by Matthew Daniel Mason
1. For the professional and personal life of Van Schaick and a history of his collection, I examined decades of issues from Black River Falls newspapers. Publications consulted include the Badger State Banner [later Banner-Journal] (Black River Falls, Wisconsin), 1873–1974; The Jackson County Journal (Black River Falls, Wisconsin), 1886–1926; and the Black River Falls Wisconsin Independent (Black River Falls, Wisconsin), 1872–1888. For genealogical information, I consulted a variety of resources, including federal and state censuses and state vital records. For individual sources, as well as a detailed biography of Charles Van Schaick, his immediate family, colleagues, and use of his imagery, see Matthew Daniel Mason, “A Partial Presentation of the Past: A Critical Examination of Wisconsin Death Trip” (Ph.D. diss., University of Memphis, 2008).
2. For a discussion of individual schools, see Citizenship and International Committee of the Jackson County Association of the Home and Community Education, Schools of Yesterday in Jackson County, Wisconsin: A Collection of Memorabilia (Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Jackson County Association of the Home and Community Education, 1997), esp. 53, 93.
3. For a brief discussion of backdrops, see Avon Neal, “Folk Art Fantasies: Photographer’s Backdrops,” Afterimage (March–April 1997): 12–18.
4. For a contemporary description of Ho-Chunk annuities, see Reuben Gold Thwaites, “The Wisconsin Winnebagoes: An Interview With Moses Paquette, by the Editor,” in Collections of the State Historical Society, vol. 12, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Madison, Wisconsin: Democratic Printing Company, 1892), 399–433, esp. 420–421. Moses Paquette (born 1828) was a mixed-ancestry member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a government interpreter.
5. For a discussion of the development of film negatives, see William Welling, Photography in America: The Formative Years, 1839–1900 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1978), 321–326.
6. For an account of the flood and reminiscences by survivors, see Marie Anne Olson, Black Friday: The Flood of October 6, 1911 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin (Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Block Printing, 1987).
7. These photographic prints comprise PH 3469 in the Charles J. Van Schaick Collection, Library—Archives Division, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
8. Van Schaick had four children. A daughter, Florence Van Schaick (1892–1893), died of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) in infancy. His eldest son, Shirley Delaney Van Schaick (1885–1960), worked for the American Railway Express Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His two other sons were medical doctors. Roy Edson Van Schaick (1887–1956) operated an independent medical practice in Marion, Wisconsin, while Harold Dean Van Schaick (1889–1969) was chief surgeon for the Florida East Coast Railway Hospital in Saint Augustine, Florida, as well as a president of the Florida State Board of Medical Examiners.
9. Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).
10. For a detailed critique of Lesy’s work, see Mason, “A Partial Presentation,” esp. p. 132 ff.
11. Michael Lesy, “Wisconsin Death Trip,” Quixote 6, no. 6 (Winter 1971–1972), n.p.
12. For a description of this montage, see Mason, “A Partial Presentation,” 450.
13. George Greendeer provided this information about photographic postcards based on a conversation with his maternal grandmother, Puss (White) Lonetree.
14. Steven D. Hoelscher discusses Bennett’s images of Ho-Chunk and the marketing of the Wisconsin Dells in Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett’s Wisconsin Dells (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). The Denver Public Library purchased the collection of David Barry’s original glass negatives in 1937. See Denver Public Library, David F. Barry Catalog of Photographs (Denver, Colorado: Denver Public Library, Western History Department, 1961).
15. For a concise overview of photographers of American Indians, see Alfred L. Bush and Lee Clark Mitchell, The Photograph and the American Indian (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994). For an excellent example of a collection of images depicting a Native group in the greater Midwestern region, see Bruce M. White, We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe People (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007), which explores formal and informal portraits of Ojibwe from the advent of photography through 1950.
16. Paul Radin wrote many works on the Ho-Chunk, including “Autobiography of an American Indian,” University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology 16, no. 7 (April 1920): 381–473, later reprinted and expanded as Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian, ed. Paul Radin (New York and London: Appleton and Co., 1926); and “The Winnebago Tribe,” in Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. 1915–1916 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), 35–560, and 58 pages of plates.
17. Alan Trachtenberg, “The Group Portrait,” in Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photography, eds. Leslie Tonkonow and Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1995), 17.
18. Roddy had a number of traveling shows featuring members of the Ho-Chunk Nation, and their exploits were often reported in the local newspapers; see “The Winnebagoes at the New York Fair,” Badger State Banner (June 22, 1893): p. 4, c. 4.
by Amy Lonetree
1. The Charles Van Schaick Collection that I examined in 1993 at the Jackson County Historical Society was moved to the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) in 1994. The Jackson County Historical Society Board approved the donation of the negatives to WHS in April 1994, and the move happened in May 1994.
2. The concept of survivance is widely used in the field of Native American Studies, and I feel it is an appropriate term to use when describing Ho-Chunk history. While Gerald Vizenor has offered definitions of the term in various publications, this quote is taken from Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15.
3. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, “Indigenous and Ethnic Representations in Film” (panel presentation at the Documents of an Encounter: Edward Curtis and the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, June 2, 2010).
