Extending halfway across the State of Wisconsin was a belt of loam some fifteen miles wide known as the Colby Loamy Clay. Composed of the decayed leaf mold of centuries, this exceptionally fertile soil assured the ultimate success of the many dairy farms that were gradually replacing the wilderness in that part of the State. But the wilderness had first to be literally uprooted. Besides assisting in the construction of the Schmidt family dwelling and the other frame buildings needed for farming (barn, hen house, and tool shed, Karl took on the main responsibility for the biggest job of all—clearing the land.
First the trees had to be cut down on more than one hundred acres of the farm. Then the brush had to be cleared, and the tree stumps, with their stubborn roots, pulled out of the ground. The fallen trees themselves were sawed into firewood, or into larger logs that were hauled away to market. Even then the job was not finished, for the countless glacial boulders that had been deposited thousands of years before, when the ice cap covered half of North America, had to be removed from the newly created fields. Only then could the land be planted in clover or grains or farm grasses, or converted into pasture and meadowland. In patches, then, little by little, the forest became fields, and crops were planted.
It isn’t hard to understand why Karl’s teachers felt that for a sensitive 17-year-old suburbanite student to be suddenly burdened with managing a wilderness farm, a job requiring him to be lumberjack and teamster as well as dairy farmer, would probably mean the end of his scholarly career. But Karl’s teachers underrated both his strength of mind and the unusual intellectual curiosity of the entire Schmidt family. Neither Karl nor any of the rest of his family required an academic atmosphere in which to grow intellectually. For the Schmidts, farming was as much an adventure in education as it was a means of livelihood. Natural history now became their passion.
Nor did Karl give up reading and studying. That first winter of 1907, he had only a single horse and two cows to care for, which left him with lots of time for the books which lined the walls of the huge living room of their new farmhouse. He even took correspondence courses, from the University of Chicago, in English composition and comparative religion. Stretched out before the great fireplace which he had helped to build, he read not only the assigned books for his courses, but other volumes that he discovered in the Stanley town library: Francis Parkman’s series on early American history, Sven Hedin’s Travels in Central Asia, and a book that recounted the stories of all the great polar expeditions up to the year 1900.
But the most important part of Karl’s education was of a different kind. From his early childhood he’d been given lessons in botany and astronomy by his mother, and in woodlore and fishing and camping by his father. From Professor Needham at Lake Forest College he’d learned the basic facts of biology. Now, his new life in the wilderness gave him the perfect environment in which to put all this knowledge to work, in the observation of new phenomena which in turn would increase his knowledge still further.
In Wisconsin, the Schmidts found themselves in a climate very different from that of Illinois. The winters were much longer and colder, and the summers were much hotter. Karl became very interested in observing the changes of weather in this new locality. Even in his childhood in Lake Forest he had kept a systematic record of the weather, clipping the forecast for the following day from a Chicago newspaper and pasting it in a great ledger, so that on the next day he could write beside the clipping what the weather had actually turned out to be. Now, in the Stanley area, Karl found that there was a neighborhood rivalry in recording the lowest temperature in winter and the highest in summer. He discovered, too, that the forecasting of weather changes was necessary to successful farming.
Karl found the stark winters of Wisconsin especially dramatic. For one thing, they were full of new sounds. Lying in bed on a bitter night, he would hear in the great silence a sudden report like that of a 30-30 rifle—and would know that a giant elm had just been split by the frost. Many of the elms bore the healed scars of these frost cracks, sometimes forty feet in length. And, going out in the morning to investigate the latest crack, Karl would find himself listening to other winter sounds—packed snow creaking and squealing beneath his feet, or the runners of his sleigh—and he noted that these sounds varied in pitch with every change in temperature.
The most spectacular of all the northern phenomena of winter weather, though, for Karl, was the Aurora Borealis, the “Northern Lights.” He and his brothers and sister would get thoroughly chilled standing out in the night cold watching the steady glow of the arched bands across the northern sky, or the more familiar streamers of light shooting toward the zenith. Occasionally, they would be witness to an awe-inspiring vision, when the entire night sky was aglow, with streamers reaching upward even from the south. On one such night, when Karl was making a long drive with horse and buggy, he laid back the buggy top to get a better view of the magnificent sight, even though the temperature was well below zero.
