from Poisoning Paradise: An Environmental History of Madison
By Maria C. Powell, PhD
[Dislaimer: This is a very abbreviated description of some Ho-Chunk (Ho-Chungra) history in the Madison area. I am not a historian and am not Ho-Chunk. Though I did consult a few Ho-Chunk people I know here on a few of these details, most of this information came from documents and/or books written by Ho-Chunk, other Wisconsin indigenous sources (Patty Loew), and/or European American writers (Mollenhoff, Ruff). It likely includes inaccuracies and I apologize for those in advance. I welcome corrections.]
Ho-Chunk lived in this desired “veritable garden of Eden” for “time immemorial”
The Ho-Chunk (Ho-Chungra) people who lived in the beautiful area that eventually became Madison called it “Teejop.[1] Most European writings say that Ho-Chunk lived in the Teejop area for at least 12,000 years, based on archaeological evidence, but Ho-Chungra oral tradition states the Ho-Chunk “have always been here.” In the Ho-Chunk language, Hoocak, Teejop means “Four Lakes.” The area is also sometimes referred to as “Taychopera.” (Ho-Chunk and European-American writings are unclear as to which of these terms is most accurate, whether they are interchangeable, and/or whether one or another refers to a more specific part of the four lakes region.)[2],[3]
European founders of Madison later came up with their own contrived names for the four lakes, but of course Ho-Chunk had their own names for these beloved waters, which provided most of their sustenance for eons. Different sources vary somewhat on the specific Ho-Chunk names, but according to the most recent source I could locate, Ho-Chunk referred to the Yahara River, which connects the four lakes, as Mąą’ii yahara (Catfish River). Lake Mendota was known as “Waaksikhomikra (“Where the Person Rests”) and Lake Monona as or Čihabokihaketera (“Great Tipi Lake.” Lake Waubesa was Sahu Xetera (spelling uncertain) (Tall Reed Lake) and Lake Kegonsa was Nąsąkučitera (Hard Maple Grove Lake).[i],[4]
The Ho-Chunk people lived in wigwams in small villages scattered throughout Teejop, subsisting on fish, shellfish, birds, deer, elk and other fur-bearing animals, nuts and berries, and maple sugar. Wild rice, also a staple of the Ho-Chunk diet, grew in shallow lake areas and marshes. The Indians had an extensive system of foot trails throughout the area and traveled quickly on water in birchbark canoes. They were also skilled gardeners, growing highly productive seasonal gardens of corn, pumpkins, watermelons, beans, squash, and more to supplement foods they hunted and gathered. Early surveyors documented the production of over 84 tons of corn (presumably per season) in Ho-Chunk agricultural villages known as Old Turtle (Middleton), Four Lakes (Madison), and Broken Arm (Monona).
Teejop was a culturally and spiritually central and sacred place to the Ho-Chunk, and large number of geometric and animal-shaped effigy mounds built there by Ho-Chunk’s ancestors.[5],[ii] Teejop was considered a cultural center of the mound building people, and over 1,200 conical, linear, and effigy mounds were created there. Most of them were destroyed during city development, but a few remain today scattered throughout the city and campus.
Madison was deemed a paradise and coveted by wealthy east coast speculators
The area around Madison was also seen as a special place to non-Indigenous people who ventured there for fur-trading purposes, land speculation, scientific research, and other reasons.[6],[iii] In the 1800s, many visitors to the Madison area wrote flowery descriptions of its beauty. George W. Featherstonaugh, an English geologist who visited the Madison area in 1837, called the area west of the city “one of the most exquisitely beautiful regions I have ever seen in any part of the world.” The same year, Simeon Mills, one of Madison’s early merchants, said “language cannot paint the intoxicating beauty of this garden of the world before it was touched by the utilizing hand of civilization…It was a paradise of loveliness, a veritable garden of Eden.”[7],[iv]
The four lakes in particular were raved about in early writings. Featherstonaugh wrote that “the ‘four noble lakes in the centre of a region of unrivaled beauty, must constitute perfection itself.’[v] A militiaman in the Black Hawk War wrote “they are the most beautiful bodies of water I ever saw.”[vi] In the 1850s, a visiting professor from Louisville wrote that they were “as lovely as a fairy dream”—and regarding the city, he said “I feel convinced this place was once called Eden, but in the language of mortals it is now called Madison.”[vii]
The scientist Increase Lapham described the lakes as “cold and clear to a remarkable degree” and with “bottoms…visible at a great depth.” Fish and wildlife were abundant in the lakes, and early settlers with hunting skills were generously sustained by them. One earlier Madison settler wrote that the lakes were “fairly black in places with flocks of ducks and geese” and easy to hunt.[viii] Another humorously described walking up to shallow waters of the “Third Lake” (Lake Monona) in 1839 and picking up a 35 pound catfish that was sunning there.[ix]
U.S. Government violently removed Ho-Chunk from their sacred lands
Tragically for the Ho-Chunk, the U.S. government and eastern speculators, lead miners, and farmers also desired what Madison and surrounding areas’ “Garden of Eden” and all the valuable natural resources it had to offer. A month after the Black Hawk War, in a meeting with some Ho-Chunk leaders, U.S. government authorities demanded that Ho-Chunk cede their lands south of the Wisconsin River and north of the Rock River, which included the four lakes regions. According this this agreement, called the Rock Island Treaty, no Ho-Chunk could legally reside in this area after June 1, 1833.
