wisconsin death trip book pdf

Wisconsin Death Trip PDF

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik....

Chapter List (25 chapters):

• Chapter 1: Cover
• Chapter 2: Half title
• Chapter 3: Title
• Chapter 4: Copyright
• Chapter 5: Dedication
• Chapter 6: Preface
• Chapter 7: Introduction
• Chapter 8: Chapter 1
• Chapter 9: 1885-6
• Chapter 10: 1890
• Chapter 11: 1891
• Chapter 12: 1892
• Chapter 13: 1893
• Chapter 14: 1894
• Chapter 15: Chapter 2
• Chapter 16: 1895
• Chapter 17: 1896
• Chapter 18: 1897
• Chapter 19: 1898
• Chapter 20: Chapter 3
• Chapter 21: 1899
• Chapter 22: 1900
• Chapter 23: Conclusion
• Chapter 24: Bibliography
• Chapter 25: About this Book

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Published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik. (Goodreads.com)

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Edition notes.

Bibliography: [2] p. at end. Originally presented as the author's thesis, Rutgers. Consists chiefly of excerpts from the Badger State banner, Black River Falls, Wis., for the years 1885-1900 and of photos. taken by Charles Van Schaick from 1890 to 1910.

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Wisconsin Death Trip

Michael lesy , charles van schaik  ( photographer ) , warren susman  ( preface ).

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Michael Lesy

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Community reviews.

"Mrs. A. J. Cowles, aged 87 years, died at Beloit. She had been married to Deacon Cowles, who survives her, for nearly 68 years. On the occasion of her last birthday her eccentric husband presented her with a coffin which he had made with his own hands and in which she was buried." [3/16, State]

"Tramps who were refused food at the home of John Ovenbeck in the town of Friendship, Winnebego County, entered the barn at night and cut the throats of 3 cows, which bled to death. A card attached to the horns of one bore the following message: 'Remember us when we call for something to eat again. " (9/21, State]

”Abraham Zweekbaum of the town of Holland committed suicide by battering himself on the head with a hammer. . .. He attempted to take his life a few days ago by cutting his head from his body with a sharp instrument, but was prevented from doing so." 17/12, State]

Bill's law partner, C.R. Johnson, said that one of the first trials that old Jacob Spaulding presided over as Justice of the Peace was a kind of mad hatter's tea party full of mock testimony and false witnesses. The drunk plaintiff falsely accused an innocent man of selling liquor to the Indians, and the drunk jury that found him guilty fined him four gallons of whisky, which they drank on the spot. Colonel C. C. Pope claimed that most court cases began and ended with friendly bottles passed between the judge, the jury, the defendants, the plaintiffs, the witnesses, the lawyers, and spectators who were so suspicious of one another that they came to court with things other than pen knives in their pockets. He recalled a trial in 1886 over the ownership of a cow. He said the testimony and argument were interrupted at least a dozen times by as many drinks, all of which were toasted by the trial judge breaking into a verse from" Old Rosin and Bow."

Tramps are overrunning Grant County, raiding sheep and stealing horses. The farmers [are] organizing a vigilance committee.

Christ Wold, a farmer near Poskin Lake, committed suicide by deliberately blowing off his head with dynamite. He placed a quantity of explosive in a hole in the ground, laid his head over it and touched the fuse, exclaiming, "Here I go and the Lord go with me."

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Critic’s Notebook

50 Years On, ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’ Still Haunts and Inspires

Michael Lesy’s book of historical photographs and found text offers a singular portrait of American life.

By Dwight Garner

Listen to This Article

Michael Lesy’s 1973 book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door.

The book is a portrait of Black River Falls, Wis., at the turn of the 20th century. Lesy’s method was to blend workaday photographs with horrific local news items that point, page by page, toward spiritual catastrophe. Nearly every person in it looks as if they are about to be struck by lightning.

“ Wisconsin Death Trip ” is 50 years old this year, and it’s an anniversary worth heeding. Lesy’s unclassifiable book earns its portentous title, and its tone has influenced many disparate works of art. It is a haunting backdoor into history and a raw experiment in feeling. It has never been, as the fissures in American life deepen, more relevant.

The book began its life at the University of Wisconsin, where Lesy was studying for a master’s degree. (It became his doctoral thesis at Rutgers.) At the Wisconsin Historical Society, he chanced upon thousands of photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by Charles Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls. Van Schaick didn’t think of himself as an artist. His images were work for hire. But when Lesy began to sort through them, they spoke to him. He saw in them gravid documents “created at the secret heart of this culture.”

Lesy chose around 140 of Van Schaick’s photographs and arranged them by theme. He juxtaposed them with short, contemporaneous news items from a Black River Falls newspaper, The Badger State Banner, as well as documents and quotations from other sources, including the writings of Hamlin Garland and Glenway Wescott.

Some of the images are portraits; others show barber shops or timber camps or horses or clusters of musicians. Photography was cumbersome then, and a formal occasion. The photos are grave because few people thought it appropriate to smile. Some of the subjects are dead babies in tiny caskets.

“There are events which arouse such simple and obvious emotions,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1948, “that an A.P. cable or photograph in Life magazine are enough and poetic comment is impossible.” “Wisconsin Death Trip” reads like a catalog of such events: suicides, arson, derangements, houses thought to be haunted, aquatic beasts that carry farm animals shrieking into rivers, poisonings, ax murders, families wiped out by diphtheria, bankruptcies, early deaths, religious mania, incest, howling wild men from the woods, people found to have been buried alive.