Then winter turned toward spring. While the snow still lay white on the northern slopes, the forty acres of woods at the back of the farm burst into pink and blue with hepatica. The hepatica was followed by a whole succession of early flowers, which took advantage of the sunlight that reached the forest floor before the trees came into leaf—the white poppy-like flower with the red root and sap for which it is called bloodroot, the variegated phlox, delicate Dutchman’s-breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, squirrel corn, with its much divided leaves, and the white waxen dogtooth violet. Then, just before the leafing out of the trees, came the glorious white trilliums, hundreds of thousands of them, climaxing the annual spring flower show of the woodland forty.
“Look at this one, Karl,” called out Karl’s younger brother Frank.
They were searching for freaks among the farm’s million trilliums. The white trillium is normally a three-petaled and three-sepaled flower, but Frank had found one of the uncommon double trilliums that look like roses. Also, there were trilliums in fours, with four leaves, four petals, and four sepals. Even more extraordinary, there were trilliums with six green sepals but no petals, and others with six white petals but no sepals. By transplanting them from the woods, Karl and Frank were able to bring together an entire garden of freaks.
As true warm weather finally came to Clark County each year, Karl and Frank would turn to another pursuit—the making of an insect collection. From Professor Needham, at Lake Forest College, Karl had obtained his first understanding of the fascination of such a collection. Now, he and his brother determined to make an insect museum of their own, with the help of W. J. Holland’s Butterfly Book and Moth Book, classic works on their subjects which are in print even today, a half century later. The two books are filled with color plates, and they made it easy for the two boys to identify their specimens.
In the daytime, they chased butterflies with an insect net; at night they collected moths by “sugaring” for them, following Dr. Holland’s instructions on preparing moth bait. The boys soon learned to recognize all the common species of both moths and butterflies at sight. But there were always new and more unusual species to be discovered, and occasionally there would be a real prize, a large, spectacular beauty such as a giant swallowtail butterfly. One of those cost Frank a wild chase from the cornfield near the road, over fences and through brush-covered pastures nearly to the Wolf River, a mile away, before he could capture it with his net. Darkness held prizes for them, too: giant night-flying moths such as the brown crecropia, the green luna, or the yellow polyphemus. Other night-flying moths fastened themselves to tree trunks, their dark, mottled upper wings concealing the brilliant colors of the under wings, so that they seemed a part of the tree itself. But by day the boys, searching the woodland forty, became very clever at spotting them in spite of their camouflage.
From the lower branches of those same trees, another kind of creature—the little gray and tawny screech owls—would wail mournfully at twilight. In fact, the woodland forty resounded with bird calls of all sorts the year around. On winter nights, barred owls and great horned owls sent forth their eerie hoots. In spring, the songs of the wood thrush and the veery floated through the woods at dusk. Before a summer shower, the black-billed cuckoo would croak hoarsely from the treetops. For the Schmidt family, the study of birds became an all-season hobby.
A pair of Baltimore orioles always nested near the house; and on a beam in the barn, above the horse stalls, a phoebe regularly built its nest, interweaving its vigorous “phoebe” call with the plaintive “pea-wee” of a wood pewee outside. In the sturdy oaks that had been saved for shade between the house and barn, the chipping sparrow and the flycatcher would “chip” and “chebec,” as if talking with each other; and from the brushy pastures there often sounded the cheerful call of the Maryland yellow-throat: “weechity-weechity-weechity.”
The winter feeding shelf would bring to the farmyard an endless parade of winter birds—chickadees, nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and slate-colored juncos. Once a red-bellied woodpecker, a stray from the south, stayed at the farm all winter, paying daily visits to the feeding shelf. In a bitter cold spell, Karl discovered that a little sawwhet owl had taken up residence in a chicken house, perching contentedly beside the roosting chickens.
In later years, Karl recalled that six inches of snow once had fallen on May 1, when most of the summer birds had returned from the south to their northern homes. Led by song sparrows and fox sparrows, a great flock of summer arrivals came to the Schmidts’ back door, where they were treated to quantities of chicken feed. “With their crops filled,” Karl would write, “they sat about in the bushes and sang in a memorable full-throated chorus as if to thank us, to defy the snow, and to express their faith that it would go.” But he remembered that four days later he had hauled a load of hay to town—on a sleigh!
During those long Wisconsin winters Karl and Frank would set traps for the common fur-bearing animals, the muskrat, weasel and mink; and, like other boys in the neighborhood, obtain pocket money from the sale of the pelts. Trapping, of course, was only a part-time activity; their season’s catch amounted to two or three dozen muskrats, three or four minks, perhaps a dozen black and white skunks, together with an occasional ermine, the winter form of the larger weasel.
