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.

My Get Rich Quick Product Idea

Ah, getting older.  Well, it does beat the alternative.  But you do have to attend to more "maintenance" as the birthday cake candles glow a bit brighter.  

As a retired MD I'm a bad patient.  But there are things I believe in strongly enough that I even talk myself into them.  Like colonoscopy.  Turns out I have a bit of  family history, my grandfather dying of it at just a few years older than I am now.  So, there's nothing for it....

The procedure is not so bad.  I just insist on the good meds.  Much as Fentanyl has caused suffering and tragedy when used illicitly, it - in concert with its good pal Versed - makes for a dreamy, detached state. 

Now the prep, that's just not fun.  But necessary.

Suffice to say that you have to drink some stuff that gives you very kinetic, ate a bad burrito in Mexico level diarrhea.  Don't plan anything on that prep day.

The prep meds usually come in small - but deadly as it happens - colored glass bottles.  Now, on to my make a million bucks idea.

I used to be a fair home brewer.  And I'm pretty sure you could concoct a beer flavored prep solution.  Great beer?  Oh, no way.  But better than the horrid sensation of glugging down what tastes like concentrated Dead Sea water?  I think so.

But you'd have to market it well.

I've tried asking AI to show me some example "brands".  In some cases it was unwilling.  I mean, the obvious is BUTT LITE.  But that stuff can hardly be considered beer.....  So, how about:

This is actually almost spot on for the little green bottles of Affliction.  They are perhaps half the size but just that color.   

I actually enjoy the occasional Heineken, and once had a very memorable tour of their flagship brewery in Amsterdam.  For a variety of technical reasons there were some parts of the tour we could not take that morning, and each time we were promised "Well, that will give you more time in the tap room".

Apologies for the satire Heineken, I actually  think highly of your product.

Now, there are a number of US beer brands, current and historic, that would not need any alteration at all to be good colonoscopy prep names.  If, and this is a gigantic if, their copyright lawyers looked the other way and whistled, I could see several names being quite compelling just as they are.

Schlitz, Blatz, any others you'd like to suggest?

But perhaps your tastes do not run to European or US beers.  I've enjoyed some Mexican lagers as well.  Modello and Dos Equis do not sound immediately promising, but what about:

Should of course have a crown on the label, and actual Corona comes in clear bottles.

I've always felt that the silly times we live in make satire darn near impossible.  So who knows, perhaps somebody has already tried this concept....

Cache as Cache Can

With a bit of free time on my hands I've been paying attention to the string of geocaches that I have out in the world.  I mostly enjoy making and placing custom caches.  Finding them, eh, not so much.

Over time they tend to need maintenance.  Water gets into everything.  Put something inside a hollow tree and the tree blows over.  On occasion people who find the caches have their own eccentric ideas of how they should be rehidden.  

One cache I had near a ball field was called Brown Bat.  It was hidden inside a little plastic souvenir baseball bat.  I think it was something you could buy full of beer at the local minor league ball park.  Alas, it vanished, so I decided to replace it with something a bit more Lugosi themed...

That was a "one off", but I also have geocache series going.  Local History is rather unofficial.  Strange Fish is a long running series where I put a geocache - usually a custom container made to look like the species - where I caught some weird bottom feeding critter.  That's getting harder to do btw.  I'm up to 15 in this series.  HERE is an example.

Recently I started a new series that I'm calling Crossroads.  All at intersections of county roads.  For some reason these are designated with letters, and when they ran through the alphabet they started using double letters.   The juxtaposition of signs at such places provides, shall we say, opportunities.....

For instance......The House at Pooh Corner  What creative things could you do with semi random arrangements of two or three letters?

Robot Christmas in July!

Robotics involves lots of supplies.  Electronics, motors, aluminum and plastic stock.  Lots of it we now have in stock, but there are always things that are needful.  Because shipping costs extra we try to merge shopping lists into larger deliveries.  And I have always considered the day that big boxes of coolness turn up on the porch to be "Robot Christmas".  I of course need to open a few....just to make sure everything has arrived in good shape.

Our latest undertaking is a new spin on Robot School, our farm club at the middle school level.  And with a new venture we of course need new toys.  Lots of new toys.  FIRST Tech Challenge robots are about 15% of the size of the high school program machines, but they have lots and lots of small fiddly parts.  We are talking about hundreds of items showing up in a half dozen boxes....

Some of this stash came from a recent workshop where students had put some of the parts together in a basic frame...

Merry Robot Christmas!  I thought it would be fun to stack the hoard up into something resembling a Christmas tree.

01000111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01000010 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100001

The above is conversion to binary code of Tiny Tim's "God Bless us, every one!"

The Mystery of Wardell's Ginger Ale

Here is our starting point.  It is a "hutchinson" style soda bottle.  These were pretty much the standard pop bottle in the 1880's and 1890's.  

The embossing reads R.T. WARDELL EAU CLAIRE WIS.  That little gizmo in the bottom of the bottle is the stopper.  Replacing earlier corked bottles this allowed you to open up a bottle, drink some of it, and reseal it.   

So, what's the story here?  Well, its complicated.