Writings by Madison’s early leaders about the removal of the Ho-Chunk people reflect a disturbingly casual acceptance of their forced military removal, mixed with patronizing, disingenuous sadness.
In an 1857 piece by Lyman Draper, one of Madison’s first mayors, A. A. Bird, described how city settlement began in 1837. “At that period,” he wrote, “almost the entire territory between Lake Michigan and the mining country bordering on the Mississippi River was a wild and unsettled country, inhabited only by the ‘Sons of the Forest.’ These people, he continued patronizingly, as if they were naïve children, “seemed to cling to Madison and its beautiful lakes with a determination not to leave until called to the ‘Spirit Land.’” His wording suggested that the land rightfully belonged to the white settlers. “Our beautiful lakes, the fisheries and game, the beautiful country bordering upon the lakes, the hills and dales and groves had become so associated with their very being, that it was to them a paradise on earth.”
Bird described the removal of the “Sons of the Forest” from their “paradise on earth.” “The General Government,” he began, “required the removal of the Indians to the country west of the Mississippi.” Using passive voice—deflecting responsibility from any particular entity– he continued. “It was found necessary to procure the aid of the army in removing them to their homes” and “it was a difficult matter for the soldiers to collect them together.” He noted that it was “a touching scene to witness the departure of those who had spent a lifetime in a land made so beautiful by nature from which they were to be removed.”
Perhaps most troubling was Bird’s description of the artistic opportunities for painters in capturing the emotions of the Indians—no doubt deep, indescribable anguish–as they were removed. “The different emotions exhibited by these ‘Sons of the Forest,’ were worthy the pencil of the painter. They were leaving the land of their fathers, the spot dearest to them on earth; passing westward, upon reaching University Hill, they took a long and last farewell of the spot endeared to them by early associations. ‘The grove and lakes on which they had sported from childhood, where they had followed the flying deer, and impelled the light canoe, were to be seen no more.”[8]
Ho-Chunk “renegades” refuse to leave
Though many early writings, such as the above, give the impression that all of the Ho-Chunk people sadly walked away from the four lakes area after the military rounded them up and told them to leave —that is not what happened. The Ho-Chunk people opposed the 1833 treaty, and though some were forced from the Madison area, many found ways to resist and remain on the land they loved.[9] In June 1835, according to Mollenhoff, an estimated 1,200 to 1,400 Ho-Chunk were still camped between Lake Mendota and Lake Koshkonong to the east of Madison.[x] In 1836, Madison was chosen as capital of the Wisconsin Territory,[10] and in 1837 U.S. authorities gave remaining Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin eight months to move to land in northern Minnesota. Ho-Chunk leaders opposed this plan and again, some left, but others refused.[11],[12]
According to Ruff (2000), “some five to six hundred Ho-Chunk camped at the present site of Tenney Park on Lake Mendota and elsewhere around the lakes as late as 1839-1840,” and though “the government sent the military to remove them” in the late 1840s, “many slipped away.” Those who remained, he continued, continued to go to their traditional hunting, fishing and ceremonial spots, even though recent treaties prohibited them from holding titles to property in the region.
According to Allan Ruff’s history, “large numbers” of Ho-Chunk camped near the head of Pheasant Branch Creek, and around 1864, many camped in a large marsh near where Tenney Park is now, and north of that in Fuller’s Woods. “Living in bark and rush-covered wigwams,” Ruff wrote, “they hunted muskrat, fished, and harvested wild rice and the edible arrowroot root.”[xi]
In 1874, the U.S. government rounded up a thousand Ho-Chunk remaining in Wisconsin, forced them at gunpoint into boxcars, and shipped them to the Nebraska Ho-Chunk reservation. Again, showing remarkable courage and endurance, many returned to Wisconsin and continued to live in their traditional ways on the margins of the city even as the city grew.”
Ho-Chunk life at the margins of the city became harder and harder as rapid city growth and development filled in wetlands and polluted waters that sustained the fish, wild rice and other wildlife the Ho-Chunk depended on for food. Nevertheless, the Ho-Chunk people who remained in—or returned to—Wisconsin are considered politically distinct from the Nebraska Ho-Chunk; they are called the “renegades” or “rebel faction,” and are the ancestors of the Ho-Chunk remaining in Wisconsin today.
