The Siamese Twins of Chippewa Falls

In 1867 the population of Chippewa Falls was somewhere around 2000.  Given the nature of those times the ratio of men to women was quite high.  It's true that families were bigger then, but there would not have been that many babies born per year.  So what are the odds of twins?  (Supposedly 1% if you must know.)  How about Siamese twins?  Well those odds might be as extreme as 1 in 200,000 births.  But, odds or not, this could happen anywhere.  And in July of 1867 it happened at Chippewa Falls.

I ran across this story by accident, seeing it repeated in newspapers across the region.  Papers swiped from each other pretty regularly then.  My quick scan for the name of the parents involved found no mention in the local paper, which I found puzzling.

As it happens, there was a long, front page article, but it was sensitive enough to omit the name of the family involved.  You can read it in its entirety if so inclined, I present it for your perusal. 

The name was mentioned in reports from other newspapers.  John Clemens was a supervisor at the Mill.  His abilities were highly thought of.  Of his wife I can learn much less.

The article has the feel of a "silly season" bit of journalism, as far fetched tales seemed to be circulated widely in late summer.  But the poignancy of the tone, and the direct mention of the other people involved - the physicians in particular - give this credibility in my eyes.

Of the man who purchased the embalmed bodies of the twins to subsequently display for profit, I shall restrain my comments other than to say it's a famous name hereabouts.  He went on to become mayor. There's a street named after him. 

The Day the Storm Began

On this day in 1914 the Great War began.  Looking at the problems of our time its hard to avoid thinking of this as a hinge moment, the point when the modern world came crashing in on us.  Just consider the problems arising from maps drawn post war, especially in the Middle East and the Balkans.  Consider also the rise of poisonous weeds such as Communism and Fascism when the Established Order had proven its impotence.

Doing a bit of tidy up recently I came across something I don't think I've shown before.  When I was a volunteer at Hill 80, excavating a First World War battlefield site there were some strict rules.  Don't drop live ordinance.  Don't photograph human remains.  That sort of thing.  But regards artifacts it was way looser than how places like Vindolanda regard things.  There, every pottery shard is handed in for analysis.  At Hill 80, one of the archaeologists was collecting shrapnel and brass artillery shell bands with the intent of selling for scrap and putting one of his kids through Uni.  There was that much stuff....

So nobody objected when I put a few round lead balls into a pocket on my last day.  These were once packed into a shell and fired at the enemy.  A close up look shows dents and divots.  They hit something.

The Electrocuted Owl

OK, technically this both is and is not the right picture to go with the story that follows.  As I've documented previously the first actual dedicated movie theater in Chippewa Falls was purpose built as The Victor.  Later it was purchased by the Rex Brewing Company of Duluth and renamed, logically, The Rex.

It had a mix of movies, live vaudeville, community theater, boxing matches.  But for sheer oddity, how about this from 1923:

Alas, I scanned the newspapers for an image of the Electrocuted Owl and came up blank.

My Adventures as a Teen Aged Philosopher

Some of the stuff I retrieved from my parent's house last year just got tossed into a box. In some cases I looked briefly at an object, said "ugh" but felt it needed to be kept.  This is one such.  

I attended Minnehaha Academy for high school.  A private school, it likely gave me a better education than the public high school on our end of town.  It even had classes in religion, philosophy, etc.

I took a philosophy survey class as a junior or so.  It was a small group, maybe four or five of us students.  It was taught by a man named George Fisher, who had been a Catholic priest.  Here's the cover of the notebook from that class....

There was an awful lot of doodling and marginalia in this book.  Some of it related to philosophy, note the yin/yang.  Other stuff I'm not sure.  I might have been taking geometry at the same time to account for some of the shapes and formulae.  It starts out fairly coherent...

But towards the end I was clearly going off the rails.  I think Neo Platonism pushed me over the edge.

The class probably did me some good.  In this world sometimes you have to be philosophical and if you can't square it with Plato, maybe St. Thomas Aquinas will suffice.  The only student I remember, and the only one who seemed to understand this stuff, was named Winston Cavert.  I got to wondering where he ended up....turns out he also went to medical school but had a rather more impressive career than your humble scribe.  He went into infectious disease and became a Professor.  Cheers, Winston, if you stumble across this!

