Mrs. Wilson’s True Tales Retold

The song in this story----Wildwood Flower----is now a traditional “folk song,” but was composed as parlor music by J. P. Webster, living in Elkhorn, Wisconsin at the time, shortly before the Civil War. The original lyrics by Maud Irving were so strange that most renditions of the song make mondegreen of them. Take, for example, the first stanza. Maud wrote: I’ll twine 'mid the ringlets of my raven black hair,The lilies so pale and the roses so fair,The myrtle so bright with an emerald hue,And the pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue.But the usual version given, is that which is sung here by Maybelle Carter in 1928:Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair,With the roses so red and the lilies so fair,And the myrtle so bright with the emerald dew,The pale and the leader and eyes look like blue.Actually, neither one makes much sense. But there is no flower called “aronatus;” what Maud meant by that is anybody’s guess.

(corresponding to “The Story of the Bride”)Women are central to the myths told by Mrs. Wilson. They control the plot. They dominate the characters. Their interests and virtues are foremost.Once again, we find out how important it is not to be stingy with your wife.

“Hope is the Heart in the Body of Belief.”In which we learn how the peddler made Maximilian Robin the man he became and why he hated water, how Amy was a singer and Amy was a dancer, and how love can split you in two.

(corresponding to “Catching Sky”) In which we learn how birds get their colors and why you ought not to trust little girls who go digging for roots that aren’t really good to eat.

In which we are introduced to Chicago, city of America’s Will, Heart, Muscle, and Nerve. In the mighty words of Carl Sandburg:“They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.“And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.“And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.“And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.“Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;“Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness....”

In which the adventures of the masked man begin and end.“A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.”Nathaniel Hawthorne

(corresponding to “Fabulous Masked Man”) From Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act II, Scene I:THIRD FISHERMAN.... Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.FIRST FISHERMAN.Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. such whales have I heard on o’ the land, who never leave gaping till they they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.PERICLES. [Aside]A pretty moral.

In which we are introduced to Mr. Kite and Mr. Boyd, better known as Even and Odd, and the enterprise of logging and those occupations which supported it. In Wisconsin and Minnesota white pine forests covered better than half of the entire territory, before settlement; so densely covered it that a squirrel could travel leaping limb-to-limb from the shore of Green Bay to the Lake of the Woods, almost a thousand miles, without ever touching ground, and its 150-foot mature trees were prized for sailing masts, so tall, so straight, so indomitable they were.They----sons of the industry who had decimated the forests of New England----had started cutting them down in earnest after the Civil War ended, and in less than a single human generation, before the century was over, they were virtually all gone.

(corresponding to “How to Make a Buck----First”) John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of Kellogg’s corn flakes, a vegetarian, and a guru of health and the mind cure movement which dominated popular culture in America of the late nineteenth century, held that clean bowels was the road to wellness. Patients to his Battlecreek Sanitarium were required to undergo a therapy of enemas. Every patient every day was plied with purgative rinses, from above and below. His favorite device was an enema machine that could rapidly instill several gallons of water in a series of enemas. Every water enema was followed by a pint of yogurt— half was eaten, the other half was administered by enema. In the words of Dr. Kellogg: “Thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service." Yogurt, he believed, served to replace the intestinal flora of the bowel, creating what he claimed would be squeaky-clean intestines.With these daily purgatives patients also devoted themselves to rigorous exercise and a strict diet which further purged the poisons in their bodies. Kellogg was an especially strong proponent of nuts, which he also believed would save mankind in the face of decreasing food supply.His many notable patients included: former president of the United States, William Howard Taft; the British satirist, socialist and playwright George Bernard Shaw; Olympic athlete Johnny Weissmuller (who later starred as Tarzan in the movies); Henry Ford; Thomas Edison; and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Preoccupation with bowels was common. Every magazine that posted to the American prairie home contained dozens of remedies for constipation. Children were popularly induced to gag down a ration of cod liver oil, not for its vitamins. Meat as the principle diet for these hard working folk, especially well salted and preserved meats, made for guts of steel. The man who wrote sentimental drivel for his mother in Valentines also took a spoonful of sand and shot of kerosene each morning to keep his pipes going.

Image is the botanical drawing of American Ginseng (Panax Quinquefolius), an herbal native to Wisconsin, but related to the Asian ginseng (Panax Ginseng), which grows wild in Northern Manchuria and has been harvested there for thousands of years.Ginseng was one of the earliest marketable herbs to be harvested in America. In 1860, more than 120 tons of dried ginseng roots were shipped from the state to China.

