are very striking and range from the morbid dead babies in coffins and old women who are scary to look at to studio shots of people but whose eyes are strangely lifeless and there are even some photos of picnics and local businesses. The way they have been arranged though is not just a sequence of photos but is an artistic presentation. I almost felt as if I were watching a silent movie at times.

The combination of the text and the photos together presents an unusual artistic viewing of social history in a manner not likely to be seen again. I think this is only something to come about from the mindset of the seventies. Both the preface and the authors ending thesis (this was originally presented as his thesis at Rutgers) suffer from a lot of seventies psycho-babble but the history presented is unblemished and fascinating ... and macabre. This is the type of book that would be a pleasure to own and dip into or just to come back to over and over for the pictures alone. While not for everyone I highly recommended it for those who, like me, enjoy this sort of thing.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A testament to the sheer weirdness of history, or, rather, the strangeness of the everyday that gets smoothed away & forgotten in our tellings—and thus our understanding—of the past.

Lesy's project is astonishingly simple: he simply collects together brief little snippets of the historical record from Jackson county, Wisconsin, between 1885 -1900 & presents them as found (the majority are newspaper notices & photographs but also some longer excerpts from works by Glenway Wescott, Sinclair Lewis, & Hamlin Garland). What quickly emerges is a nightmarish hellscape out of the mind of Poe or the Southern gothic tradition: a relentless accounting of grisly suicides, murder, infanticide, mental breakdowns, disease, death, arson, crime of all types. The very American vision of an idyllic rural past (that, implicitly, we should aspire to return to) quickly fissures, then shatters altogether.

Of course this is itself a skewed, extremely limited perspective on the situation; it's not good historiography in a traditional sense of the term (for which it has been severely critiqued since its first publication). But at the same time, it also reveals what "good" historical accounting also misses or leaves behind, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes less so. And on those terms it's a breathtaking achievement.

I merely skimmed the attached theoretical texts—this originated as Lesy's MA thesis at the University of Wisconsin—mostly because the project itself functions as a theoretic text in the best, most generative sense of the term: it's a medium which forces the reader to think both through & alongside. I'm only just starting to untangle its implications in my own thinking & research.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lesy’s painstaking research through the archives of a rural Wisconsin town between 1890 and 1910 is presented in such a fashion that it becomes a hymn to a forgotten world, a bleak picture of a tough life with harsh working conditions, one in which death is an ever-present, and yet the resilience of the community shines through, and it is not without humour.

Fifty years after its publication it stands only stronger as something of a cult classic, presenting the dark side of the American dream, ludicrously absurd, and yet haunting and unsettling.

When taking a break from his Masters in social history at the University of Wisconsin Lesy stumbled accidentally on a collection of photographs of grim faces. They had such an affect on him that he scoured through newspaper archives of The Badger State Banner from the 1890s, sifting and picking out any bizarre reports that complemented the dark vision he had seen reflected in those faces.

He unearthed a treasure chest of stories of everyday life; of insanity, suicide, disease and crime, of colour bars and prototypes of perpetual motion machines, which he formed into a history book like no other.

In 1893, as economic depression took a grip, the people of Wisconsin felt hardship like never before. But Lesy’s account defies convention, so that the reader can only wonder as to the nature of the hardship that pushed some to such grisly extremes; isolated and macabre tales, or an authentic overview of a society with more than its share of crazies.

Either way, it’s a gripping read, as well as a memorable history lesson.

Here’s some snippets..

"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]

and, from the narrative running throughout the piece..

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."

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read and loved "A Reliable Wife." The author, Robert Goolrick, claimed this book was his inspiration. Wierd, wierd, wierd

Disease. Mental illness. Corruption. Deceit. Murder. Crime. Psychosis. Love affairs. Suicide. Death. Lots of death. This is a bizarre book, a collection of newspaper articles and historical photographs from Black River Falls, Wisconsin from the 1890's to 1910's. This book paints a bleak picture of harsh working conditions, unsavory social connections, and a genuine hardship amongst the community. A reviewer from Library Journal summed it up succinctly, "[the:] whole package seems to confirm that the good old days were actually awful."

[Carla Remy · Rating 3 out of 5]

From 1973
This is not exactly a book for reading, it's an amazing list of various happenings around I think it said Jackson County, Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900. And photographs, many of dead people, like the one shown on the cover here...........Apparently it was common to photograph your relatives as corpses. Don't you want a snapshot of your dead baby?........ There were a lot of deaths of diphtheria. Drowning was a common form of suicide. Arsonists are called Incendiaries.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

great book for overly moody man-children who think a passing interest in "death" makes them deep.