Proud, progressive Madison pushes renegade Ho-Chunk to the polluted margins
Some of the Ho-Chunk people who refused to leave, or returned after forced removal by the U.S. government, were still living in the four lakes area while farms, homes, businesses and industries were being built around them. According to Ruff, “[e]arly county anthropologist C. E. Brown recorded an account of a small Ho-Chunk encampment on Lake Mendota’s Picnic Point Bay as late as 1889.”[xii] In his history written at the turn of the century, the historian Ruben Gold Thwaites noted that “….we can still—sixty one years later (1899)…frequently see Winnebago tepees on the shore of Lakes Mendota and Monona; especially upon the latter, a mile and a half from the Capitol.”[xiii]
Ho-Chunk people camped in Madison’s eastside along Lake Monona south of Madison-Kipp through the 1800s, even as residential lots were being sold, and some may have been living there after the factory was built in 1902. Several effigy mounds remain in Hudson Park just south of Kipp. As more lots were developed, most Ho-Chunk people there were likely pushed southward along the lake to the less-populated Winnequah area, also a known campsite.
Some of the renegade Ho-Chunk lived on the margins of the city along the lakes well into the 1900s. The Ho-Chunk’s existence in Madison at this time was described as “fugitive” by Mollenhoff. “They ate boiled lily bulbs, muskrats, and fish and lived in wigwams. To make money they trapped mink and speared muskrat in Madison’s many marshes, and when they collected enough pelts, they sold them to Capitol Square fur buyers for ten cents apiece.”[xiv]
Sadly, as the Ho-Chunk people remaining in Madison were pushed to the edges of the growing city, their ability to continue traditional subsistence methods they had relied on for thousands of years were slowly eroded. The lakes and waters that provided their food were polluted with sewage and chemicals, and marshes were being drained and filled. Garbage was sometimes pushed into the marshy areas along the edges of lakes where Indians fished, trapped animals and gathered wild rice. Eventually the wild rice could no longer survive in these degraded waters. The marshy area at the mouth of Starkweather Creek, where wild rice likely thrived, was a residential dumping area that eventually became an official city landfill and was filled in with residential and industrial wastes to “make land” to build Olbrich Park.
Some courageous, resourceful Ho-Chunk persisted and remain in Madison today
As the 1900s progressed, many Ho-Chunk still in the Madison area either gave up traditional subsistence modes or moved elsewhere—many to the Black River Falls area, which eventually became the tribal headquarters. But some Ho-Chunk managed to survive in Madison all the way through the 1900s, and their descendants still live in the city today.
Well-known Ho-Chunk artist Harry Whitehorse’s parents and grandparents were among the renegade families who refused to be removed from their beloved Teejop. Annie Greencrow Whitehorse, Harry’s mother, camped in the Four Lakes area as a child. As an adult, while living in a wigwam at the Ho-Chunk in Black River Falls (where Harry was born), Annie bought land where Ho-Chunk had lived for generations just outside of Madison south of Lake Monona near Mud Lake in the 1920s (now the City of Monona). She moved her young family there. After living in a wigwam for a time, the family built a home and children were raised there next to a stream and marsh that provided the family’s sustenance.[13] (See end of article for sources of this information).
Harry remembers living on fish, muskrats, and other wildlife, along with vegetables they grew in a garden. The family got drinking water from nearby springs. But the Whitehorse land was slowly surrounded by urban development, and in 2008 when Harry, his wife and daughter still lived there, the stream was considered a “stormwater conveyance” by urban planners. At the time, developers planned a multi-use retail complex, including a large hotel, on land next to the Whitehorse home that had been owned by the family for generations. Harry home was on 1 acre adjacent to the planned development, and the developers were hoping they would not want to live next to a big hotel and would sell it. They were wrong.
Harry, 81 years old at that time, was very distraught about this planned development—which eventually came to pass– and its effects on the land and water. “Once they chop down all the trees, the birds and wildlife will leave,” he told the Cap Times reporter Mary Ellen Gabriel. “That’s what my day-to-day life is all about – seeing the animals come up the creek this way. I see the animals and I say, ‘I’m still here, and I see you’re still here.’ He said many of his sculptures and paintings were inspired by the creek’s wildlife.
The Whitehorses hired attorneys and in the end did not sell their 1-acre and home next to the creek. Harry passed away in 2017, at age 90, and he is survived by his wife Deb Whitehorse and several children and grandchildren—along with many other relatives throughout the Madison area. Deb, a well-known competitive ice boater, still owns the house, and several nearby parcels are owned by others in the Whitehorse family.