(corresponding to “How to Make a Buck----Second”) Two variations of the myth are presented. Both tell the tale of how the salmon came into the river. Both begin with the notion that the people were dying of hunger and ate roots, before the salmon appear, that food which dominates and enriches their diet, and which symbolizes wealth.The action of the myth is how salmon goes up river for the first time. As he goes up, the salmon travels with “people” who stop him as he goes and declare they want out of the canoe. The people referred to are not only the human beings. All living creatures are sentient, even plants, and therefore all are “persons” and are called “people.” So in the first instance it is skunk-cabbage who stops wants to go ashore, then Arrowhead, and then other roots. Each one goes ashore and settles into its environment, encoding the tale with the ethnology of naming and finding these foods. And to each one Salmon makes a gift—a potlatch, in the traditional manner—giving him something of value in honor and appreciation for them. After all when Salmon are not found, these keep us alive. We are grateful to them.There is an odd expression here, which each one says when he wants to get off: “At last my brother’s son arrived, whose anus is full of maggots. If it had not been for me, your people would be dead.” The “brother’s son” in the reference is the salmon, the nephew by a brother. Assuming that the speaker is a woman, this is the closest kin to her after her own child. A common kindred affinity amongst tribal people is the lineage from the woman, because the woman is the obvious parent; the father of a child could be anyone; the mother is certain and therefore the uncle who is the mother’s brother is most important (often a sponsor or sort of “god-father” for a child), and so too his children are important to her. What is meant by the odd phrase “whose anus is full of maggots”? It is to the Salmon that it refers. It is observed that the Pacific salmon going up-stream in the spring are going up to spawn, and there they shall all die. As they go up, they are dying, it seems. Perhaps because of the ordeal of cascades or the change from sea-water to fresh-water, their bodies suffer: they will lose their oil; they will look physically distressed; they will discolor; they will deform. Their pink flesh will turn white. The flesh will be mushy when you cook them. And finally, after they spawn, they will lie spent, gasping and exposed in shallows, to be pecked at by birds or devoured by bear, or to rot while half-alive. This then is the reference of the phrase, I think, that the Salmon is foredoomed.At the end of the tale Salmon going up river encounters three last people: Flounder, Crow and Blue-jay. They tell him a lie about the journey, that it takes only one day’s travel when it actually takes five. Salmon takes some revenge of them. It is how Flounder got his face sideways, for example.

Of the monsters told in this tale, I believe you can find further information on the internet concerning the common Hodag and Wobblecat. The Hidebehind is rarely spoken of out-loud and is not to be found there. The mysterious bayl is not a creature that can be described and is only known by intimation; hence, the word “baleful,” which is etymologically derived from the creature’s name and its lore.

(corresponding to “Monsters Today...”) Because we live in a world that is largely man-made, in which our needs are fulfilled by intercession of a society that is the predominant reality of our lives, we are not aware how monstrous, irrational, unconscious are the forces that govern and surround us. We have forgotten the experience of being prey. The unexpected in our lives is an accident, and we think we should avoid them, if we are careful, if we are intelligent. But this is not so. We are yet the animal in the wilderness. Our predators surprise us.And while we like to believe that our capacity to control our lives is absolute, our own bodies, our own minds are like that wilderness in which our being, like animal, is vulnerable. We are stalked by what we cannot control; our natural frailty makes us its prey.

The Motto of the 
graduating class of ’96 was:
 “Vim, Vigor, Victory.”Badger State Banner18 June 18961896 was the last year of a severe depression that had begun with the bank Panic of 1893. At its height 19% of American workers had lost jobs, the middle class lost homes on foreclosed mortgages by the thousands, 15000 companies shut down, more than 500 banks failed. The worst of it occurred in the mid-western states like Wisconsin. By 1896, however, times began changing. The progress of science and affluence put forth promise and portent. The Klondike Goldrush began in earnest after Kate Carmack and Skookum Jim found motherlodes in Bonanza Creek. Tens of thousands stampeded north for their fortune. In that year too scientists used x-rays for the first time to reveal the skeleton in a live human body. In that year history recorded the first time that an automobile killed a pedestrian, a mother holding the hand of her child, as she crossed a road.Our story takes place twenty-five years earlier in 1871 when America was at new heights of prosperity. A Panic very like the one of 1893 was just two years off, and its depression would darken lives for a decade. But in 1871, as I say, America reveled in prosperity and optimism: the centennial of our Independence on the horizon, new railroads flung for miles and miles each new day, our banks and granaries bursting, our hopes at a peak, rising on our soaring ambitions. Chicago, America’s new Rome, is coming into its heyday. The Palmer House Hotel, newly built, had just opened a week before the events which we shall relate. Its enormous marbled gold-leafed frescoed lobby, comfortably trafficked hundreds of patrons at a time, or directed them aside into elegant salons for dining, drinking, shopping or barbering, also splendid in marble, gold-leaf, and frescoes of the French pastorals, princesses playing at shepherdesses.The story that follows is the true account of the events of October 8, 1871, including the fate of that new hotel in Chicago.

“It was the completeness of the wreck; the total desolation which met the eye on every hand; the utter blankness of what had a few hours before been so full of life, of associations, of aspirations, of all things which kept the mind of a Chicagoan so constantly driven.”
 ––– Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, 1871The web site----The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory Copyright © 1996 by the Chicago Historical Society and the Trustees of Northwestern University----describes the aftermath of the fire this way: Devastated Chicago remained so hot that it took a day or two before it was possible even to begin a survey of the physical damage. According to the papers, in some instances when anxious businessmen opened their safes among the rubble of what was once their offices, precious contents that had survived the inferno suddenly burst into flame on exposure to the air. Shortly after the fire, Stephen L. Robinson, a North Division resident whose home was not burned, set out with a printed map of the city to mark what was still standing. Among the few scattered survivors he noted were the mansion of Ogden on Lafayette.... Had he then crossed to the West Division, he would have found the O'Leary cottage safe and sound in front of the ashes of the barn.The so-called "Burnt District," a map of which appeared in virtually every account of the fire, encompassed an area four miles long and an average of three-quarters of a mile wide--more than two thousand acres--including over twenty-eight miles of streets, 120 miles of sidewalks, and over 2,000 lampposts, along with countless trees, shrubs, and flowering plants in "the Garden City of the West." Gone were eighteen thousand buildings and some two hundred million dollars in property, about a third of the valuation of the entire city. Around half of this was insured, but the failure of numerous companies cut the actual payments in half again. One hundred thousand Chicagoans lost their homes, an uncounted number their places of work.