USA > Wisconsin > Buffalo County > History of Buffalo County, Wisconsin > Part 30
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commodate itself to circumstances wherever it was introduced, until from the solitary postillion, mounted on a stout horse, and armed to the teeth, it gradually metamorphosized into the stages, still sometimes accompanied by guards, lumbering along slowly and heavily on poor roads, finally on carefully constructed ones, until to-day it comes along at railroad spced in comfortable quar- ters. It is one of the most interesting phases in modern develop- ment, how out of such a small and unsatisfactory arrangement in the course of time the gigantic service was developed, which now is ramified into the farthest corners of the world and by which a letter is brought across an ocean for the insignificant sum of five cents, and for two cents is carried through thousands of miles in the United States. It is impossible to follow the march of im- provement in all the details connected with this iniportant factor of modern public life but I imagine it must have been about thus:
1. Regularity, dependent on security and reliability of ex- ternal provisions and arrangements, such as roads, bridges and relays.
2. Speed, requiring great improvements of roads and bridges more and extensive relays, hence a greater number of stations, horses and vehicles.
3. Cheapness. Establishments having to be kept up, they could only be remunerative, if used by the public in general, and the public could only use it, if prices were reasonable, and would use it the more in proportion to cheapness.
Of course this does not apply to our own country and present time, as far as development is concerned, yet it may not be amiss to call attention to it, since to a certain extent this development must occur in about the same successive steps in every country and may be traced from colonial times to the present.
Experience has demonstrated the necessity of retaining the mail or postal service as a government monopoly, though in this country it is modified by the contract system. The extension of mail routes is concommitant to the extension of population, and the means of transportation used are determined by circumstances. Below I shall give a table showing the successive establishment of post-offices in this county. As every one knows, we received the mail at first by steamboat at the regular landings, and from these it was distributed to the interior offices as soon as such were estab-
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lished. In the intermission between the seasons of navigation the mail was carried by stage coaches or wagons, frequently sleighs, froni some places already reached by railroads, to every interme- diate point, a mode of conveyance still necessary and practiced for the interior offices not on railroads. In these cases the passenger transportation is independent of the mail service, and has never been connected with it here, except as the arrangements for mail ser- vices would furnish regular opportunities of conveyance.
The following table shows the names and most other things of interest concerning the post offices of Buffalo County. Names of consecutive incumbents of these offices will be found in the de- scription of the several towns.
POSTOFFICES IN BUFFALO COUNTY.
Names.
Location.
Time of Establishment.
First Postmaster.
Present Postmaster.
Time of taking Charge.
Alma ..
In the city.
W. H. Gates.
M. W. McDonnell.
.Sept. 21, 1885
Anchorage ...
Sect. 30, T. 21, R. 11 ..
Feb. 12. 1868 ...
Robert Henry.
Robert Henry.
.Feb. 12, 1868
Beef Slough.
Camp No. 1.
May 9, 1887.
George Scott. ..
Geo. Scott
.. May 8. 1887
Buffalo ..
In the city ..
March 1858.
Charles Scbaettle.
Nicholas Weinandy
June 16, 1886
Cocbrane ..
Near station.
June 14, 1887 .
Jos. L. Rohrer ..
Jos. L. Rohrer.
.June 14, 1887
Cross ...
Sect. 5, T. 19, R. 10.
Aug. 23, 1872
Gotlieb Bobri ...
Gottlieb Bohri ..
. Aug. 23, 1872
Fountain City .. In the village.
1854.
Marvin Pierce.
John B. Oenning ..
Jan. 13, 1886
Gilmanton.
Sect. 14, T. 23, R. 11.
1858.
Wm. Loomis
J. W. Howard.
.May 15, 1866
Glencoe' ..
Sect. 28, T. 21, R. 10 ...
Sept. 1858.
Geo. Cowie ...
.
Phil. Smith ..
Spring 1887
Marshland. . ..
At the R. R. station ..
|1874. 1871.
J. Zatscb ..
Lawrence Schneider.
1878
Misha Mokwa. . In the village.
Jas. W. Kelley ..
Wm. Cbafey.
April 8, 1887
Modena ..
Sect. 23 T. 23 R. 12.
1863
Benj. F. Babcock.
H. J. Canar.
. Oct. 18, 1886
Mondovi.
In the village ..
1858.
Robert Nelson.
J. D. Pace.
March 22, 1887
Montana .. Nelson.
Sect. 36 T. 22 R. 11
1870.
Fred. Zeller ...
Aug. Helwig, Jr.
. . 1880
Urnes.