The earliest local clue is from the summer of 1884.  Summertime is generally when pop bottlers started a venture, or advertised an existing one.  From an Eau Claire paper of June 21st we read:

"R.T. Wardell, of Michigan, is opening up an establishment on the West side for the manufacture and sale of ginger ales, etc."

There is a bit of confusion in early reports.  At one point it was said to be an F. Wardell starting the business.  And embarrassingly, on the July 3rd, the paper described ginger ale as an alcoholic beverage.  A hasty 4th of July retraction was published:

The reference to three million bottles being sold in the previous year is rather audacious.  Where?  And by whom?

Wardell bottles from Eau Claire are pretty scarce.  R.T. gets mentioned briefly among citizens signing a petition in 1885.  After that there is but one enigmatic and somewhat jokey reference from 1886...and this from a Minneapolis newspaper.

It sounds like somebody the editor knew well, perhaps on a drinking buddy sort of level?

As it happens there was another branch of the Wardell family over in St. Paul, Minnesota.

John G. Wardell is said to have moved from Battle Creek Michigan to the Twin Cities in 1882.  After briefly being in Minneapolis he set up shop in St. Paul, doing business as The Spa Bottling Company.  He was quite successful, both at the original Spa Bottling company and later, in 1900, when he left that firm and started his own venture.  The Consolidated Bottling Company became Highland Spring Water company later in 1900, actually lasting until the mid 1960's.  For more on this branch of the Wardell clan I found THIS quite helpful. 

When Spa got started in 1882 it had Minneapolis and St. Paul branches, and was variously described as having relocated from Grand Rapids Michigan or being an offshoot of an earlier company there.  John G. Wardell is described as being "....long connected with the Grand Rapids house..." I'm not sure how that fits with the report of him being from Battle Creek, but they are not far apart. 

John G. was born in 1857.  R.T. is described as a young man in 1886.  They must have been related.  Same last name, both came from Michigan, both in the soda business.  The presumed difference in ages does not fit for father and son, but perhaps brothers?  Maybe he was a sort of black sheep of the family.  The claim of three million bottles sold in 1883 is hard to believe.  Maybe if the output of the Minnesota and Michigan branches was combined.  Interestingly there also was a Diamond Ginger Ale sold out of Connecticut starting in 1865.  Maybe that three million figure suggested an early franchise set up?

John G. lived a long and productive life.  He died in 1935, his son and grandson carrying on the business.  Heck, I might have had a swig or two of Highland Spring Water when I was a kid.

Eventually I tracked down an on line City Directory of Grand Rapids from 1880.  John G. Wardell is listed as a "clerk" for Mills and Lacey.  No listing of them in the beverage business.  Robert T. Wardell was, if I am reading the abbreviation corrctly, a cradle maker!   There is one soda bottler and one ginger beer manufacturer listed,  but oddly the Wardells do not seem to have been associated with either.  

4th of July - America at 250

Fourth of July is usually a surprisingly personal holiday for most Americans.  We  get the three day weekend off - ER docs being the exception - and are expected to go do summer things that please us.  If you have a lake cabin, go there.  If there are jobs to do, keep them at a minimum.  Grill stuff.  Have a cold beer.  That's the Midwest paradigm at least.  As for other parts of the country, well, YMMV.

250 years seems like a less impressive feat than the Bicentennial was.  It's kind of like one's 40th anniversary.  A big number but less substantive than say 25 or 50.  That's not really fair of course.  With longer life spans lots of people reach their 50th anniversary.  Very few countries on earth last for centuries.  I mean, obviously the land does, the form of government not so much.  

There is a tendency of late to be very downcast about America and the future.  I don't share this pessimism.  

1976.  The bicentennial.  I was in college.  My waistline was thin.  My hair was not.  We'd just waded through the apparent defeat of Vietnam and the difficulty of Watergate.  Gas for our horrid 1970's cars was expensive.  Interest rates were ridiculously high.  Current home seekers despair over 6.3% mortgage rates.  Hey, try 18% on for size.  (ok, that was a couple of years earlier, but still....).

And for all that I don't remember people being nearly as disturbed as some are today.  

Times are different.  We are different.  Which changes which?

Fifty years ago there were still certainties.  Our parents were of durable stock, having endured the Great Depression and the Second World War.  There were even plenty of "doughboys" around whose lives started in an agrarian, isolationist country.  These were not stupid people, they'd seen a great deal come to pass.  But they kept their focus on making their lives and that of their families better.

Odd times for America on its 250th.  We are now exposed to continuous outrage on our electronic marvels.  But at the same time we have as a culture been sleep walking.  So many important questions just kicked down the road like an old tin can...a can that contains the accumulated debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. You can be supportive, neutral or antagonistic to this administration but at least difficult questions are being asked.  Hopefully the right answers will be forthcoming.  If not, we'll elect a different bunch.   

So Happy Birthday.  Life is not perfect.  It is in fact always going to be a mixture.  That phone that brings you Tiktok slop and panicky dispair...it also contains more information that we could have imagined 25 years ago.  We are smarter than we used to be: the percentage of Americans with college degrees is up markedly.  Wiser is another matter.....

Well enough of this.  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness means, get out there and enjoy the day.  Burgers and beer optional.