4 February 05

Portage

Picture a highway bridge over a small river in central Wisconsin. The land is flat, mostly open, marshy in bits; on one side up a slope is an old farmhouse. The only clue to anything unusual about the vicinity is that it has perhaps more than its fair share of historical markers. Two of these commemorate Fort Winnebago, formerly on the site of the farmhouse. The second one is a small monument in red granite, erected around 1925 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The wording on the copper plaques is terse; on one side there is a list of officers who served at the fort. To the modern viewer, all the names on the plaque are likely to be unfamiliar except for one, a Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.

So began the environmental historian William Cronon last night in a talk he gave in the Alumni Center on campus. He was reading from the first chapter of a book he has been working on for ten years, and is likely to be published in three, a local history of a town named Portage. “This is a place with ghosts”, he said. Three of these ghosts are important figures in American environmental history who spent formative years near the spot: Frederick Jackson Turner, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold.

And once upon a time the spot was a major transportation nexus. Due to an accident of physical geography, the Fox River, over which the bridge passes, here lies only 1.28 miles from the Wisconsin River. The Fox drains into the Great Lakes and hence is connected to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Wisconsin drains into the Mississippi and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. In the era when canoes reigned, when waterways were the chief means of transportation into the interior, this portage spot, at the border of two great watersheds, was key.

There are many stories to be told about this place. But that is so about all places. The process of placemaking, Cronon contends, is the process of storytelling.

Posted by at 08:35 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Ah, yes, the portage. I think of the Fox as my river. The Grand River, which heads up here at Fairwater, drains into the upper Fox. The lower Fox drains into the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. Eventually everything touches everything. There are some great stories at the portage, great stories all along the Fox. I speak about “ghosts on the landscape,” and there are lots of them along the Fox. Ultimately all history is local history, I think. “The process of placemaking is the process of story-telling….” I’ve never heard it put quite that way. I’ll add it to my Wallace Stegner version: No place has a history until it has had its poet. Thanks for posting this.

    — Tom Montag    5. February 2005, 02:59    Link
  2. “The process of placemaking, Cronon contends, is the process of storytelling.” That is literally true with the oldest stratum of narrative, sacred stories from traditions as disparate as Australian aborigines – about which i was just refreshing my memory yesterday, in Warlpiri Dreamings and Histories – and the Dineh, thinking of Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places.

    Cronon’s book sounds like it will be a good addition to that bookshelf. Thanks for the preview!

    — Dave    5. February 2005, 08:33    Link

  3. Even today, of course, many people understand geography only through stories—the simple but satisfying narratives that we call “directions.” I’ve often wondered if directions offer a remnant, for the scientistic world, of the paths that Aboriginals dreamt continuously into being.

    Me, I can’t follow directions to save my life. Give me a map.

    — Jarrett    5. February 2005, 13:36    Link

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