Our watches, for a wonder, coincided on Monday afternoon, Aug. 22, 1887. This phenomenon is so rare that W—— made a note in her diary to the effect that for once in its long career my time-piece was right. It was five minutes past two. The place was the beach at Portage, just below the old red wagon-bridge which here spans the gloomy Wisconsin. A teamster had hauled us, our canoe, and our baggage from the depot to the verge of a sand-bank; and we had dragged our faithful craft down through a tangle of sand-burrs and tin cans to the water's edge, and packed the locker for its third and final voyage of the season. A German housewife, with red kerchief, cap, and tucked-up skirt, stood out in the water on the edge of a gravel-spit, engaged in her weekly wrestle with the family wash,—a picturesque, foreign-looking scene. On the summit of a sandy promontory to our left, two other German housewives leaned over a pig-yard fence and gazed intently down at these strange preparations. Back of us were the wooded sand-drifts of Portage, once a famous camping-ground of the Winnebagoes; before us, the dark, treacherous river, with its shallows and its mysterious depths; beyond that, great stretches of sand-fields thick-strewn with willow forests and, three or four miles away, the forbidding range of the Baraboo Bluffs, veiled in the heavy mist which was rapidly closing upon the valley.
We feared that we were booked for a stormy trip, as we pushed out into the bubble-strewn current and found that a cold east wind was blowing over the flats and rowing-jackets were essential.
Portage City, a town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants, occupies the southeastern bank for a mile down. Like Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, it was an outgrowth of the necessities of the early fur-trade. Upon the death of that trade it languished and for a generation or two was utterly stagnant. As a rural trading centre it has since grown into a state of fair prosperity, although the presence of many of the old-time buildings of the Indian traders and transporters gives to much of the town a sadly decayed appearance. For two or three miles we had Portage in view, down a straight course, until at last the thickening mist hid the time-worn houses from view, and we were fairly on our way down the historic Wisconsin, in the wake of Joliet and Marquette, who first traversed this highway to the Mississippi, two hundred and fourteen years ago.
Marquette, in the journal of his memorable voyage, says of the Wisconsin, "It is very broad, with a sandy bottom, forming many shallows, which render navigation very difficult." The river has been frequently described in the journals of later voyagers, and government engineers have written long reports upon its condition, but they have not bettered Marquette's comprehensive phrase.
The general government has spent enormous sums in an endeavor to make the Fox-Wisconsin water highway practicable for the passage of large steam-vessels between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. It was of great service, in its natural state, for the passage into the heart of the continent of that motley procession of priests, explorers, cavaliers, soldiers, trappers, and traders who paddled their canoes through here for nearly two hundred years, the pioneers of French, English, and American civilization in turn. It is still a tempting scheme, to tap the main artery of America, and allow modern vessels of burden to make the circuit between the lakes and the gulf. The Fox River is reasonably tractable, although this season the stage of water above Berlin has been hardly high enough to float a flat-boat. But the Wisconsin remains, despite the hundreds of wing-dams which line her shores, a fickle jade upon whom no reliance whatever can be placed. The current and the sand-banks shift about at their sweet will over a broad valley, and the pilot of one season would scarcely recognize the stream another. Navigation for crafts drawing over a foot of water is practically impossible in seasons of drought, and uncertain in all. A noted engineer has playfully said that the Wisconsin can never be regulated, "until the bottom is lathed and plastered;" and another officially reported, over fifteen years ago, that nothing short of a continuous canal along the bank, from Portage to Prairie du Chien, will suffice to meet the expectations of those who favor the government improvement of this impossible highway.
In the neighborhood of Portage, the wing-dams,—composed of mattresses of willow boughs, weighted with stone,—are in a reasonable degree of preservation and in places appear to be of some avail in contracting the channel. But elsewhere down the river, they are generally mere hindrances to canoeing. The current, as it caroms from shore to shore, pays but little heed to these obstructions and we often found it swiftest over the places where black lines of willow twigs bob and sway above the surface of the rushing water; while the channel staked out by the engineers was the site of a sand-field, studded with aspen-brush.
It is a lonely run of an hour and a half down to the mouth of the Baraboo River, through the mazes of the wing-dams, surrounded by desolate bottom lands of sand and wooded bog. The east wind had brought a smart shower by the time we had arrived off the mouth of this northern tributary and we hauled up at a low, forested bank just below the junction, where rubber coats were brought out and canvas spread over the stores. The rain soon settled into a mere drizzle, and W——, ever eager in her botanical researches, wandered about regardless of wet feet, investigating the flora of the locality. The yellow sneeze-weed and purple iron-weed predominate in great clumps upon the verge of the bank, and lend a cheerful tone to what would otherwise be a desolate landscape.
The drizzle finally ceasing, we were again afloat, and after shooting by scores of wing-dams that had been "snowed under" by shifting sand, and floating over others that were in the heart of the present channel, we came to Dekorra, some seven miles below Portage. Dekorra is a quaint little hamlet, with just five weather-worn houses and a blacksmith-shop in sight, nestled in a hollow at the base of a bluff on the southern bank. The river courses at its feet, and from the top of a naked cliff a ferry-wire stretches high above the stream and loses itself among the trees on the opposite bottoms. The east wind whistled a pretty note as it was split by the swaying thread, and the anvil by the smith's forge rang out in unison, clear as a well-toned bell. A crude cemetery, apparently containing far more graves than Dekorra's present census would show inhabitants, flanks the faded-out settlement on the shoulder of an adjoining hill. The road to the tattered ferry-boat, rotting on the beach, gave but little evidence of recent use, for Dekorra is a relic.
The valley of the Wisconsin is from three to five miles broad, flanked on either side, below the Portage, by an undulating range of imposing bluffs, from one hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty feet in height. They are heavily wooded, as a rule, although there is much variety,—pleasant grass-grown slopes; naked, water-washed escarpments, rising sheer above the stream; terraced hills, with eroded faces, ascending in a regular succession of benches to the cliff-like tops; steep uplands, either covered with a dense and regular growth of forest, or shattered by fire or tornado. The ravines and pocket-fields between the bluffs are often of exceeding beauty, especially when occupied by a modest little village,—or better, by some small settler, whose outlet to the country beyond the edge of his mountain basin may be seen threading the woodlands which tower above him, or zigzagging through a neighboring pass, worn deep by some impatient spring torrent in a hurry to reach the river level.
Between these ranges stretches a wide expanse of bottoms, either bog or sand plain, over all of which the river flows at high water, and through which the swift current twists and bounds like a serpent in agony, constantly cutting out new channels and filling up the old, obeying laws of its own, ever defying the calculations of pilots and engineers. As it thus sweeps along, wherever its fancy listeth, here to-day and there to-morrow, it forms innumerable islands which greatly add to the picturesqueness of the view. Now and then there are two or three parallel channels, running along for miles before they join, perplexing the traveler with a labyrinth of water paths. These islands are often mere sandbars, sometimes as barren as Sahara, again thick-grown with willows and seedling aspens; but for the most part they are well-wooded, their banks gay with the season's flowers, and luxuriant vines hanging in deep festoons from the trees which overhang the flood. At their heads, often high up among the branches of the elms, are great masses of driftwood, the remains of shattered lumber-rafts or saw-mill offal from the great northern pineries, evidencing the height of the spring flood which so often converts the Wisconsin into an Amazon.