Sect. 8 T. 23 R. 12.
1872. .
Ole P. Urnes.
S. S. Braford.
Dec. 6, '77 and July 20, 1883
Waumandee
Sect. 21 T. 21 R. 11
1857
J. H. Manz. .
Chas. Kirebner.
.In 1871
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.July 28, 1886
In Fairview Village
Ernst Warner.
John F. Butler
Lookout.
I could not get any report from this office, which may possibly be abandoned soon.
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The following postoffices that once existed in this county have been discontinued: Maxville, formerly situated at the store on Max- ville Prairie; Burnside, situated in Sect. 3 T. 23 R. 13, at the house of J. L. Hallock; Eagle Creek, situated in Section 7, T. 21 R. 11, near the crossing of Little Waumandee Creek; Urban, situated at the house of Henry Hauenschild in the upper part of Little Wau- mandee Valley, Eagle Branch Sect. 36 T. 21 R. 11, kept by Fred Morgan.
The mail is carried by the C. B. & N. R. R. along its line and delivered once a day in each direction, north and south. From Waumandee and Montana to Fountain City and the reverse, mail is carried three times a week, also from Alma to Modena, Gilman- ton and Mondovi, and return. Some connection seems to exist between Waumandee and Montana on one side and Gilmanton on the other. The mail for Buffalo City P. O. is carried by team from Alma, three times a week. A tri-weekly line is still in exist- ence between Nelson and Durand, although there is but one post- office, Misha Mokwa now situated on this route. How Urne and Cross are supplied I do not know. There must be a mail route between Gilmanton in our, and Independence in Trempealeau County, on which Lookout P. O. is situated in the town of Dover, but precise accounts are wanting.
RAFTING.
Along the Chippewa River and its numerous tributaries there was an'almost inexhaustible supply of Pine Timber that had grown up from times immemorial. Settlements began to encroach upon the margin of this immense tract of land, but they only made it evident, that the timber would not be needed, nor could it be pro- fitably utilized upon the spot. It had long been wanted some- where else. The question was how to transport it. Easy enough one should think. But although logs would float, and rafting had been practiced long ago, much had to be learned, contrived and arranged to make the wood in the log a profitable piece of merch- andise, an object of wholesale traffic. The most natural idea was to reduce the pine to lumber. Waterpower was not wanting in places to which logs could at the annual freshets be floated and after the subsidence of these, could be conveniently manufactured into lumber, which would sell along the Mississippi River like hot cakes. As early as 1828 the first attempts at carrying out this
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idea were made. The permission of the Indians being necessary for settlement and establishment of any factories or posts, Judge Lockwood of Prairie du Chien obtained that permission of Waba- sha, the chief of the Sioux, to build a saw mill on the Red Cedar, now Menomonie River. Gen. Street, Indian Agent at Fort Craw- ford was his partner in the business. It would be tedious to fol- low up the development of the trade thus begun, but after the ex- periences of almost forty years after the first beginning, during which time the valleys of the Chippewa and the most important of its tributaries had become settled and were finally inhabited almost exclusively with white men, the Indians being expelled, cities like Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire founded, it became ap -. parent that the transportation of the pine timber had become not only necessary for the wants of the people dwelling below along the Mississippi, but that it would no longer be profitable to have all the lumber manufactured upon the spot, thus submitting this immense interest to the exclusive control of a comparatively nar- row strip of country and the few men it, who had the means to build and run saw mills, and who virtually had the monopoly of the pine lands. It is true, that the establishment of mills had been attended with risks and dangers, with losses and disasters, but it is just as true that many of these losses and disasters could and would have been avoided if the experience of the past could have been made available in the beginning. The owners of pine land had an indisputable right to dispose of their timber as it suited themselves, and navigation upon the Chippewa for their logs could not be prevented nor prohibited. The question was to find some safe reservoir for the reception, storage and manipulation of these logs. This reservoir was found in the Beef Slough and its connections and ramifications. There are rumors of quiet explora- tions of the slough by several men even in the earliest times of the settlements. Victor Probst, one of the earliest settlers at Alma, used to relate that a stranger, whom he met somewhere on Beef Slough, almost directly told him, that this would in no very distant days be used for the very purpose for which it now serves.
