History's Crossroads

Before President Eisenhower started the Interstate Highway System as part of the country's national defense; before President Lincoln finished the transcontinental railroad; the rivers of this country moved us and moved the world.

Where the Wisconsin flows into the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien, French explorers and eventually French traders formed a trading post that became a focus of fur trade and an economic hot spot.

Rivers were the best way to get quickly from one place to another because the alternative was travel by horse and the limits for travel each day was around 20 miles.  That makes the country a whole lot bigger, doesn't it?

The Mississippi draws a line across the country flowing 2,348 miles from its start in central Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.  At the confluence with the winding Wisconsin, 15.8 million gallons flow past each minute.

Before all that, before there was even a United States of America, two French Europeans, Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet ended their ride down the Wisconsin River and entered the Mississippi on June 17, 1673.

Father Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, joined the French Explorer's expedition in 1673 and ultimately the two learned much about the upper Midwest and the upper part of the Mississippi.

Standing atop a bluff in Wyalusing State Park, it wasn't that difficult to imagine the view the two might have seen from the same vantage point.

What is difficult to consider is what they might have thought or imagined might happen over the next 340 years.

In the skies back then Passenger Pigeons were a dominant force over the Mississippi as huge flocks were said to have covered as much as 850 square miles.  By 1914, they were hunted to extinction.  A memorial in the park serves as a canary in the mine for park-goers, a reason to pause and consider actions that individually seem to have little impact.

Back further in time than the French Explorers, various native peoples created effigy mounds to commemorate different times, events, and people.  Many of those mounds have been lost to erosion and others to development.  Several of these monuments stand on top of bluffs on either side of Mississippi, while some do act as cemeteries, the meaning of many is lost to history. 

Historical markers in the park indicate the effigy mounds may have been built as long ago as the time of Christ.

You can't see all of it from the top of a river bluff, but you might be able to see a long way back and dream of what this spot might look like in another 100 years or more.

My hope is that our great-great-great grandchildren will also be able to enjoy the spectacular view at Wyalusing State Park.