4. In 1993, a United Nations Commission defined ethnic cleansing as “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous,” as quoted in Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 2. This definition certainly fits the removal of Native Americans from their homelands that occurred throughout the United States during the nineteenth century. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson also uses the term to describe the history of white–Native relations in the nineteenth century. Though he stops shy of referring to this as genocide, he does feel that the history of Texas fits the definition of ethnic cleansing. He states, “I argue, however, that the situation in Texas fails to rise to the level of genocide, if genocide is defined as the intentional killing of nearly all of a racial, religious, or cultural group. . . . Rather, Texans gradually endorsed (at first locally and eventually statewide) a policy of ethnic cleansing that had as its intention the forced removal of certain culturally identified groups from their lands.” Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 7.
5. Jason Tetzloff, “The Diminishing Winnebago Estate in Wisconsin: From White Contact to Removal” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, 1991), 1.
6. Thomas Forsyth to William Clark, 10 June 1828, as quoted in Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, “Autonomy and the Economic Roles of Indian Women of the Fox–Wisconsin Riverway Region, 1763–1832,” in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 84.
7. Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Metis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 130.
8. Thank you to Grant Arndt for providing clarifying information on Red Bird’s acts of resistance during this period. Grant Arndt, email message to author, January 7, 2011.
9. Tetzloff, 59.
10. As quoted in Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, “Autonomy and the Economic Roles of Indian Women of the Fox–Wisconsin Riverway Region, 1763–1832,” 86.
11. Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Winnebago,” in Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), 698.
12. Nancy Lurie, email message to author, December 14, 2010.
13. Grant Arndt, “No Middle Ground: Ho-Chunk Powwows and the Production of Social Space in Native Wisconsin” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2004), 137.
14. As quoted in Mark Diedrich, compiler, Winnebago Oratory: Great Moments in the Recorded Speech of the Ho-Chungra, 1742–1887 (Rochester, Minnesota: Coyote Books, 1991), 58.
15. Tetzloff, 89.
16. Arndt, 145.
17. This passage is quoted in several sources. See Arndt, 145; Lawrence Onsager, “The Removal of the Winnebago Indians from Wisconsin in 1873–74,” (M.A. thesis, Loma Linda University, 1985), 58; and Steven Hoelscher, Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett’s Wisconsin Dells (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 58. Originally quoted in John T. De La Ronde, “Personal Narrative,” Report and Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin 7 (1876): 345–365.
18. Arndt, 146; De La Ronde, 363; Onsager, 58.
19. As quoted in Diedrich, 69.
20. On the attempts by Ho-Chunk leaders to negotiate for a new reservation and leave the Long Prairie reservation, see Edward J. Pluth, “The Failed Watab Treaty of 1853,” Minnesota History 57 (Spring 2000): 2–22.
21. As quoted in Diedrich, 73.
22. “The Knights of the Forest: A Chapter of Secret History,” Mankato Daily Review, April 27, 1886.
23. As quoted in Charles A. Chapman, “Secret Society of the Early Days in Mankato,” Mankato Daily Review, April 18, 1916.
24. As quoted in Diedrich, 89.
25. The following quote was relayed to Thomas Hughes by John Blackhawk and published in Thomas Hughes, Indian Chiefs of Southern Minnesota: Containing Sketches of the Prominent Chieftains of the Dakota and Winnebago Tribes from 1825 to 1865 (1927; reprint, Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, Inc., 1969), 179.
26. As quoted in Diedrich, 92.
27. Hoelscher, 58.
28. In Article II, the Ho-Chunk Constitution outlines membership requirements: “(a) All persons of Ho-Chunk blood whose name appears or are entitled to appear on the official census roll prepared pursuant to the Act of January 18, 1881 (21 Stat. 315), or the Wisconsin Winnebago Annuity Payroll for the year one thousand nine hundred and one (1901), or the Act of January 20, 1910 (36 Stat. 873), or the Act of July 1, 1912 (37 Stat. 187); or (b) all descendents of persons listed in Section 1(a), provided, that such persons are of at least one-fourth (¼) Ho-Chunk blood. . . .” Ho-Chunk Nation Official Government Website, “Constitution of the Ho-Chunk Nation,” http://www.ho-chunknation.com/?PageId=180#art_2 (accessed July 10, 2010).
29. This information is provided on the Wisconsin Historical Society website’s description of Wisconsin Historic Image 64283, which can be accessed through “Wisconsin Historic Images” at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/.
30. Frederick E. Hoxie, Peter C. Mancall, and James H. Merrell, “Cultural and Political Transformations, 1900–1950,” in American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850 to the Present, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie, Peter C. Mancall, and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2001), 263.
1. Undated, Henry Roe Cloud writings, Woesha Cloud North files, in possession of Dr. Renya Ramirez.
by Michael Schmudlach
1. Interview with Frances Perry of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, recorded by Robert Andresen on January 17, 1986, and broadcast on “Northland Hoedown” on April 26, 1986, on Wisconsin Public Radio.
1. The United States Indian Census, taken from 1885 to 1940, is held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and is available on microfilm or online at Ancestry.com. The Ho-Chunk tribal rolls, which are taken from the United States Indian Census, are held by the Ho-Chunk Nation in the Department of Tribal Enrollment. The rolls are used today to determine whether a person can be registered with the Ho-Chunk tribe. Tribal requirements specify that a person must be a minimum of one-quarter Ho-Chunk to be registered, regardless of any other Indian lineage.