[Susan Lundy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This out-of-print book is so good that it was my only Christmas/Anniversary request a couple of years back. I read it when it first came out in the 1970's and have never forgotten the structure and premise: glass negatives were found all dating from the late 1800's in Wisconsin. Some were death pictures (especially the children, as pictures were rarely taken then). Others were just portraits of everyday citizens. Side-by-side to these pictures were excerpts from Wisconsin papers; that society's definition of obituaries. What was most moving and thought-provoking was the fact that the custom was to be brutally blunt: "Eva Sounder threw herself down a well, distraught at the loss of the Sounder farm". (I made that up, but I do remember there was a description of suicide-by-well-jumping in the book.) The essay at the beginning describes how the Wisconsin farmers could not understand the worldwide depression. Why, if their crops had produced a certain dollar amount the year before, did something going on in Europe suddenly made their crop worth so little this year? The pictures, the author's essay, and the news clippings came together to make a book worth reading, thinking about, and remembering for forty years.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not like any other book.... don't read it so much as dip into it and marvel at how tough life was back in the Wisconsin of the 1890's. Snippets of newspaper articles touching on deadly epidemics, bank failures, suicides, arson and doctors' notes from the Mendota State "Insane Asylum".
Here is one such snippet: (Mary Sweeney appears often - in different towns - throughout the state, breaking windows.) Governor Schofield willl take steps to provide, if necessary, for the care of Mary Sweeny who has cause so much trouble.... by smashing plate glass windows. This woman... once taught school in Marquette, Michigan and Stevens Point in this state... Mary says she doesn't know why she breaks windows and only does it when the craze seizes her. She uses cocaine liberally on such occasions, saying it quiets her nerves."

[Chris Wallbruch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was wild. It consists of newspaper clippings featuring the strange, macabre, morbid, and odd events in Wisconsin during the turn of the century. Black and white photos accompany the text, creating an interesting and off putting environment.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Firstly I would like to thank this book for not putting some kind of weird hex on me when I brought it along as a gift on an actual trip to Wisconsin!

I debated this rating a little bit, so firstly we need to get through a disclaimer: these five stars are not for Michael Lesy, they are for Wisconsin. Before I bought and read this, I saw some Goodreads reviews that advised skipping all the sections that he wrote and just reading the primary source material, which I thought was harsh. But it's not. Do that, because Michael Lesy's contributions are weird. They are almost as weird a period snapshot of 1970s academia as the contents of the book are for 1890s frontier life.

This book is a collection (selected, arranged, and introduced/concluded by the author for his PhD thesis) of newspaper snippets and photographs from Black River Falls, WI during the years 1885-1900. It kind of reads as a "top stories" scrapbook of the decade in the state, in short 50-word bits. I love reading old newspaper stories, and I love learning the striking details of the way that individual people did and did not deal with things in history. There is an everyday dark side of reading history. So, I really loved this.

However: it's not kidding. A huge majority of these clippings are about people's death, and/or their being declared insane. It's so morbid it often loops back around into near-funny, the kind of laughter you use to protect yourself from how awful things can be, and have been. This was not a good 15-year period in the area it covers. There was a terrible rural economic depression (1873, 1893), leading to lots of impoverished farmers and workers, lots of starvation, lots of diphtheria (families could lose 6 children in a day), lots of arson, lots of insanity, and lots, lots, LOTS and LOTS of suicide. So, what you are reading is the story of so many people's lives, in the tiniest snapshots available.

My favorite themes that emerged: People going insane "deranged on the subject of religion," or sometimes "finances." Men going mad trying to "solve the mystery of perpetual motion." Several women with a penchant for "sending obscene matters through the mail." And of course Mary Sweeny, who traveled relentlessly around the midwest and smashed every pane of glass she could get to until she was arrested — then she'd sit in prison a little while, return home, and then go out and do it again somewhere else. She was arrested this way over 100 times, and I am sort of enchanted with her. (Unsurprisingly, this book connects directly to the part of my heart that loves Rennie Sparks, who wrote a song about her.)

There is a smaller portion of the content of this book that isn't as successful, and unfortunately they are all the places where you sense the author's hand. There is a good bit of paraphrased rural legend (as it were), credited only to "Town gossip" or "Local history" and clearly not excerpted from any source. There are also, weirdly, some excerpts from later literature, like Spoon River Anthology , the Sinclair Lewis novel Main Street , and a book by Glenway Wescott called The Grandmothers . These were used as attempts to insert first-person accounts, or maybe as a way to make it seem more PhD-friendly, but they didn't belong here. (I might want to read those novels myself, though.) Also, I really did find the Introduction and Conclusion truly nigh unreadable. Lesy loves a metaphor to the point of obfuscating whatever he is trying to say, and I could do without ever reading anyone's pseudo-Freudianism about the anal stage ever again, though I won't be so lucky.

