Green Lake Prairie Village Life
1840-1845

by S. D. Mitchell and Charles E. Brown

Charles E. Brown

(19) Indian Agent John H Kinzie, in his census of the Wisconsin Winnebago, made for the US Indian Office, in 1829, states that the chief of the Winnebago at Big Green Lake was Sweet Corn. His village was one of eight lodges and was inhabited by 150 Indians. Of this chief nothing more is known. It is possible that he and Sarcel may have been joint chiefs of the same band.

Mr. S. D. Mitchell states that in his boyhood (1845-1855) as many as five hundred Winnebago sometimes camped along the south shore of Green Lake, between Powell Creek and the present Spring Grove hotel, a distance of about one mile. He says that the chief of this village was Big Soldier, then a wrinkled old man. His son was High Knocker, afterwards the chief of all the local Winnebago. ...

(20) Mr. Mitchell provided the following information concerning the Indians of this village. The Green Lake Prairie Indians lived in wigwams made of a pole framework covered with skins, strips of bark or rush matting. The floors were covered with mats or skins. There was no other furniture. The fireplace was in the center of the wigwam. Their household utensils consisted of brass kettles, (21) of wooden bowls carved out of ash and basswood, and wooden ladles. Spoons were made of the valves of clam shells tied to wooden handles with strips of moosewood bark.

They possessed guns but also used bows. Arrows with large blunt wooden heads were used for killing small game. Their bows were made of hickory and red cedar. Iron points for their arrows were made of iron found in the scrap heaps of the settlers. Their muskrat spears were of iron and had but one prong. Their axes were the iron axes purchased from the traders. Trees were felled with them by cutting all around the trunk (girdling). Their garments were made of skins and of the cloth obtained from traders. Their ornaments were perforated clam and sea shells and glass beads. Their food consisted of corn, wild rice, acorns, fish and game. The dog fish they speared in large numbers on a bar off the mouth of Silver Creek. These were dried on a light framework supported by four upright sticks raised some four or five feet above the fire. The entrails were at first removed. Strips of bark were often placd on the framework. After being smoked they were stored for winter use in shallow pits or caches. Acorns were gathered and also stored in this way. There was little or no wild rice in Green Lake. This commodity was obtained by them in Lake Puckaway and the Fox River. Corn was grown by them along Satterlee Clark Creek south of Forest Glen Beach and elsewhere south of the lake. They used dugout canoes. Some of these were from 35 to 40 feet in length and would hold fifteen persons. These Indians were quite friendly and agreeable.

Mr. Albert Hill states that the Indians camped here, within his memory, from 1878 to 1882. There were sometimes as many as two hundred of them.

Passing south of this village was the Indian trail from Green Bay to the Wisconsin portage afterwards, the Military road from Fort Howard to Fort Winnebago. Connecting with this highway were other trails leading to other Indian camps and villages in this and surrounding counties. Travel to the Fox River was from the north shore of Green Lake down the Puchyan River, or by a portage of two miles from the west side of the lake across country to Lake Puckaway, a distance of two miles. The trails and water routes made it not different (22) for traders to reach the Green Lake Indians the evidence of whose village and camp sites appear to indicate that they were well supplied with the metal implements and cheap jewelry, which among other materials, these white men brought to them. ...

(31) He states that both within the Spring Grove "enclosure" and on its western embankment there were many caches or provision pits. "The diameter of some of these was 4 feet and their depth several feet." Mr. Richard Dart of Ripon, who has seen some of these in use by the Winnebago, came to Green Lake with his father in 1840. Before his father built his mill dam at Dartford (Green Lake), in 1841, there was a bar near the northeast corner of the lake. This was grown over with rushes. Here, in water about two feet in depth, during the summer the Indians speared thousands of dogfish. These they "jerked" or dried over a slow fire after which they were placed in these caches with acorns. When the winter came and other food became scarce they erected huts or wigwams over these caches and boiled the fish and acorns together in their kettles. The result was a black tar like mass which they ate. As soon as the contents of one cache were exhausted they moved the wigwam over another.

Mr. Dart says: "When plentiful, they dried fish in the sun till they were dry as powder, then put them in big puckawa sacks. The squaws also picked up bushels of acorns. In deep holes, below frost-line, they would bury their fish and (32) acorns together, twenty bushels or so in a place and cover them over with a mound of earth. It was hard work making such caches with the tools they had."¹ ...

Notes to the Text

¹ Richard Dart, "The Settlement of Green Lake County," Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Its Fifty-Seventh Annual Meeting (October 21, 1909) 252-272. [267-268].

Commentary. "Big Soldier" — Mąnąpexetega, a Bear Clan name. For Big Soldier, see Dart's account.

High Knocker

"High Knocker" — this is not a translation of his unknown Hocak name, but a reference in the slang of the time to his stove pipe top hat. He drowned at age 91 while trying to swim the Fox River on what some say was a drunken dare.

USFWLS

The Freshwater Dogfish or Bowfin

"dogfish" — the freshwater dogfish is more commonly called the "bowfin." It has been considered rather bland in its taste, but smoking it, as the Hocagara used to do, is said to greatly enhance its palatability.

Richard Dart

"Mr. Dart" — Richard Dart, son of Anson and Eliza Catlin Dart, was born May 12, 1828 in New York city. He removed with his father's family to the township of Dartford, Wis., becoming pioneers of the Green Lake region. Richard Dart died 5 January 1910 (aged 81) in Ripon, Wisconsin, where he is buried.

"puckawa sacks" — an obscure item, perhaps related to pahkwaya, Sauk for "cattail" (cf. Ojibway, apakweshkway, "cattail"). Perhaps they were sacks made of cattail, and apparently of very large dimensions.

Source

Charles E. Brown, “Antiquities of Green Lake,” Wisconsin Archeologist, 16, #1 (March, 1917): 1-55 [19-22].