I have under the head of Topography given a description of Beef Slough and its relations to the Chippewa, the Beef River and the Mississippi so that it will not be necessary to say more about that. The obvious connection of the Slough with the Chippewa
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River was known to pilots and if they also knew the difficulties and intricacies of it, they were quite excusable, if they preferred the main channel, though it did look smaller at the parting from the slough. This circumstance was illustrated in the following anec- dote: In the year 1835, Jefferson Davis, then a young lieutenant in the United States service, stationed at Fort Crawford, was sent up to the mills on the Menomonee to get lumber to rebuild the fort or make some addition to it. The order had been filled, and Davis and the soldiers were coming down the Chippewa under the command of an old voyageur who acted as pilot. At the critical point where Beef Slough sets off to the left, or rather seems to go on straight, while the main river turns to the right, the French- man, well aware of the situation, called out: "To de right, hard." "What's that," said the West Pointer, "you're going to run this raft right to hell? I tell you to pull to the left where the main river is." It was done and the lumber lost in Beef Slough. The crew of the raft returned to the mills for more lumber, and the officers to the fort in a canoe to report the raft broken. Though we cannot vouch for the truth of the anecdote, it still illustrates the relative situation of the parts concerned. As times wore on, and about thirty-two years after Jeff Davis' adventures on Beef Slough and two years after the explosion of his confederacy, the initial steps were taken to put the idea of creating Beef Slough a log harbor into operation. On the 27th day of April 1867, in the village of Alma the
Beef Slough Manufacturing, Booming, Log-driving and Transportation Company
was organized by the following persons: M. M. Davis, M. D. of Appleton (now of Baraboo,) Wis .; Jas. H. Bacon of Ypsilanti, Mich .; Elijah Swift of Falmouth, Mass .; C. Moser, Jr., Jno. Hun- ner, Jr., and Fred Lane of Alma, Wis.
The first meeting of the stockholders was held at Alma, May 23d, 1867, and the following Board of Directors were elected:
M. M. Davis, T. E. Crane, Elijah Swift, Francis Palms, Jas. H. Bacon, Fred Lane, and Jno. Hunner, Jr.
At a meeting held the same day, the directors chose M. M. Davis, President; C. Moser, Jr., Secretary; Elijah Swift, Treasurer; and T. E. Crane, Superintendent.
Violent opposition to this organization was manifested on the
%
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Chippewa River and its tributaries by the lumbermen of the region, who had until then enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the lumbering business, not only by being the only ones in the business, but by dictating their own price in the purchase of logs cut upon land not their own. Most determined in this combined opposi- tion was the firm of Knapp, Stout & Company, whose mills were on the Menomonee, but who were also largely interested in the village of Read's Landing, Minn., where at that time the coupling and combining of lumber and lografts from the Chippewa was car- ried on, and which on account of the large number of men em- ployed in that business and other items connected with lumbering was a very thriving place, but has since dwindled down to insig- nificance. This opposition did not manifest itself in idle words only but went to work to create obstacles, which, if not removed, would render it impossible to get logs into the Slough. A dam was thrown in at the head of the slough, where Knapp, Stout & Co. owned the land on both sides. The Beef Slough Co. secured an entrance to the place by having a road laid out from a place on the Durand road close to the Chippewa, along the river and the slough, which road was an open higway as soon as recorded. The people from Alma and along Beef Slough were all in favor of the new enterprise, and when called upon to assist in the removal of the obstructions put in by the Menomonee firm, assembled in large numbers, armed and equipped in various ways. I never at- tended any of these gatherings, but I had laid out the above men- tioned road, and so was acquainted with the locality, and as excite- ments are never silent, I learned much of what happened from acquaintances, and on one of these occasions Mr. Thomas B. Wil- son was brought before me in my office of Justice of the Peace, then residing in the town of Belvidere, about nine miles below Alma. He had come down in company with Mr. A. Tainter, who with Wilson was the Co. attached to Knapp and Stout, and with a force of their men to prevent the removal of the obstructions they had placed into Beef Slough at the head of it. In course of lively debates carried on in the choicest English of river-men, with appropriate retorts from the other side, Mr. Wilson, accord- ing to complaint, seized an axe and cut a cable, and threatened summary vengcance upon all who dared to oppose his sovereign will, whereupon he was arrested by a constable of Buffalo County,
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Capt. Beely, and sent down to be put under bonds to keep the peace, which was done and bonds furnished by parties in Alma. I don't remember that any harm was done, nor that anything was demolished, with the exception of some melons, in whch beneficial work Mr. Wilson was faithfully assisted by his attorney, Mr. Camp- bell of Wabasha.
