Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy
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Book Reviews of Wisconsin Death Trip
Book Review: My Favorite Book
Summary: 5 Stars
"The pictures you're about to see are of people who were once actually alive." So begins historian Michael Lesy's masterpiece - a by turns touching and disturbing examination of life and death in a small Wisconsin town during the final 15 years of the nineteenth century. Lesy stumbled across a cache of 30,000 glass plate images made by a local town photographer named Charley Van Schaick and spools of microfilm from the local newspaper - and combined the most compelling of these images and newspaper excerpts to create a vivid examination of Victorian prairie life. Although there are numerous post-mortem memorial photographs to add morbid appeal to the book, the newspaper and insane asylum excerpts are what I find absolutely enthralling. If ever anyone tries to suggest to you that times were better "before", you might want to refer them to these matter-of-fact tales of murder, suicide, insanity, and lethal pestilence. Death was a constant threat and entire families of 6 children could be wiped out by diptheria in a matter of days. It's no wonder that so many were driven to suicide: the depth of despair that these people must have gone through is at times palpable.
To give you an idea of the sort of macabre fascinations you can find in these olde newspapers, here are some excerpts:
"The 60 year old wife of a farmer in Jackson, Washington County, killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears"
"Mrs. James Baty... died suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs. She leaves a husband, her family of 6 children having died of diptheria last summer"
"Mrs. John Larson... drowned her 3 children in Lake St. Croix during a fit of insanity... Mrs. Larson imagines that devils pursue her"
And my personal favorite:
"Mrs. Carter... was taken sick at the marsh last week and fell down, sustaining internal injuries which have dethroned her reason. She has been removed to her home here and a few nights since arose from her bed and ran through the woods... A night or two after she was found trying to strangle herself with a towel... It is hoped the trouble is only temporary and that she may soon recover her mind"
You don't see entries like that in newspapers anymore!!
Book Review: a VERY one-sided--and thus limited--review
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a true story.
When I was around 11 years old (I'm 46 now), we got this book as a Christmas present from my quiet uncle, who was a doctor far away. I pored over this strange book in horror. I said, "Mother, I think something's wrong with Uncle James. Why would someone give a book like this to us?"
About three years later, he gassed himself to death.
From my child's eye view, it was a book overflowing with black and white pictures of long-dead children: propped in coffins, posed in their lying-outs amidst prickly flowers and poofy silk pillows. It was filled with photos of wasp-waisted women and descriptions of the brutality of a diptheria death. I read about the "black membrane" of diptheria growing over the backs of countless babies' throats--of parents made desperate by the wheezing (and then strangling) of hundreds of children. It was riveting, immediate, terrifying: history whipped into a frenzy.
Honest to goodness, this was unspoken--but when I heard Uncle had killed himself, I wasn't surprised in the least.
I know there must have been more to the book (as reviewers here attest)--I do recall reading a few newspaper articles about madness--but all I truly remember, too vividly to ever forget, is a dead girl then my age, slumping at a grotesque tilt in a coffin, her eyes waxy and lids half-closed, with vine-like lilies circling her. They'd propped her coffin up in order to photograph it, for goodness sake. If you were ten, wouldn't that be all you recalled?
The book disappeared, and I didn't find it when my mother died. I'd dearly like to read it again. The Victorian-era obsession with children who'd gone to Jesus didn't make sense to my vaccinated, O.J.-nourished, moderately-exercised kid's mind, but I see it now: a world where people were MORE THAN LIKELY to lose most of their children to one of myriad childhood killers. The pittance they paid for their child's grave was all that they could give them--except their love, which I now know was no different from ours.
Book Review: haunting, humorous, genuine
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently read "The Time-Traveler's Wife" and noticed a small reference to a book I hadn't heard of -- "Wisconsin Death Trip." Intrigued by the casual mention of an apparently famous book about my home state, I decided to investigate, and stumbled upon something before my time in more ways than one.
"Wisconsin Death Trip" came of age in the 1970s, well before I was born, and is set in the 1890s, well before my grandparents were born. Then again, in reading it, I felt a connection to the people, and to the land we shared. Reading "Wisconsin Death Trip" was quite a, well, trip; for one, the story of a relative of mine was traced throughout the book. For another, I was offered a glimpse of a life much different than the bucolic, pastoral pleasantry I had always, albeit subconsciously, envisioned. Were these the Wisconsinsites I was descended from? Apparently so.
What people may not mention about this book is that it is FUNNY. "More poetry is said to come from Wisconsin than from any other state in the Union," it tells us, but apparently so do more "wierdies" [sic], and women who cut their hair off in their sleep, and daughters who burn their fathers' barns down. It is black humor, true, but I found myself laughing out loud as often as I was horrified. How many times will Mary Sweeny try to break a fine plate-glass window?
A beautiful book, one whose legacy deserves to be revived, "Wisconsin Death Trip" strikes the right balance between photographic exhibition (of Black River Falls) and fin-de-siecle, daily-life exposition via newspaper clippings from both Minnesota and Wisconsin. And now those who have never before heard of Prairie du Chien (Prardoosheen), Menominee, and Sheboygan can know them intimately, and know the humanity populating them (in all its racist, incestuous, sexist, clinically insane glory).
I just wish it were available for cheaper.
Book Review: Moving, effective, original, singular
Summary: 5 Stars
Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, originally a doctoral thesis, is one of the most touching, poetic, beautiful, harrowing, moving and dislocating works I have read. Basically a compendium of found glass plate negative photos taken by the (himself knock-knees odd) Charles Vam Schaik in and around the rural community of Black River Falls WI, and leavened by snippets taken from the Badger State Banner newspaper and the Mendota State Record Book (an insane asylum), as well as a few personal reminisces, the book instead is a commentary and an indictment of a brutal time of economic dislocation, social upheaval, religious confusion and obsession, and personal decay in a farming community. It is an endless repitition of suicide, madness, arson, children dying of disease, and of a mostly sternly religious people living the grimmest of lives of back breaking work in the country. The photos by their sheer repetition and some of the games played with them by the author, pound out a tattoo of strain, people only barely suppressing their madness, and a society truly on the edge of collapse. Hardly the bucolic paradise so often evoked in our time.
The afterword by the author provides some backstory and statistics backing the point up, and illustrating in numbers and facts what the pictures and excerpts made clear by anecdote, and is also well written.
This was something of a cult book in the mid 70s, a most unusual way of looking at local history, lifting up the rock under which society had crawled. It is haunting, tragic, striking. You will never forgot it.
Book Review: The Good Old Days
Summary: 5 Stars
Ah, the Good Old Days! that time when the men and women were wrapped like a warm blanket in Christian piety. When boys and girls grew up straight and tall, amid swimming holes and Sunday schools, and read aloud in the public schools from the Protestant Bible. When men bore the guns that kept us free on their broad shoulders, and women were demure, graceful, with chaste and untroubled souls. This remarkable collection of photographs --- many depicting funerals and similarly mournful scenes --- and the accompanying anthology of ephemeral journalism will go a long way towards showing that this, like any other lost Eden, never really existed. These people had other virtues, of course: they lived in the presence of death; they cultivated a sort of stoicism in the face of hard lives made harder by the rise of national capitalism.
It seems that people in rural Wisconsin were heirs to the same failures that all flesh is heir to. People committed adultery back then, and bore children out of wedlock. People went mad back then, and often expressed their madness in violence. There was drunkenness, grinding loneliness, indifference to neighbours, and murder. They coped with problems, too, that we have managed to conquer: most notably, epidemic disease, and wholly inadequte health care. It is good to remember this when this period is portrayed as a golden age of piety and patriotism.