INTO THE WILDS OF WISCONSIN
Book chronicles Northwoods canoe travel in early 1900s
They called themselves “the Gang,” and in the early 1900s the group of men and boys would leave town for wilderness canoe trips and an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life. They were led by Howard Greene, a wealthy Milwaukee businessman who was looking for a diversion from work and found it by paddling down wild rivers, fending off mosquitoes and sleeping in tents that provided scant protection from the rain.
Greene kept meticulous journals of the weeks-long journeys. And more significantly, he carted along a bulky 8-by-10 camera and tripod to photograph camp life, idyllic lakes, strings of fish, Indian villages and lumber camps at the dawn of a new century.
Greene’s daughter, Martha Greene Phillips of Madison, used the journals and more than 300 photographs to chronicle the camping trips in a new book published by the University of Minnesota Press, “Border Country: The Northwoods Canoe Journals of Howard Greene
1906-1916.”
In all, over a decade, Greene and company made eight trips in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Ontario.
What emerges is an intimate portrayal of men and boys exploring the rivers and northern forests of the Midwest at a time when roads were few and hazards were many.
Greene was 42 and the owner of the Milwaukee Drug Co. and lived in an east side mansion when he led his first trip — a flotilla of wood and canvas canoes on the Wisconsin River in 1906. Theodore Roosevelt, who would protect more than 200 million acres of wilderness, was president.
The group started near Conover in Vilas County. A month later, the trip ended in a town in southern Wisconsin called Kilbourn City, now known as Wisconsin Dells. Greene wrote letters and stopped in towns like Rhinelander, Wausau and Stevens Point to mail them home.
On following trips, he took notes in a journal and made detailed descriptions of the weather, the routes, the food they ate and people they met along the way.
In some cases, their interactions were with earnest young men working in the new field of conservation. Others were hard-bitten miners and loggers, or strange characters just wandering through.
In 1907, on the St. Croix River, the Gang lost their dog, Di, and Greene and one of the men backtracked, on foot, 20 miles to find the delighted dog. “Not more than two miles of it was ordinarily decent going,” Greene wrote.
In 1909, on the Presque Isle River in the Upper Peninsula, a hired man for the group got lost in the wilderness for a day and the Gang struggled with rain and many portages before arriving at Lake Superior, where a boat would pick them up.
Up to that point, it had been their hardest camping trip. “It has been an unusual experience, not without considerable danger and we are very fortunate in that we had no serious accident,” Greene wrote.
The documents from the trips will be donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
But before giving them up, Phillips said she wanted to write about her father’s travels, taking advantage of the experience she gleaned from writing a book on floating boathouses of the Upper Mississippi River in 2009.
“I thought that some grad student might find them on a shelf 25 years from now and not have a clue as to who these people were — whereas I still had a personal connection,” Phillips said.
Her father was born in 1864. The Civil War was still being fought. Phillips is 74, and was the last of Greene’s children.
Greene remarried after the death of his first wife and he and his second wife had Phillips when the intrepid explorer was 79 years old. He died in 1956 at the age of 93. Phillips was 13 years old.
She remembered seeing the journals and some of the photographs in her father’s library, but her interest in the subject didn’t take hold until years later.
“I thought they were something that needed to be shared,” Phillips said. “They seemed to be gems, but they were my father’s, so I wasn’t sure I was objective enough.”
She was assured by historians and other experts on history of the region that the material was, indeed, significant.
During the group’s decade of canoe trips, the United States was undergoing tremendous change, and the wilderness areas of the Upper Midwest were no exception.
Conservation was in its infancy and figures like Wisconsin’s Aldo Leopold were a generation younger than Greene. The logging boom was beginning to ebb. But while the Gang often paddled through canyons of towering forests, they also passed vast treeless tracts, sawmills, mines and log dams.
Greene was keenly interested in Ojibwe people and their culture and the book contains many photographs and exchanges about canoes, guns, family and the beadwork of women.
Although Phillips said her father held enlightened views for the time, she and the publisher made no attempt to sanitize language considered offensive today, nor hide the fact that the group pilfered artifacts.
Once home, Greene typed a narrative of the trip and mounted the photographs in numbered, leatherbound journals that ran about 80 pages. He gave one to each member of the Gang.
Phillips believes that she has the only remaining complete set of journals.
Among the people who accompanied Greene was his eldest son, Howard T., who would become a leading figure in the state’s dairy industry and was a Republican candidate for governor in 1934.
Another member of the group was a young Charles Ilsley, later chairman of the board of the former Marshall & Ilsley Corp; and another, Ernest Copeland, a Milwaukee obstetrician and sportsman, who is reported to have killed one of the last passenger pigeons in Michigan in 1895.
A 1916 trip on the Chippewa River would be the last. The boys were growing older, and most were finding it harder to get away. The U.S. would enter World War I the next year. In later years, the get-togethers, Greene lamented, would become reunion dinners.
Ten years after the last expedition, Greene wrote that the trips “taught me that the best form of recuperation for a tired mind and body is to break loose from the usual manner of life and go away with men who live outdoors in the great open places where the postman does not come or the (telegraph delivery boys) bear brief and inopportune messages.”