Harry’s stunning sculptures and artwork remain all over Madison, and some are displayed around the world.[14] One of his most beloved sculptures is in Hudson Park along Lake Monona, near some of the few Ho-Chunk effigy mounds that weren’t destroyed by development. Whitehorse Middle School (formerly Schenk Middle School) is named after Harry’s mother Annie.
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Almost all the history on the Whitehorse family is from the below online sources, which may have included inaccuracies (or I interpreted incorrectly). My apologies for any information that isn’t accurate. Corrections are welcome.
-https://madison.com/news/local/renowned-local-sculptor-and-painter-harry-whitehorse-dies-at-90/article_31adbe0f-df79-509a-a7cd-cbf33db9aa23.html
-https://madison365.com/remembering-harry-whitehorse/
[1] The Ho-Chunk people who lived in the Madison area were inaccurately dubbed “Winnbagoes” by early French fur traders (a name they are still called by some today).
[2] https://tribalrelations.wisc.edu/dejope/.
[3] Until shortly before European contact, the Ho-Chunk tribe was the most powerful in a large area including Madison, with lands stretching from upper Michigan to Southern Wisconsin. They were part of the Ho-Chunk Nation, which included the Iowa, Oto, and Missouri tribes (Loew, 2015). This source says “Ho-Chungra have traditional lands that go from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and Illinois.” Ho-Chunk consider Red Banks, near Green Bay, to be their place of origin, but the tribe was slowly pushed southward after European contact and fur trade dynamics, as well as conflicts among French, English, Americans pushed eastern tribes into Wisconsin, exacerbating conflicts among them for lands and resources. (Loew)
[4] According to Allen Ruff (2000), Ho-Chunk people called Lake Monona “lake where the turtle emerges” and Lake Mendota “lake where the Indian lies”—likely because of the many effigy burial mounds on its shores (Ruff, pg. 23).
[5] Madison is sometimes called “Mound City,” because it has a denser concentration of effigy mounds than anywhere in the world–though many have been destroyed by urban and agricultural development.
[6] French traders were aware of the areas around Madison as early as 1655 but purposely didn’t share their knowledge of the region, even going so far as to knowingly make inaccurate maps to keep other explorers and entrepreneurs from finding it; they were concerned that farming, industry, and business developments in the region would destroy the habitat for the fur-bearing animals that they traded. Beaver habitat was in fact eventually decimated by farming and other developments; beavers were also over-hunted nearly to extinction.
[7] Mills was a banker, real estate developer, and “respected civic leader who was instrumental in the growth and prosperity of Madison.” He founded the city’s first insurance company, the first newspaper, two major railroads, and helped establish the University of Wisconsin (historic sign on the Mills property, 2016).
[7] Now the site of Madison-Kipp’s Fair Oaks factory
[8] Lyman Draper, 1857. Madison, the Capital of Wisconsin: Its Growth, Progress, Condition, Wants and Capabilities
[9] They opposed it because it wasn’t signed by enough tribal leaders authorized to conduct such negotiations.
[10] The Wisconsin territory at the time included Iowa, Minnesota, and the eastern half of the Dakotas
[11] Many of the Ho-Chunk who went to Minnesota were later asked by the U.S. government to move elsewhere in Minnesota, after which many took refuge with the Omaha tribe in Nebraska. In an 1865 treaty, the Ho-Chunk purchased part of the Omaha reservation.
[12] By 1837-1838, Madison’s first capitol building was already being constructed. A steam saw mill was erected on Lake Mendota to prepare logs and a scow from “Eagle Point,” made daily trips with loads of stone to use in building the capital. (December 31, 1930, The Capital Times).
[13] Like many Indigenous people, Ho-Chunk people’s traditional views on human’s relationships with land did not include property ownership. Harry told the Cap Times—“you don’t own the land, the land owns you.” But “It was almost like other Indians thought Nani was an atheist,” he said of his mother, “because she wanted title to the land. She saw the writing on the wall.” (see Cap Times link below).
[14] https://www.harrywhitehorse.com/
[i] https://tribalrelations.wisc.edu/dejope/.
[ii] Mollenhoff, p. 11-12
[iii] Travels in the Interior Parts of North America in 1766, ’67 and ’68, by Capt. J. Carver. London. 1778. 8vo. Durrie history, p. 11).
[iv] Mollenhoff, p. 31, p. 41
[v] 1857, Lyman Draper document
[vi] 1934, Durrie p 16
[vii] 1857 Madison history by Draper
[viii] Mollenhoff, p. 40
[ix] Durrie, p. 28
[x] Mollenhoff, p. 19
[xi] Ruff, pg, 43
[xii] Ruff, pg, 43
[xiii] “The Story of Madison; 1836-1900,” p. 9
[xiv] Mollenhoff, p. 228
© 2023 Maria C. Powell. All rights reserved.