IN THE summer of 1845, the young village of Milwaukee spent several weeks tearing itself apart at its riverway seams. While the village had been incorporated more than five years earlier—joining settlements that had grown along each side of the Milwaukee River—the unification was hardly one of spirit or purpose. The most contentious of their disagreements was over the bridges that spanned the waterway. Of the three bridges that crossed the Milwaukee River, those who lived on the west side favored only the one that led down Spring Street, which allowed them access to City Hall and the courthouse. Each of the others were, in their estimation, impediments to river traffic. Those living on the east side preferred the connections that allowed for materials to be unloaded at their lakeside docks and transported across the river by wagon or cart. Westsiders preferred these goods to be unloaded at their river docks, bypassing the east altogether. When a befuddled schooner captain plowed his vessel into the crossing at Spring Street, westsiders accused the east side of paying the captain to cripple their choice passage, revenge for their refusal to help finance the bridges they considered deleterious to their community. Within days, Milwaukee’s two halves were at war.
It had been more than two hundred years since Father Jacques Marquette became the first European to see the land the village now occupied. He noted in his diary that the place was of “no value.” Dozens of Europeans visited and traded at the spot over the following decades. The first resident of the area was a Frenchman named La Framboise, whose misdeeds with the locals caused him to be chased out of the area in 1791. The first permanent white resident was Jean Baptiste Mirandeau, who arrived in 1795. His reasons for coming are not known, although some whispered that a scandalous love affair sent him to the young nation’s hinterlands, while others swore he had taken up the stance of a heretic during his training for the priesthood and fled on the eve of his taking orders. Mirandeau lived east of the Milwaukee River with his Native American wife and large family for nearly a quarter century, trading with local tribes, farming, and operating as a part-time blacksmith. He also might have been Milwaukee’s first resident inebriate, as he met his fate in the winter of 1819 when he tried to move a heavy log while drunk.
Around the same time Mirandeau was shuffling through the snow toward his dreary end, a six-foot tall, twenty-five-year-old Frenchman named Solomon Juneau was taking over the fur-trading business of Jacques Vieau, who had been swapping with local tribes in the Menomonee Valley since 1795. But it was more than Vieau’s pelt trade in which Juneau was interested. He had also become smitten with his fourteen-year-old daughter, Josette. Solomon and Josette were married the next year and in 1822 built a cabin on the east-side stomping grounds of the ill-fated Mirandeau. For more than a decade, Juneau was contented with the simple life of a frontier trader. His primary efforts toward the growth of the settlement were via his dear wife, Josette, who gave birth to seventeen of his children. No one in the area at the time, least of all Juneau, recorded any visions of the place rising to became a major American city. Then the Yankees began to arrive.
Byron Kilbourn was, in the words of historian H. Russell Austin, “the most accomplished and learned man to appear in the little backwoods community” when he arrived to survey the land west of the Milwaukee River in 1834. He had aristocratic roots and came from an eastern family of means. Kilbourn never intended his career as a surveyor to satisfy his ambitious nature. It was in the course of performing his governmental duties across the river from Juneau’s peaceful little outpost that he determined to make himself a city builder. The land west of the waterway, he felt, would prove superior to the swampy patch of earth that Juneau occupied. The Juneau settlement, while having direct access to the lake, was also pinched on three sides between the lake and river. These waterways were almost a noose and, with just the right angling, Kilbourn seemed confident it could be slipped around the neck of the little village, allowing it to hang as his west side birthed a new American metropolis. But Juneau was not one to back down from a fight. For a decade, the earthy, overgrown Frenchman and the refined eastern sharpy built rival villages and competed for the flood of speculation money flowing into the new American west. Juneau called his village “Milwaukie”; Kilbourn called his “Milwaukee.” No one knew what the word meant.