At this juncture it will not be amiss to introduce some testi- mony from the opposite side. This I find in the work of T. E. Randall, called the "Early History of the Chippewa Valley " page 143 and following. " At first all the mills on the river joined in the opposition to this gigantic rival as against a common enemy. Two of the ablest men on the river were chosen to represent the two districts in the Assembly ; in Chippewa and Dunn, T. C. Pound, and for Pepin and Eau Claire, Horace W. Barnes, who, aided by a strong lobby, defeated the bill (for granting the Beef Slough Co. a charter) on a direct vote in the Assembly; but another bill was subsequently introduced, a copy of an old Portage City charter, changing the names of persons and localities-merely a working charter-it was claimed, embodying no specific privileges except corporate powers, but which was afterwards found to contain nearly everything asked for; and the work went on in spite of opposition.
Disastrous as the success of this new organization was consid- ered by the mill men, a considerable class of our citizens favored the innovation. They were the class known as loggers, who, while the mills on the Chippewa were the only purchasers of logs, saw themselves completely at the mercy of a dozen or twenty monopolists. What cared they, whether cities grew up at Daven- port, Clinton and Muscatine, by the manufacture of our pine into lumber, if they could only get fifty cents more per thousand for logs with the promise of cash in the place of trade for pay.
But most of the mills were illy prepared for the new order of things. Subjected to annual losses by floods and short supply of logs for want of storage, few of them were able to erect sorting works and keep sufficient force to sort out and pass the logs below going to other parties, and secure their own, and therefore had re- course to exchanging marks, as the practice was called. About fifty million feet of logs were contracted by the agent for the Slough Co., this year, 1868, and on opening of spring a driving force of 125 men was placed on the river, and a watchman at every boom
*
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and mill to guard the interest of the new company. A moderate freshet favored the drivers this spring, and it was well into June before the main force of the Beef Slough Company reached the Slough, who on their way down had cut or opened almost every boom on the river, and taken out, indiscriminately, whatever logs they contained. It seemed as though the agent of the new com- pany aggravated every hardship by ruthless, unnecessary and ar- bitrary destruction of property, and loud and bitter were the de- nunciations against him. It had been a doubtful problem even among the friends of the measure, whether logs could be success- fully driven over the broad sand bars of the lower Chippewa, and cost what it would, its feasibility must be demonstrated now, or the stockholders, already assessed for the last dollar on their stock would abandon the undertaking; the drive was therefore contin- ued after the water got so low, that the cost of driving was more than the logs were worth. But the drive was a fixed fact, and henceforth the Chippewa pinery must furnish its quota of logs, for the mills, and build up the cities on the shores of that great river, whose tributaries span two-thirds of a continent. The next session of the Legislature, 1869, witnessed a renewal of the struggle for charters, but it was a tri-party fight, with a leaning of Chippewa Falls interests towards Beef Slough, and a final coalition of the two to defeat the Dell's bill. It was not until the season of 1870 that the final charter for the Beef Slough Company became a law."
I omit some remarks of Mr. Randall, which, though perhaps not entirely without foundation, are stated in his book with the zest of partisan spirt, excusable with him, who could not but be prejudiced against the Beef Slough Company. But he was fair- minded enough to add the following:
" Although stoutly opposed, and the establishment of those works much deprecated by a large share of our people as deroga- tory to our manufacturing interests, their existence has not been without its benefit, even to its most strenuous opposers. For in 1869 the Company at the Falls having planted some immense piers directly in the channel in the big eddy just below Paint Creek Rapids, a jam of logs of vast proportions was formed against them during the spring drive, filling up the entire river for several miles with logs, piled by the force of the current twenty or thirty feet high, totally obstructing the passage of logs and rafts, - and
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presenting a grand, almost- sublime spectacle to the beholder- which jam, when broken in the July following, by the aid of two steam engines and a great force of men, filled the river for miles in extent with floating logs, pouring down in such rapid profusion, that any force the mills below could command was powerless to . arrest their onward course, or to secure a hundreth part that be- longed to them. Millions on millions of feet of logs would have gone into the great river, and been lost in its thousand lagoons and bayous, which were saved to their owners by the Beef Slough boom."
