Wisconsin Death Trip

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Description

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

The last decade of the 19th century was once, for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made. For plenty of others, on the other hand, the period was once a time of economic dislocation, when the gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. As the Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into The united states’s first Imperial Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells started to examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate behavior, suicide, and insanity.

In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle The united states. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. First published in 1973, Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins–and it from time to time reads like a hip product of its time. Lesy documents the unsettling record of one small corner of rural The united states, turning up accounts of barn burnings, attacks by gangs of armed tramps, threatening and obscene letters, death by diphtheria and smallpox (the Wisconsin townsfolk had, some years, to attend several funerals a week), alcoholism, madness, business and bank failures, and even a case or two of witchcraft.

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

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