JUNEAU COUNTY PIONEER HABITAT
By Lawrence W. Onsager
The habitat that the first whites found in the area of Juneau County was rich in wild life and other natural resources. The French fur traders followed the Winnebago and Menominee Indians up the Wisconsin, Baraboo, Lemonweir, and Yellow Rivers to their winter hunting grounds. Here the Indians found abundant furbearing animals to trade for white technology.
Juneau County has one of the most varied habitats in Wisconsin. The region north of the Lemonweir River valley, which comprises two-thirds of the county, is a nearly level plain. The southern one-third of the county is a rugged, highland plateau, dissected in every direction by valleys and ravines. The differences in elevation ranges from 200 to more than 400 feet. The border region between the two areas has numerous outliers of irregular bluffs topped with grotesque towers and crags of sandstone.
The border area between the highland plateau and the Lemonweir River is drained by many creeks and tributary streams. This drier terrace plain sustained fish, fowl, and wild animals. On a farm of one hundred and sixty acres in Kildare Township just south of the Lemonweir and near the Wisconsin River, six creeks with their broad marsh bottoms cut the arable area into shreds and patches. This interrelation between arable and marsh land is made doubly significant by the habitancy of the wild life itself. These streams were the natural haunts of the beaver. Hundreds of their dams could be traced across the marsh bottoms, some of them running for many rods over fields that were later cultivated. The area north of the Lemonweir has defective drainage and broad marshy areas which are favorable for fur bearing aquatic animals.
One can easily imagine the conditions existing when this land was in undisturbed possession of its wild life. The broad marshes, cranberry bogs, and wild rice lakes, the streams and their tributaries dammed by the debris of floods and by the beaver and the land and water the home of fish, fowl, and fur bearing animals.
Rivers and Streams
In 1860, John T. Kingston, a Necedah lumberman, wrote that "the streams of importance bordering on and passing through the county are the Wisconsin on the eastern border, the Lemonweir passing nearly east and west through the southern portion of the county, and emptying into the Wisconsin at the head of the Big Dells, the Yellow river coming down through the county in a south-easterly direction and emptying into the Wisconsin about ten miles above the Lemonweir, the Little Yellow and Cranberry creek, both tributaries of Yellow river, the former emptying in about three miles from the mouth, and the latter some fifteen miles farther up." The Baraboo River drains the southwestern portion of the county.
Western Upland
Kingston described the southern one-third of the county as "a portion of the bluff range lying on and around the head waters of the Baraboo and Kickapoo rivers. The soils of the valleys in this bluff country is a deep black loam, very productive for all kinds of grain. The bluffs are also covered with a rich soil, producing a heavy growth of all kinds of hard timber known in this country. North of these bluffs, and extending to the Lemonweir River, a distance of from three to six miles, the country is very level, the soil mostly of a rather clay nature, and rather cold, owing to the near approach of the surface water, but as a general thing producing good crops of all grains."
The Castellated Hills Bordering the Western Upland
These irregular bluffs are remnant parts of the Western Upland escarpment capped by resistant rock. The isolated castles, towers, pinnicles and crags are formed by the action of weather, wind, and water. Some well-known outliers are Rattlesnake Mound, Castle Rock near Camp Douglas, Steamboat Rock, Swistal Bluff, and Twin Bluffs. Most lie west of New Lisbon, south of Mauston, and near Camp Douglas.
Sheep Pasture Bluff, southeast of Mauston, is a typical mesa. Its dimensions are one-half to one mile by one and five-eighths miles. It rises to an elevation of 300 feet above the surrounding plain. The lower portion of its wall is a 100-foot cliff, probably in the Cambrian, Dresbach sandstone.
Petenwell Rock, 235 feet high,is a more isolated sandstone outlier, which lies a dozen miles to the north on the west bank of the Wisconsin River. Nearby is Necedah Mound, an easily ascended, rounded knob of quartzite. This mound is a partly-exhumed monadnock of the pre-columbian peneplain. There are linear markings on the quartzite of the mound which resemble glacial striae but are really grooves called slickensides. Slickensides are produced on rock by movement along a fault or at the bottom of a landslide. At Necedah they extend down into the solid rock ledges.
The Dells of the Wisconsin lies partially within Juneau County. Here the Wisconsin River flows through a narrow, steep-sided gorge. Weathering and stream erosion have carved the river-banks into bold cliffs, sharp chasms, and striking, isolated rock pillars. On the western side of the Dells within Juneau County are Louis Bluff, Stand Rock, and several other interesting, natural features.
