July 2013 Odd Wisconsin
Wisconsin had both real giants and mythological ones. The best known of the latter was probably Paul Bunyan, but 1,000 years earlier the Ho-Chunk had crafted tales about the hero Red Horn battling a race of giants: "In the early days there were Giants tall as trees and their bodies in proportion to their height; and their especial food seemed...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 18, 2013
To many of us, hot summer afternoons mean beer. In fact, one recent study found that Wisconsin residents each drank, on average, more than 36 gallons of beer last year. This is nothing new, since beer has been part of our cultural life for at least 150 years. In the 19th century, Germans often spent weekend afternoons with family and...
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Posted in on July 12, 2013
In July 1854, John W. Quinney (1797-1855) returned home from Wisconsin. A leader of the Stockbridge (Mohican) Indians who helped organize the tribe's emigration to Wisconsin in the 1820s, Quinney had been invited to speak at July 4th celebrations in Reidsville, N.Y. In his speech there to 2,000 listeners, he described how to him the festivities marked "the triumphal days...
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Posted in Curiosities on July 3, 2013
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