As a book to read straight through it's very strange, and so overwhelming it's not entirely useful. It is brilliant, though, as a collection, and as something that I could imagine using when you need… something (is inspiration the right word?) — opening it up to a random page, reading for ten minutes, then putting it back. I gave this book away as a gift, but I intend to buy another someday, for this.

I transcribed several of the pieces that most swayed me, and I'll include them here in a spoiler tag (for space rather than spoilers), for my own reference and for anybody who is curious.

La Crosse was somewhat agitated last week by an alleged ghost, manifesting itself by the usual symptoms.

Mrs. Hiram McDonald of Eau Claire, rendered insane by religious excitement, attacked her children recently and wrecked the furniture and windows in her house.

Mrs. John Leiniger … was recently … charged with poisoning her husband. Leiniger found her in the poorhouse from which he took her to be his bride.

Etta Walker, the girl who disappeared the other day from Boscobel on the eve of her marriage, was found at 2 o'clock the next morning but could give no account of herself … being in a completely dazed condition. Fred Stahel, who was to have married her, would not fulfill his engagement.

Marie Sweeny, who ran away from her husband at St. Paul and has been creating trouble at Ashland with her wild mania for breaking windows, has finally been captured. Reports from St. Paul say that she was a model wife and mother, but some injury to her brain entirely changed her character. She ran away from home 2 years ago, and since then … has been in more than 100 different jails, serving short sentences for indulging in her wild sport.

Maria Sweeny [alias Mary Ricks], the window smasher … reached Eau Claire from St. Paul [and] sat up all night in the waiting room of one of the depots. In the morning she demanded a ticket to Hayward from the Chief of Police. He refused but offered to send her to Chippewa Falls. She gave the chief til 3 o'clock in the afternoon to accede to her demand then moved on the depot windows. Before she could break any glass, she was arrested.

The society people of Kenosha are worked up over the discovery that a person known as 'Mrs. Howe' is not a woman but a man. He went there some time ago to get up a 'Kirmess' for a church, and several ladies joined in the performance. The peculiarity of her manners was commented on at the time, but none suspected the real truth. Now there is regret on the part of the participants that they joined 'Mrs. Howe's troupe of dancers.'

A woman who gave her name as Wilson died at Chippewa Falls from a criminal operation performed upon herself. … The woman was young and pretty and visited every physician in Chippewa Falls to accomplish her object, but without success. (Headlined as "Fatal abortion")

There is an army of about 50 tramps making Racine their headquarters … The other evening, the vagabonds took possession of Racine Junction and ran things to suit themselves. A number of them entered farmer Sheldon's barn and proceeded to behead 18 chickens. Others … entered stores and carted off meat wholesale … The tramps took to the woods and had a feast.

While Mrs. John Manning was picking berries a short distance from Arcadia, she came face to face with a large she-wolf with a number of whelps. The woman was terribly frightened, her screams attracting the attention of some workmen nearby who carried her home. She is in critical condition and it is feared she will lose her reason.

At Sheboygan, a mysterious woman dressed in black and wearing a heavy dark veil enticed from school George Alfred Preston and Hattie May Preston, aged respectively 11 and 9 years, children of George Preston. The children were hurried away in a closed carriage which started in a northerly direction, supposedly for Plymouth where a train could be taken.

Lyda Berger, a 15 year old girl is in jail having confessed to the crime of arson. Several days ago she left her home on a farm north of Milwaukee and went to town to go to … the carnival … She was out late that night and the next day her father whipped her for staying away without his permission. She sought revenge by setting fire to the little cottage in which they lived. It was burned to the ground. A neighbor gave the family shelter and the next day the girl set fire to the house of their benefactor. Her mother ordered her to harness a team of horses which was temporarily quartered in a barn belonging to the Wisconsin Lake Ice Company. The girl went to the loft and set fire to the barn, which, with 64 tons of hay, was burned to the ground. The girl says she set fire to the places simply to have revenge on her father for whipping her.

At Cameron a child was born in a family named Dunn. The father, in celebration of the event, is reported to have become intoxicated, and returning home seized the babe and dashed out its brains. He was on the point of strangling his wife when neighbors intervened.

George Kanuck, a laborer, is alleged to have sold his 7 year old boy to Italian peddlers who have been working at Manitowoc. The sale is said to have taken place at Kanuck's house during a drunken orgy in which all participated. The Italians, 2 women and a man, left town next day with the boy.

