Northwoods

Prologue: Winter, 1895 - Birth of the Hoax

               The Wisconsin River flowed through the virgin wilderness, steady and strong, carrying patches of ice and snow away from the embankment.  Steam rose from its churning surface in the cold of that early January day.  Chickadees, the wintering birds, played in the pine boughs and hopped along the ground in search of seed, while blue jays soared from tree to tree, scattering the smaller birds.  Squirrels and chipmunks cussed and scolded from the upper reaches of the forest, while rabbits and deer came to the river’s edge from time to time to drink from it.

            A modest encampment was nestled along the wooded bank.  More than a dozen log shanties stood around a large, snowy clearing marked with the prints of horses and oxen and booted men’s feet; there was also the evidence of large skids and sleds in use amid tree stumps and sawdust piles.  The logs those skids were used to transport lay along the ground in the clearing, with several more in towering stacks in large corrals or on large skids.  The majority of the lumber camp’s crew worked at a few miles out in the pine stands, but a few worked the edge of the clearing, felling the pines, while others performed the necessary tasks which were assigned to them removing branches, dividing large logs and loading them onto the sleds. Some of the men were busy sawing logs, while others used spikes and leather straps to hoist themselves up the tall virgin pines to measure them.  Some were away for the day, driving packs of floating logs down the river to a lumber mill in the nearby town.

They were men as big and tough as the equipment they used and the logs they felled.  Most wore corduroy and wool clothing, well-worn leather and cloth boots, and wide-brimmed hats.  If they didn’t have that, then they made due with whatever they could find that suited their fancy best.  It was a hodgepodge affair.

            The nearby town was one named Rhinelander, sometimes still referred to as Pelican Rapids, since it was located just south of the foaming, boulder-broken stretch of whitewater.  Positioned on the sand flats at the junction of the Wisconsin and Pelican Rivers, it was prime real estate where numerous logging camps and trading posts had sprung up over the past few decades.  Rhinelander was still a fledgling town, but was growing fast.  It was little more than fifteen years old, born in 1880 with thanks to a certain Webster Brown and family.  The family owned a lumber company a hundred miles south, in the rapidly growing town of Stevens Point.

            In the harsh light of the winter’s day, the primitive nature of the logging camp was apparent.  Life was crude and hard, and in turn it made the men crude and hard.  But that fledgling town down river, though still dusty roads and frontier architecture, held all the modern comforts and style of the larger towns in the southern part of the state.  The paper mills had the latest turn-of-the-century equipment, a bank and other necessary firms were taking root, and the railroad brought in new settlers and bigger and better supplies for the general stores every day.  The town thrived off of the lumber industry, but the trees wouldn’t last forever.  Some of Rhinelander’s residents worried loudly about this.  Other frontier towns had been born in the same quick manner, and disappeared just as quickly when the stands of pine grew thin.  Most, however, concerned themselves with daily life and kept their own worries to themselves, thus aiding in the pleasant atmosphere the small community harbored.

            Standing outside the cook shanty was a man of moderate height and strong build.  He surveyed all the activity around him from his vantage point on the river bank.  His character was of equally strong flavor; he was well-known by the loggers and settlers of the area as a notorious prankster; he especially enjoyed pulling pranks on unsuspecting passers-by who were riding to and from towns on the passenger trains.

Aside from bloopers, his general employ was as a self-made real estate man and a free-lance timber cruiser.  He excelled at all he put his hand to, except maybe marriage.  He’d just come in from cruising a section of timber in the northern part of the county for a local lumber company, and so had, in the course of the last several hours, made his report to the company contractor, received his pay, and partaken of a small bit of libation.  He bore the look of a man with deep-wilderness experience; he was tough and built like most of the men around him, but added to that was a nimble, quick-witted quality.  Nothing was missed by his eyes in the wooded domain that was his playground.