Sawdust and Sacred Stones

A Historical Fiction Memoir of Growing Up in Company-Town Baraboo

Author

Amanda Nelson
February 05, 2025

Author's Note: This story weaves historical fact with fictional elements to explore the tensions between corporate interests and Indigenous resilience in 19th-century Wisconsin. While Baraboo's mills, circuses, and Ho-Chunk history are rooted in reality, the characters and specific events are imagined. The name "Kunu" is inspired by Ho-Chunk birth-order traditions, where "Kųųnų" denotes the first-born son. This fictional usage aims to honor the Ho-Chunk people's enduring connection to their ancestral lands and intergenerational knowledge. As someone who grew up in Baraboo during the aftermath of 9/11, I found the town's complex history particularly illuminating. This narrative is an attempt to bridge past and present, highlighting how historical struggles continue to resonate in our modern world.

Baraboo, Wisconsin – 1884

The sawdust settled like snow on my eyelashes as I watched Papa's mill churn out another day's worth of timber. It wasn't until Kunu showed me the other Baraboo that I realized our town had two rivers: one visible, one hidden.I was 10 years old when this revelation struck me. There was the Baraboo everyone knew, the one choked with sawdust from Papa's mill, its banks lined with railroad tracks hauling timber to Chicago. Then there was the other river, the one my friend Kunu showed me one October afternoon when the maples blazed crimson. It wasn't on any map the mill bosses used, but it flowed through the quartzite bluffs of Devil's Lake, where the Ho-Chunk had fished for generations before the treaties came.

"This place remembers," Kunu whispered as we crouched by a lichen-crusted stone. His father called it a "sleeping bear," though I couldn't see the shape anymore. Not after the quarrymen blasted the larger mounds to make gravel for the railroad. But the river? It still sang the old songs.

Kunu's father once told me his name meant "first light" in their old language. He was the eldest son, destined to carry stories like the Thunderbirds carried storms. But in the mill's shadow, where even sunrise tasted like sawdust, that name felt like a secret. A rebellion."In the old days," Kunu explained as we crouched by Devil's Lake, watching mist rise off the quartzite bluffs, "my ancestors would look to the stars to know when to plant, when to harvest. Each constellation told a story." He traced an invisible pattern in the air. "Now the mill smoke hides the sky, but we remember. That's why they call me Kunu, to keep the old ways burning bright, even when others try to snuff them out."

I thought about my own name, plain as the timbers stacked by the river. How different it felt from Kunu's: a name that carried the weight of generations, of resistance against forgetting. In that moment, as the lake lapped gently at the shore, I realized names could be more than just words. They could be lifelines, tethering us to a past the company ledgers tried to erase.

The Two Baraboos

The Mill's Baraboo

Our cabin reeked of pine resin and sweat. Papa's boots left sawdust trails that Mama swept into the stove each night. "Heat's heat," she'd say, but I knew she hated how it clung to our bread. At the mill store, flour cost a day's wages. "Better than Pullman," the clerk boasted, referencing towns where workers owed their souls to company housing. But debt here wore a kinder mask: credit slips decorated with circus elephants.When the Ringling brothers rolled into town with their first elephant in 1884, the whole village cheered. I didn't understand why Kunu's family stayed away. The circus brought a veneer of excitement, but beneath it, the river suffered. Each year, it ran a little slower, a little darker. Progress was taking its toll on the water that had sustained life for generations.

The Other Baraboo

Kunu's grandfather showed me where the bear-shaped mound once stood, its outline erased by plows. "They buried our stories," he said, "but the land keeps them." Though wild rice no longer grew in Devil's Lake, Kunu's aunt tucked a woven bag of northern-grown manoomin into my hands. "Taste what the water used to give," she said. It tasted like smoke and hope.We gathered hazelnuts where the Ho-Chunk camped before the 1837 treaty pushed them west. "They pay us to forget," Kunu muttered, crushing a shell underfoot. "We remember." His words hung in the air, heavy with the weight of history and the determination to preserve what others sought to erase.

The Winter the River Froze Black

When the mill dumped dye into the Baraboo River, turning the ice a sickly indigo, Kunu's father laughed bitterly. "Now they've tattooed their shame onto the water." The river, once a source of life, now bore the scars of industry, a stark reminder of the cost of progress.That same winter, as the cold deepened and resources grew scarce, the circus left for warmer climes, taking its promises with it. The town, so dependent on the seasonal spectacle, felt the absence keenly. Workers who'd built their lives around the Ringlings' seasonal jobs starved quietly. Mama traded her wedding ring for a sack of potatoes at the company store.

But in Kunu's world, the cold brought clarity:

Ice Lessons: He taught me to read cracks in frozen ponds. Zigzag lines meant danger, concentric circles meant spring was near.

Stolen Stories: His grandmother recounted how quarrymen dynamited the bird effigy mound for road gravel. "They take the land's bones," she said, "but not its voice."

The Rebellion of Small Things

By spring, I'd become a thief of seeds, a small act of defiance against the relentless march of industry. I scattered yellow coneflower seeds behind the mill. They sprouted in defiance, their roots clawing through industrial waste: nature's own rebellion. Kunu's family tapped trees in secret, avoiding the mill's "managed" sugarbush. Their syrup tasted of bark and resilience, each drop a testament to their enduring connection to the land.When the Ringlings' storage barn mysteriously caught fire in 1887, no one investigated. The Ho-Chunk said the bluffs themselves had struck the match. I watched the flames from afar, feeling a mix of awe and unease. The fire seemed to embody the simmering tensions between two worlds: one of spectacle and profit, the other of deep-rooted tradition and respect for the land.

Epilogue: 1923

I returned when the mills closed, their skeletons rusting beside the river. The circus had moved on, but Devil's Lake remained, its quartzite bluffs glowing amber in the sunset. The years had changed me, just as they had changed the landscape. Where I once saw only the mill's prosperity, I now saw the scars left on the land and its people. Kunu's grandchildren showed me the new wild rice beds their community planted up north. "Someday," one said, nodding toward the Baraboo, "it'll be clean enough here too." Their hope was like a seed, small but persistent, ready to take root in the healing earth. As I knelt by the river, I heard it again: the old song, faint but insistent. Progress had tried to drown it, but water has a way of wearing down even stone. And in that moment, I understood that resilience, like the river, flows not just through places, but through people. It's a current connecting past, present, and future in an unbroken stream.

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