Ferdinand Thieman, 10 years old, jumped into a cistern and drowned himself because his sister wanted him to go on an errand. The mother conducts a home for aged Germans at Wauwatosa, and was away at the time.

The police at Kenosha are of the opinion that a young girl took her own life by throwing herself into the lake near that city. The belief of the police is based on a bundle which … 2 boys … found on the beach. The bundle contained a dress evidently belonging to a girl about 15 years of age. It was carefully folded and on the inside was found a note as follows: 'My father and mother abused me and kept me working hard, so I thought it best to end my life now. Here is my dress. Good-bye, all.'

Mary Karban, wife of Wenzel Karban, a farmer of the town of Neva, committed suicide by eating the heads of 4 boxes of matches. She was only 16 years of age and had been married last fall.

[Lghamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lest you think small-town America at the turn of the 19th century was accurately depicted by Little House, take a gander through these photos and newspaper snippets that detail suicides, insanity, murder, childhood illnesses, tramps and arsonists (so many “incendiaries”!).

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting account of the effects of an economic depression on the rural inhabitants of western Wisconsin, specifically the town of Black River Falls, with photographs that really bring to life the people who lived and died during the 1890s. However, I feel that the book’s formats, arguments, and designs say almost as much about the study of the humanities during the 1970s as about the late nineteenth century. Lesy's impetus behind the approach to history seen in the book seems to be very representative of the new philosophies such as postmodernism that began to affect the academic world by the '70s. In any case, I thought that Lesy did a very good job at evoking the everyday life, if rather sordid and bizarre, of the rural populace of America. I especially felt the mixture of actual documents and photographs brought a unique view of history, brought even closer to home as I read the book in the town of Winona, Minnesota just across the river from the area of Wisconsin the book details.

[Judi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overwhelming for me. This work is an extraordinary art piece and a commentary on history. It deserves a shelf of it's own. No page numbers. No names, dates, identification on the photos. This book means a great deal to me as my family is from rural Wisconsin. Recently I have been sorting through generations of family photos taken at the time covered in the book (1890 - 1900) The book, photos, newspaper excerpts overlap/echo my family's life. The arson,the suicides, the diseases, Mendota State Asylum, the poverty. Between the photographs, the snippits from the Badger State Banner and the Mendota State Asylum it fleshes out that time, place and people. It was my family.

[Connie Bloch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Being interested in both history and genealogy, and being from Wisconsin, I had to look at this one. The portraits are interesting, too bad they are not all printed as taken, I could do without the artistic changes (if there were 3000 portraits to choose from why use the same portrait several times in the same book?). The articles are a good collection portraying the dark side of turn of the century life and lack of medical knowledge. Glad I found this one for 99 cents.

[Rae Meadows · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much. It's a beautiful and haunting montage of images, newspaper accounts, and history, a palimpsest that evokes mood of time and place, the anxieties of a culture, particularly about women, in rural Wisconsin. A true paradigm shift that gives weight to a people's fears and emotional state as it related to history. This book was what inspired me to write historical fiction.

[Dean Jamieson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gave me bad dreams.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard about this very odd book in Michael J. Abolafia's essay "'Eccentric to the Healthy Social Order': Inversions of Family, Community, and Religion in Thomas Ligotti's 'The Last Feast of the Harlequin,'" which appeared in the first issue of the Vastarien literary magazine. Abolafia lists this "carnivalesque sideshow" alongside such works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio as examples of how "the American Midwest - and the ubiquitous constellation of religious, familial, and social inversions and transgressions that give rise to its gloomy undercurrents - is particularly amenable to the protean, polysemously mutuable genre of Gothic horror so often concerned, as it is, with themes of psychological repression, theological anxiety and sociosexual deviancy."

Wisconsin Death Trip is only history insofar as it consists of real photographs and newspaper clippings (written by father-son reporters Frank and George Cooper) from the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, from 1885 through 1900. They were curated and organized by Michael Lesy to form an illustration of what many historians perceived to have been the unusually troubled mood of 1890s America: a time of economic depression, mass immigration, and mass internal migration from country to city. The result is basically Gesell Dome in documentary format: an unrelenting recital of one town's vices and tragedies that becomes nothing less than a tour of living hell. Charles Van Schaik's photography best exemplifies Lesy's artistic interpretation of these primary sources: as Lesy himself points out, none of these images were originally anything special, but the combination of both their new context and the Uncanny Valley effect of early film renders them subtly unnerving, and overall enhances the book's oppressively morbid atmosphere.