A few selections give a sense of the book’s tonalities:

A woman was recently found wandering about the streets of Eau Claire with a dead baby in her arms. She was from Chippewa County and had lost her husband and was destitute. Poverty and no work caused August Schultz of Appleton to shoot himself in the head while sitting in his little home with his wife and five children. The 60-year-old wife of a farmer in Jackson, Washington County, killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears. The malignant diphtheria epidemic in Louis Valley, La Crosse County, proved fatal to all the children in Martin Molloy’s family, five in number. Three died in a day. The house and furniture was burned. The 80-year-old mother of an imprisoned man threw herself in front of a train and was cut into three pieces. She was crazed by the disgrace.

A cynic would say, and a cynic would have a point, that you could troll through almost any old newspaper over a similar period and compile a comparable list of horrors. But the sheer number of these events in and around Black River Falls comes to feel crushing, and gothic in tone, and suggestive of some collective psychological and social and moral crisis.

One searches for clues, in terms of how to approach and decipher this material. Why did so many people feel the need to pick up shotguns and blow their memories across the floor? There was an economic depression in the 1890s, one that didn’t linger in cultural memory as did that of the 1930s. Banks were liquidated, and people ruined. America was becoming industrialized, shaking the foundations of small-town life. But answers tend to slip through the hands of historians.

“Wisconsin Death Trip” is an imperfect book. Lesy tinkers with some of the photographs and turns a few into surrealist collages, an experiment he has said he regrets. The material from Garland and Wescott seems dated in a way that the news material doesn’t. Snippets of text from “two mythical creatures,” a local historian and a town gossip, are embarrassing. But the book is alive in the hands.

The directors Todd Haynes and Walter Murch have talked about “Wisconsin Death Trip” as an influence on their work. Stewart O'Nan’s novel “A Prayer for the Dying” was directly inspired by it, as was Stephen King’s short story “1922.” The book has given rise to operas; the industrial metal band Static-X titled their 1999 album “Wisconsin Death Trip.” That same year, the British director James Marsh turned the book into a docudrama , a good one, with narration by Ian Holm.

It is no accident that in Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, “ Stella Maris ,” the titular psychiatric asylum is in Black River Falls. There are moments in McCarthy’s novel that speak almost directly to “Wisconsin Death Trip.” The faces in photographs from the 19th century, one character comments, really stare back at you: “Even their smiles are woeful. Filled with regret. With accusation.”

The Black River Falls reference blew right past me when I first read “Stella Maris,” but Greil Marcus pointed it out to me. It makes sense. McCarthy has been known to give copies of “Wisconsin Death Trip” to friends. The book’s news items seem almost like prompts for his novels, especially the pitch-black early ones.

Native American lives are scanted here. African Americans are represented more often, sometimes in neutral contexts, but there is casual racism in the news reports, and scandal erupts when Black men and white women fall in love. Once such story ends, “Police officers from Viola tried to stop the marriage, but the girl being of age nothing could be done.” Two men were arrested, in 1890, for “blowing up a Chinese laundry.”

Residents were “worked up” when a female dance instructor turned out to be a man. In a moving item, a woman who passed as a man for nearly her entire life was found out when she was sent to prison for theft. After the sentence was passed, her wife “fell upon the neck of the prisoner and wept for half an hour.”

Lesy, who taught for three decades at Hampshire College, has gone on to write and curate many other books, but none had the impact that “Wisconsin Death Trip” did. It remains a vehicle for pain and sorrow, a ballad from a forgotten world, a book that rummages around in the marrow of things.

It brings the night in closer, as does McCarthy’s novel. Reading “Wisconsin Death Trip” for the first time in many years sent me back to “Stella Maris” with fresh eyes. Many lines took on new resonance. Here is one:

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

McCarthy also writes: “There’s a lot of bad news out there, and some of it is coming to your house.”

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His new book, “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading,” is out this fall. More about Dwight Garner

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Wisconsin Death Trip Kindle Edition

• Print length 381 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publication date September 18, 2016
• File size 48820 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Not Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy. --Gregory McNamee

From Library Journal

" Wisconsin Death Trip has become a cult favorite, an example of hybrid nonfiction narrative about more than an era and its people in Black River Falls. Lesy created a story of the seen and unseen, the spoken and the silent in small-town America at the end of the nineteenth century. . . . In that space between knowing and not knowing, Wisconsin Death Trip becomes mesmerizing."

From the Publisher

From the inside flap, from the back cover, about the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01LZ71UFX
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of New Mexico Press; Second edition (September 18, 2016)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 18, 2016
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 48820 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 381 pages
• #239 in History of Photography
• #1,369 in Photography History

About the author

Michael lesy.

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• photography

Wisconsin Death Trip

by Michael Lesy

Published by: University of New Mexico Press

148 Pages , 11.00 x 8.50 in , 148 halftones

• 9780826321930 | January 2000
• 9780826358400 | August 2016
• Description
• Contributors

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

Michael Lesy teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College. He is the author of numerous books, including Dreamland, Rescues , and The Forbidden Zone .

" Wisconsin Death Trip has become a cult favorite, an example of hybrid nonfiction narrative about more than an era and its people in Black River Falls. Lesy created a story of the seen and unseen, the spoken and the silent in small-town America at the end of the nineteenth century. . . . In that space between knowing and not knowing, Wisconsin Death Trip becomes mesmerizing." -- River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

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ISBN: 0826321933

ISBN13: 9780826321930

Wisconsin Death Trip

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Book Overview

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small, turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected photos taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black... This description may be from another edition of this product.

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Incorrect order, saw this book once and searched for it for years, my favorite book, mesmerizing, vivid truth of agrarian white american history, taking a look at an era not unlike our own, popular categories.

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