In the Schmidt dooryard during the warmer months, chipmunks played, helping themselves to the grain thrown out for the chickens, carting it away in their grotesquely over-stuffed cheeks for winter use. But even more entertaining than the chipmunks were the flying squirrels. They were numerous on the farm, but came out from their hiding places only after darkness had begun to fall. A dozen or more gnarled old maples on a slope near the spring at the back of the farm formed a playing ground for them. At sundown, Karl would go out with other members of the family to sit quietly on the slope and watch the furry little gliders chasing one another as though they were playing tag. The Schmidts delighted in the squirrels’ graceful thirty-or forty-foot glides, and listened avidly for the soft thuds that signalled their landings at the bases of the trees, after which they could be heard scurrying to the upper branches to take off on still more glides.
During his second year on the farm, Karl received a fresh stimulus toward a scientific career. His closest friend and classmate from Lake Forest, Bernhard Dawson, who years later would become a noted astronomer, came to spend a year living with the Schmidts, and together the two boys made a number of experiments. For one thing, Bernhard had brought with him an astronomical telescope. He had purchased it on a street corner in Detroit, using all the money he had left over after buying his ticket to Wisconsin. It turned out to be an unusually fine instrument, and enabled the two friends to make a serious study of astronomy, and to teach the rudiments of the subject to neighboring friends.
This interest in astronomy led to a related experiment. Using an old milk can full of iron, suspended by a long wire from the hay rack of the barn, forty feet above the driveway, Karl and Bernhard made a Foucault pendulum, demonstrating to the interested neighbors who came to see it that the earth did indeed rotate on its axis. The wire was attached at the top in such a way that it was not pulled out of plumb in any direction; and, when the milk can was set swinging along a straight line drawn on the ground, it could be observed that the direction of the swing gradually changed in relation to the line below. Karl and Bernhard explained that the earth could thus be seen to revolve on its axis below the pendulum, since the pendulum’s direction—its plane of oscillation—remained the same. They even showed how the line on the ground rotated a certain number of degrees each hour in relation to the pendulum’s direction.
Bernhard, who was an amateur meteorologist, then turned his hand to making a properly slatted thermometer shelter, so that maximum and minimum temperatures could be read with accuracy. He also installed an intricate electric wind-direction indicator in the living room, making it unnecessary to run outdoors to see if the wind had changed.
The two companions’ most unusual project was a nine-foot-long meteorological box kite. This was flown on a mile-long “string” of piano wire, reeled out from a specially constructed winch. It was long before the day when airplanes were common in the sky, and the sight of the giant kite flying overhead would cause flocks of barnyard chickens to hide all day in the brush piles, and horses of the neighborhood to run frantically through the fences of their pastures.
Following the year of Bernhard’s visit, Karl spent four more years on the farm, making six years in all. He was there from the summer he turned 17 until the autumn after he became 23. Sharing vigorously and happily in all the strenuous work required in making the farm a success, he also gave his two younger brothers, Frank and John, and his sister Margaret constant help and encouragement with their school work. As his mother was often ill, he even assisted with the housework, and learned to be an expert cook.
It wasn’t all work, of course. There were, for instance, neighborhood dances. Karl later decribed these outings in an essay.
“As a matter of course,” he wrote, “the completion of a house or barn is celebrated by a dance, and when there is a sufficiently large threshing-floor, the whole countryside gathers for a party that is continued until dawn. When such occasions are too infrequent, the more energetic of the young men in a self-appointed committee of two or three, often arrange such barn dances any season when the weather permits and a floor is available.
“The ‘committee’ spreads the report that there is to be a dance, hires the music, and is responsible for what semblance of order is maintained.
“The music and beer, for such is usually supplied are paid for by passing the hat to the male dancers. The female contingent is expected to furnish cake and sandwiches for a midnight lunch, coffee for which is supplied by the owner of the farm.
“The music at these dances is usually that of a fiddle and mandolin, or a fiddle accompanied by the chording of an organ. Country people have a strong prejudice in favor of their own fiddlers who play by ear—the term ‘violinist’ being applied with some contempt to those that play by note. Some of the older ‘fiddlers’ of the community have real musical talent, and do play with a fire and smoothness of time much superior to the playing of many ‘violinists.’
“The floors upon which we dance are rarely of hardwood—and often of unmatched lumber. Waxing is accomplished by cutting up and scattering paraffin which is ‘danced in.’ One of the floors on which I had the privilege of dancing affords me a unique memory. I was at the warming of a little one-room log house, in which the floor joists were round green elm timbers. When we danced a lively ‘Schottische,’ in approximate synchronism with the period of vibration of the timbers, there was at least six inches of spring in the middle of the floor!”