Twisted as it sounds, I actually found Wisconsin Death Trip to be almost weirdly funny at times (in the same way Thomas Ligotti and painter Zdzisław Beksiński both intended an element of dark humor in their works), from the town's stubborn infestation of obnoxious tramps and the little fires everywhere, to the satirical "behold: a series of unfortunate events" tone affected by Lesy's abridgement and arrangement of the text sources (to which he tried to give something of a musical cadence). What a unique book this was.

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

And this . . . gem:

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."

[Tamara Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A woman who gave her name as Wilson died in Chippewa Falls from a criminal operation performed upon herself. Her parents live near Eau Claire...her brother took charge of her remains. The woman was young and pretty and visited every physician in Chippewa Falls to accomplish her object, but without success. [4/6, State]

In late 2010, I finished reading A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. I highly recommend the book about a psychologically-scarred rich man and his mail-order bride during a bitter, rural Wisconsin winter in the early 20th century. Ralph Truitt, the book's anti-hero is obsessed with the oft-hidden realities of life: The sex and madness and sickness and death and betrayals that lurk behind the curtains of his his town--any town, really. Life is harsh, but it was particularly so 100 years ago. Goolrick has written that A Reliable Wife was inspired, in part, by Wisconsin Death Trip, a nonfiction book published by Michael Lesy in 1973.

Wisconsin Death Trip uses news clippings (like the ones above and below), local gossip, snatches from period literature, records from the Mendota "insane asylum" and images from glass-plate negatives taken by Charles Van Schaik in the small town of Black River Falls, WI, to illuminate the harshness of Midwestern life in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The collection includes post-mortem photography--popular at the time--placed alongside more benign images.

The double funeral of two children of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hopke of Racine was held Thursday, this making three out of the family that have died of diptheria in the two weeks, and there are two more lying at the point of death. [11/6, State]

I am enthralled by "morbid history" (as my husband says), so I immediately got a copy of Wisconsin Death Trip. It is an engrossing reminder that life was not always as it is today. That nostalgia for "simpler" days is often a sign that we do not really remember those days at all--that we have sanitized history and memory to forget that once diptheria could erase every child in a family or that good people sometimes went mad in isolated, rural areas. And that once we were much more comfortable with mortality, perhaps because death came so often and remorselessly.

The book inspired me to return to some of my genealogical research and those ancestors who lost multiple children in the early 1900s. Parents who died leaving older children caring for young. Brothers who shot brothers. Soldiers who never returned from foreign wars. In addition to the inspiring stories, there is a level of hardship our ancestors endured that seems unthinkable to most of us today.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experience ("read" isn't enough) it all in one sitting. It's probably the most disturbing book I own. It's a history lesson but it applies today: we're all finding out (again) what happens when you're surrounded by financial crisis, bank fraud, unemployment, business failures, recession/depression, pandemic illness, tax protesting, suicides, foreclosures, violent crime, mass murder, insanity, pseudo-science, etc.

After several dozen re-reads, I still can't state the main points of the analysis at the end. ("The 'good old days' weren't" is flippant, accurate, and insufficient.) He makes many interesting observations (comparing county/state numbers, reporting "suicide due to business failure" will cause more people to view it as an option, etc.) but he never really ties it all up.

(Note: there are no page numbers and no index.)

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressionistic tour of the popular fascination with madness, death, and sudden violence that dominated popular culture late in the Victorian Age, and how that intersected and was mirrored in local events in Wisconsin. This book is an art masterpiece as much as a fine read.

In no way a documentary (or even a serious attempt at historical narrative, despite the claims of the introduction), the book connects historical photographs with news, psychiatric reports, and fiction written in and about Wisconsin life at the time of the photographs were taken. This is a book to revisit endlessly because it builds with experience and there is always something new to observe and learn.

For example, I will never leave a jar of Paris Green about when employing a housemaid.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incomparable. I came to this book after reading this quotation from Geoff Rymann's Was: "By now anyone would have a right to wonder what actually happened eighty years ago: the men burning houses barns and horses so that for ten years and more the countryside was an inferno of revenge, broken by a fifth season of arson. The tramps who packed guns and overran whole towns. The old men who went mad with jealousy. The old women who jumped down wells "

Most of the reviewers on this site have quoted striking excerpts from the Badger State Banner. But the excerpts in this book are almost without exception as amazing as they are foreign to our modern ears.

This book deserves your attention

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite part about this book was the photos. I didn't really bother to read it except a few paragraphs here and there and the introduction. The photos really convey what the author is trying to get across.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal, disgusting, insane human. It is what it isn't.

Update nine years later: still very enjoyable, particularly good for bathroom/outhouse/ tree stump beside hole in ground.