Lemonweir Valley
The Lemonweir valley which divides the county topographically was described by David McBride, editor of the Mauston Star, in 1857. The Lemonweir "takes its rise from extensive swamps and marshes near the dividing ridge in Monroe County, and has a tributary called the Little Lemonweir, which unites with the main branch eight miles north?west of this point [Mauston]. For many miles on the head waters of the main river, the land is heavily timbered with white and Norway pines, which have afforded a constant supply, since the earliest settlement of the valley, of immense quantities of this valuable timber, and which will no doubt continue during the present generation. The river is a very durable, permanent stream, at all times affording an abundant supply of water. The whole valley is also abundantly supplied with hard timber, white and black oak, for fencing, fire?wood, &c., and no better lands for stock and grain farms can be found in the Great West, ranging at from five to thirty dollars per acre."
Central Sand Plain
The northern two-thirds of the county lies in the Central Sand Plain of Wisconsin. Dotting the extensive sand flats and large stretches of marsh are isolated mounds or castellated sandstone peaks and quartzite hills rising abruptly 20 to 200 feet above the level plain to form the most conspicuous features of the landscape.
Kingston continues, "starting from the mouth of that river [Lemonweir] and running up on the north side a distance of some twenty miles, is a strip of open swamp and meadow lands, from two to three miles in width, interspersed with here and there ridges and islands of dry land, covered mostly with a thick growth of small sized timber, chiefly birch, poplar, pin oak, and gray [jack] pine.
"The marsh lands are mostly without timber; near the streams producing an abundance of wild grass suitable for hay, but farther back valuable only for the production of cranberries. Following along the west bank of the Wisconsin, above the Lemonweir and up to the county line is a strip of dry sandy land, from three to four miles in width, covered, excepting a few small prairies, with a thick growth of small gray pines. The whole western part of the county, extending from the Lemonweir north, is one uniform and almost unbroken marsh, occupying about a central position in what is known as the 'Great Cranberry Marsh.' Around the borders of this marsh, and along the margin of the Lemonweir, Yellow, Little Yellow rivers and Cranberry creek, is an immense amount of grass lands.
"Considerable deposits of iron ore are found in the middle and western portions of the county."
White Occupance ? the lumber era
Previous to the period of white occupance in the latter part of the 1830's and the beginning of the 1840's, the Central Sand Plain was a land of forests and marshes. The plain, due to the dominance of pine in the forest cover, was considered a part of that larger area of the state known as the "pineries". Along each side of the Wisconsin River, in a belt varying in width from one to six miles, there is a strip of sandy land which was heavily forested with white and Norway pines. A belt of similar species also extended along the Black River. Lying between the valleys of the Wisconsin and Black Rivers in the southern portion of what is now Clark and Wood counties, there was an area covered with a heavy growth of medium sized pine interspersed with hardwood ridges. These sections constituted the most extensive blocks of pine forest, although pines were dominant throughout the sand plain. The marshy sections of the plain were open areas of grass and sedge or else were covered with tamarack, the latter diminishing and the former increasing with each succeeding fire which swept this territory.
The wooded flood plain of the Wisconsin River is further characterized by interrupted areas of marshes, sloughs, abandoned channels, and small oxbow lakes in parts of its course. The river, at Wisconsin Rapids, flows in a shallow trench but the descent of 105 feet between Nekoosa and the Dells of the Wisconsin, a distance of 68 miles, is less than the slope of the plain, and therefore the river flows almost on the plain in the southern portion of the region. In this portion of the stream the low banks enclose a broad shallow river in which there are numerous sand bars and islands.
By the 1930's the land west of the terraces of the Wisconsin in northeastern Juneau County contained nearly as many abandoned as occupied farms. In this portion of the Central Sand Plain, large areas of Plainfield sand was reverting to a growth of jack pines and scrub oak. Less care had been taken here to keep up the fertility of the soil and the absence of silt in sufficient quantities to change the quality of the soil, combined to produce a section less desirable for farming purposes. In places where the vegetation was insufficient to hold the sand, blow-outs were numerous. In general this section, which lies between the terraces of the Wisconsin and the narrow valley of the Yellow River, was one in decadence - one in which production is very low, and in which a large portion of the area is no longer used for agricultural purposes.
Flood Plain and Valley of the Yellow River
Along the Yellow River there is a strip of land adjacent to the marsh in
the northern part of its course that is productive, but this strip is seldom
more than a mile in width. The soil of this area is mainly reworked river
alluvium and has a relatively high fertility. However, the sandy texture
of the soil subjects it to excessive drainage in periods of protracted drought.
Towards the south, below Necedah, the strip widens out as the Yellow River
approaches the Wisconsin, but even here it is not extensive. The major wealth
of the whole area west of the Wisconsin River passed with the cutting of
the white and Norway pine. With the passing of the lumber industry the importance
of Necedah as a lumbering center passed, and the villages of Werner and
Germantown declined so rapidly that by 1930 they contained merely relic forms
of a previous landscape.