Aghast and Appalled.

I'm of fairly even temperament, so it is not common for me to be either Aghast or Appalled.  But I was wondering the other day, do these words have a common ancestor?  Or at least a common theme?

I guessed correctly that aghast had to do with ghosts.  It hearkens back to circa 1100.  It means "..terrified, suddenly filled with frightened amazement."  The "h" came along circa 1700, perhaps a bit of Dutch influence.  The original root word is very old, as indeed most basic and primal concept words are.  It comes from somewhere back in the origins of Germanic language and exists in various forms such as Geist in modern German.

You would probably gasp when you see a gast, but the words do not have a common ancestor.  Gasp and gape, well, that's another story.

A Pall is the cloth used to drape over a coffin.  So if you saw a figure covered in one you might reasonably assume it was a ghost and be aghast.  But pall has a gentler origin story.

It hearkens back to Latin.  Pallium was a cloak or covering.  Tertullian, an early Christian writer indicates that the faithful wore it as an alternative to the toga.  The word had various antecedents including pellis meaning "skin".  See also, one assumes, "pelt".  The creepier connotations to a pall did not turn up until the 15th century.

By the way, at the sight of a ghost you might run away. Perhaps so vigorously as to be "pelting".  Not related to the above, pelt in this form is one of those words of unknown origin that has come to mean hitting repeatedly as with feet pounding the ground in hasty retreat, or the rain that is scheduled to keep me indoors on the nice summer day....

AI is getting better by the way.  This is legitimately creepy.

Murder on the Old Eau Claire Road

Like most communities from the lumber era of Wisconsin, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls were where they were because of the water.  Specifically the Chippewa River.  This was both the highway down which prosperity flowed - in the form of log drives - and the power source that turned timber into cash.

But the same things that make for a good lumber town also complicate other forms of transportation.  You'd imagine that commerce between the two places would be carried out with boats...until you remember that there water levels were extremely variable.  Despite the big dam at Chippewa being able to regulate things a bit, it would often be the case that the river was too low for practical boat transport....or at other times such as spring, too high.  To say nothing of full of tens of thousands of logs!  And in the winter everything froze.

So for reliable, year round transportation the two communities were linked very early on by road.   

Its course is a little hard to track.  It came out of the north side of Eau Claire and roughly followed the course of modern day Hwy 53.  That would of course be Old Hwy 53, now redubbed Business 53.  It certainly arrived at the National Presto Plant - once a maker of pressure cookers and earlier of artillery shells - the location of a hostelry known as Halfway House.  It then swung over to where Lake Hallie connects with the Chippewa River, as this was the site of an early lumber mill.  Then after being lost in what is now suburbia and gravel pits it reappears near modern day Casper Park and arrives at the former site of Frenchtown.  The ferry there took you across to Chippewa Falls.  Very little remains today.  

Here's a map showing the course of the road.  This map is probably circa 1878.  The railroad is shown - it came in '74, but Frenchtown is still standing before the floods of '80 and '84.

The road went through some lonesome places.  It still does today.  At one such place murder most foul occurred in 1872.

Rolfson was traveling from Minnesota.  Arriving in Eau Claire he inquired about the price of the stage to Chippewa Falls.  Feeling the price was a bit steep he decided to hike it.  Somebody knew he was carrying a large sum of money, and was waiting for him.  He tried to save a dollar.  It cost him his life.

Despite a very hefty reward I can find no evidence that the guilty parties were ever brought to justice.   

Note:  It is not clear that the 1870's stage service ran on the same road Rolfson took.  If you study the map you can see that a less direct route did run on the west side of the river.  This was a later addition, in the heyday of Frenchtown before the Civil War there was only what is now called The Old Eau Claire Road.

Anger Goose Does Not Approve

I've had four footed "grandkids" before.  Often young couples have a dog before they have kids.  I've gotten on well with these slightly spoiled canines.

But the youngest and his lady now have.....geese.  On one level they - the geese of course - can be rather cute.  They follow my son around making happy little honking noises.

Me on the other hand, they don't like at all.......

Darn things peck at my pants legs and shoes when they can get away with it.  This goose is actually named Rodan, after the Japanese rubber monster movie star of the same name.  I think the resemblance is eerie.