In connection with this we must relate the history of the first drive, as far as our county and especially the village of Alma were concerned. The drive came down, under the command of Mr. Bacon, almost down to Alma, the Jam-Boom in Nelson not being established, or else not capable of holding the logs. The crew having been told, that they were to be paid off at Alma, they came there, and waited in vain for their money. That they grew impatient, was quite natural. It had been asserted before, that the most desperate characters had been engaged in the dangerous work to force the drive through. At first they were patient enough, - but when the means for gratifiying their sharpened appetites failed to come forth, they grew riotous, and committed acts, which finally led to the arrest of six of the most desperate characters and lodg- ing them in the jail at La Crosse. Sheriff Turnbull, residing in Fountain City had but little inclination to keep order anywhere else. A company of militia was organized and armed, and the crew being at length paid off, the danger passed and has not re- turned. Even I, not a resident of Alma at the time, was stopped and insulted in coming through the street, and it was only owing to the interference of Mr. Thomas Kennedy, whose acquaint- ance I had made at the survey of the above mentioned road, that my surveying staff was returned to me and worse was prevented. Cleaning out this " one horse town " was a favorite phrase among the " boys." I do not mention it as a grudge against anyone, not even the said "boys" for I think the whole trouble and disturbance would have been prevented, if the money, which, I understood to have been provided for the purpose, had been properly applied, and not, as was said afterwards, used for speculating in logs, in which, as rumor had it, it was lost. The company had the morti.
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fication to have its own agent after a while turning against it, try. ing to run a lumber raft through the slough to the manifest annoy. ance of its legitimate operations. The attempt was, however made only once, and was unprofitable. Secretary Irvine of the Mississippi Logging Company says as follows:
" The first effort was not altogether successful or satisfactory to the stockholders; there were only 5,785,000 feet rafted the first season." In fact the old Beef Slough Company had become bankrupt.
At a meeting of the Mississippi River Logging Company held at Winona in September 1872, a proposition was made to them by the Beef Slough Company to sell them a controlling interest in the Beef Slough Co.'s stock. The proposition was accepted, and a new organization was formed with F. Weyerhaeuser of Rock Is- land, Ill., as President; Artemus Lanib, Clinton, Iowa, Vice Presi- dent; and Thos. Irvine of Muscatine, Iowa, Secretary and Manager, which persons have continued in their respective offices to the pre- sent time.
Elijah Swift, James Jenkins and M. M. Davis of the old Beef Slough Company still hold some stock and are directors in the new company. The M. R. L. Co. is a corporation organized nnder the laws of the State of Iowa, having its headquarters at the City of Clinton, Iowa, with a branch office at Chippewa Falls, and one at Beef Slough, Wisconsin, run in conjunction with the office of the Beef Slough Boom Company, and having the same staff of of- ficers.
To harmonize the conflict of interests between the Chippewa mill men at Eau Claire and the Mississippi mill owners, operating the Beef Slough Boom, a third organization was formed in the year 1881, which united the two parties under the corporate name of the Chippewa Logging Company, commonly called the " Pool."
Under this arrangement the logs are all bought in common, and the Eau Claire parties take out of the promiscuous lot a suf- ficient amount to supply their mills, and let the balance pass on to Beef Slough. The Chippewa Logging Company has its prin- cipal office at Beef Slough. 1
As a matter of course there are many arrangements necessary to catch and manage the logs that are coming down on the drive and are to be rafted. The first arrangements are the shear-booms
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at Round Hill, one of them directing the logs to the Buffalo County side, the other compelling them to enter Beef Slough. There is also one at the head of Little Beef Slough, for directing stragglers that escaped the upper booms into the little and main slough. Two new ones will be added this year. The logs are stopped at the Jam Boom located between lots 4 and 5 of Section 24, Township 23 Range 14. They are let out at an opening in it according to the demand of the working force below, pass by old Farmer's Home, down the Devil's Elbow, by Flat Bar, Perrin Slough, Wabasha Bridge and other stations until they come out of the swampy precincts to the open deep water along the bluffs in Section 16 Township 22 Range 13, where they are assor ted, passed down the pockets arranged into a compact mass, the joints over- lapped like those in the front of mason work. Formerly the logs were rafted, that is each log was fastened at least in two different places to poles by lock-downs and plugs. The poles extended across the 10 feet strings. The strings again were coupled by similar poles to each other, to the number of from 2 to 14 or more according to requirement. But before that they had to be drop- ped down to some convenient place for this coupling. This has still to be done, but actual rafting is almost dispensed with. The logs are now brailed. A brail is a combination of logs in the same way as a raft, but these logs are not separately connected or secured. There is a boom around the whole mass, the logs of this boom being fastened by iron links, and prevented from spreading by galvanized wire lines at a distance of 50 feet from each other. A brail is 550 feet long by 45 feet wide. Six of these brails coupled together constitute a full Mississippi raft. Rafts con- structed after the old method had as many oars in bow and stern as there were strings in the raft. They floated down the river- guided by these oars. At present these oars have become unne- cessary ; a steamboat hitched to the stern of the raft manages the same by making use of the currents, and sometimes suspends the forward motion until the proper channel has been reached by the bow swinging round.
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