Milwaukee’s population at the time of Kilbourn’s arrival (excluding Native Americans) totaled about twenty. By the time his ward’s loyalists took axes to the bridge at Chestnut Street ten years later to avenge the felling of the Spring Street Bridge, nearly nine thousand called the place home. Milwaukee’s population had tripled in the preceding three years as teams of men swarmed to the place. These were men familiar with hard ways and bone-breaking work. They had set to the west for no more of a reason than to bleed their fortunes from the fertile frontier. As the east ward awoke the morning after Kilbourn’s west ward made its move on Chestnut Street, they found the bridge reduced to a watery pile of mangled timbers. A mob hustled an old cannon that was being used as a decoration piece to the bank of the river and set its aim upon the home of Byron Kilbourn. Lacking cannonballs, they dismantled a nearby clock, and its round weights were loaded into the muzzle.
These were men who had been strangers to this area a few years prior. But their fervid loyalty to their adopted wards suggests a kind of madness was growing amongst those grizzly settlers who had made this swampy patch of earth their adopted home. The dangers of an existence trapped between what was at the time considered civilization and savagery, the desperations of a life teetering between wealth and destitution, and the maddening onward march of progress all seemed to be acting as an invitation to mayhem.
But the cannon remained unfired. Word spread in the east that Byron Kilbourn’s young daughter had just died. Not willing to fire upon a home in mourning, the eastsiders instead finished off the Spring Street Bridge, sending the broken link to the west tumbling into the river. Now completely severed of connections to the Kilbourn ward, the Juneau loyalists moved next on the bridge that spanned the Menomonee River, the marshy waterway forming the southern border of the western ward. After leveling this bridge, the easterners marched proudly home, crossing the village’s only passable bridge, the crossing at Water Street that linked Juneautown with the lands south of the Menomonee. The west warders might have moved on that bridge as retaliation but were, at the moment, unable to get to it.
The “Bridge War,” as the affair came to be known, was settled by the village trustees, the details mashed out in the first city charter, signed in 1846, officially birthing the City of Milwaukee. The city fathers might have guided the quill of peace, but the war that made Milwaukee was fought in the streets by a nameless rabble of men with little to lose, but with everything on the line. It was in these lost souls that the mayhem of the times manifested itself. The Bridge War was but one example of the mayhem bred by the transition of a space to place to city to metropolis.
This is the story of the Milwaukee that finds its home in such mayhem, a story that memorializes the dark places both within itself and within its citizens. A city cannot be built on progress and triumph alone. The march forward leaves a mass of the long-forgotten in its wake. The exceptional few are driven to maddened acts of violence, directed at enemies, lovers, and themselves. Scores more lived honestly and quietly but indulged such wicked acts by following them in the gory details of the daily newspapers. Almost all such acts were roundly condemned, pitied, and mourned. But still they read. Other acts of carnage seemed to be the doings of the city itself, vengeful swipes back at a populace bound and determined to beat the place out of its natural shape and into whatever form fit its ever-changing needs. The sites of these disasters, often still fresh with the blood of the unfortunates, also drew hoards of the morbidly curious. The silent masses who gaped alongside these tragedies spoke for the city that could not stop moving, but also one that was never as far away from its adolescence as it liked to think.
And if there was a thrill in watching, there was also a thrill in hiding oneself. As Milwaukee grew, so did its dark corners. The city took to catering to the darker desires of its people as pocket neighborhoods that specialized in sin grew like saplings, their roots secreting themselves through the place until they were as vital to the city as the grain exchange or the waterworks. Some people were made by these trades, others ruined. But no one could escape the creep of these shadows completely. Not those who indulged in such places, not those who crusaded against them, not even those who hustled past the dark corners and pretended to be unaware of the city’s most open dirty secrets.
These stories, and their actors, are the orphans of history. They are too obscure to fit into the standard historical narratives, yet too damn weird to completely ignore. There are few heroes here and even fewer lessons learned. This is an incomplete history, dredged from the memory and prejudices of the times and unable to access those secrets the city still wishes to keep. This is a history that rides that dark and often senseless arc that slices through the daily happenings of a long-forgotten class of killers, liars, and crooks. This is the history of a city’s one-hundred-year struggle to leave its past behind, to understand itself, and to make sense of the everyday mayhem of life in a metropolis being born.