But, too, there was always more work to go back to. Karl’s farming life had begun with the cutting down of trees—piling logs on skidways, transferring the logs from skid ways to a sleigh, and then driving the horse-drawn sleigh to market, often in the face of the sharp winds of sub-zero weather.
As the timber farm was transformed into a dairy farm, with hay fields and grain fields and pasture land, the size of the herd of dairy cattle was increased. Then milking and the care and breeding of cows became the major chore, for the economy of the whole area was geared to the processing of dairy products.
In the earlier years of dairy farming in Clark County, the big cans of milk, kept chilled in a large tank of running water piped from a well in the yard, were collected by dealers and shipped by train to be sold in Chicago. Then, as the area became more populated, small independently operated cheese factories became a feature of every neighborhood. The milk from each farm was then hauled by the farmers for a distance of two or three miles to be used for making cheese.
Karl learned something from every aspect of his life in Wisconsin. Most important for his future life, though, was the opportunity given him to observe the strange and variegated workings of nature. As if to confound those of his teachers who had feared that his experiences in Wisconsin would destroy his scholarly career, one of his projects on the farm gave him the material for his first published scientific paper, which eventually appeared in The Nature Study Review in March 1917. Appropriately, for a future herpetologist, it concerned a snake.
With the encouragement of his mother, Karl and the other children had become interested in the cold-blooded animals around the farm, the reptiles and amphibians. They acquainted themselves with the different kinds of turtles in nearby streams and lakes, with the green frogs along the creek banks, and with the leopard frogs that abounded in the cattail swamps. Karl learned to identify the springtime singing of the little swamp tree frog, whose annual choruses on the banks of the Wolf River could be heard all across the mile of intervening fields to the house.
Karl got to know the common kinds of snakes that turned up on the farm. He was fascinated by the defensive behavior of the blowsnake or puff adder, which was much feared by the farmers in the neighborhood. Karl did his best to dispel this fear of the puff adder and other non-poisonous reptiles. In fact, that was part of the reason for capturing the pine snake about which he was to write his paper.
The pine snake was caught in July. From its stockiness, Karl judged it to be a female with eggs. It hadn’t resisted capture as most pine snakes did, but once in its glass-fronted cage it tried continually to escape, instead of becoming sluggish and “tame,” as was usual. It so mangled its nose, pushing against the glass, that Karl would have let it go if he had not hoped to see the egg laying. The first eggs appeared while two young women of the neighborhood, whose fear of snakes Karl was trying to conquer, were watching, fascinated even though they expressed disgust. The initial eggs were laid at intervals of ten minutes, but the interval constantly increased, so that it took four hours for all fifteen eggs to be laid. The young women, of course, were still watching at the very end. The sticky eggs, as long as pigeon eggs and about half as broad as they were long, unfortunately didn’t develop. But the snake still proved interesting, for, after it had laid its eggs, it began to accept food, in the form of live field mice, the first of Karl’s captured snakes to do so.
“The snake threw itself on the mouse,” Karl later wrote in his article, “grasping it by the shoulder with the jaws, and coiled around it with the middle portion of the body. The body followed the head so quickly that separate motions of striking and constriction could not be distinguished. After a few minutes of constriction, so tight that the mouse’s eyes bulged out of their sockets, the hold was released, and the mouse proved to be quite dead. The snake nosed its prey until it found the head, and immediately began the swallowing process. The remarkable mechanism of a snake’s jaws whereby unbelievably large objects can be swallowed, is easily observed. First one side and then the other of the separate lower jaws is moved forward, while the backward pointing teeth of the upper jaw, and of the inactive half of the lower, retain all that is gained. The snake literally draws itself over its food.”
Karl continued to feed the snake; and it accepted twenty-one mice from August 16th to September 7th. A number of young field mice “were taken directly from the fingers, with no striking or constriction, and swallowed head or tailor back foremost as was convenient.” Then, toward the end of August the snake began to get sluggish. Its eyes became opaque, and it accepted only young field mice, the larger ones being left undisturbed or killed but not eaten. On September 15th, the snake, with a little assistance from Karl, shed its old skin. Its eyes were bright again, and the new skin brilliant with its black and yellow pattern. And Karl released it from its cage.
Karl’s years on the Wisconsin farm were almost at an end, although he would continue to return for brief periods. Contrary to the fears of his teachers, it had proved an experience which had stimulated him further toward a scientific career. In fact, it was what he had learned about the natural environment of the farm that would make it possible for him to return to school. He had lost nothing but time, and what he had gained in knowledge more than made up for that.