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1 Settlement and Changing Land Health in the Central Sands Area 12 Discussions about the Leopold Memorial Reserve typically go back only as far as Aldo Leopold’s 1935 purchase of the property , with some brief references to the previous landowner: a farmer whom Leopold derisively identified as “the bootlegger.”1 But this particular property features a much deeper human history. Perhaps the reserve area’s most significant feature during most of its history has been its location near a portage between the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers. Not far from this site, the proximity of these two rivers joined the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, a landscape feature that Native Americans and early French trappers depended on for transportation. Soon after the arrival of settlers, federal land surveyors mapped out rectilinear property line grids in the area in the 1840s as part of an effort to transform the land into marketable property for prospective owners. But the nutrient-poor soil of Wisconsin’s Central Sands area made the land around the future reserve site vulnerable to overuse if farmed intensively, especially in an economic framework that rewarded short-term profit over sound land management. Consequently, the area sustained significant farming only for a 100-year span beginning in the 1860s. Although the Leopold property was in poor ecological health by the time Aldo purchased it in 1935, he saw great potential in this land. In Leopold’s eyes, the value of the land, even in its overused condition, was increased by his awareness that it could serve as rewarding wildlife habitat and hunting grounds if it were better managed. 12 Settlement and Changing Land Health in the Central Sands Area 13 By examining the history of this land and how it arrived at such a forlorn condition when Leopold bought it, we can better understand the development of Leopold’s ideas regarding land health and the responsibilities of private landowners in conservation. And to trace the history of land-use change around the Leopold Memorial Reserve, one must start well before the bootlegger’s time with what we know of its use by indigenous peoples of the Upper Midwest. Native American Settlement of South-Central Wisconsin e proximity of the shack property to the plentiful food supply and transportation networks of the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers helps explain its long history of human settlement. Paleo-Indians first inhabited the region at the end of the most recent glacial period, some 12,000 years ago.2 Charcoal Natural Bridge State Park. (Jay Wilbur, Natural Arch and Bridge Society) Settlement and Changing Land Health in the Central Sands Area 14 and pointed chipped-stone artifacts have been found twenty miles to the southwest of the shack in a unique rock formation that gives Natural Bridge State Park its name. ese remains suggest that the state’s earliest inhabitants lived in small groups and traveled great distances to obtain sparse food in a subarctic climate. During the next 7,000 years, the rapidly warming climate led to an increased food supply, larger and more permanent settlements, and expanded trade. Approximately 4,500 years ago, Early Woodland Indians near Baraboo left behind pottery and fired clay.3 Around 500 BCE, Native Americans constructed some of the first conGeology of the Leopold Memorial Reserve Area The Leopold Memorial Reserve is only a few miles east of the Baraboo Hills, an ancient and mostly eroded mountain range located at the boundary of the unglaciated, or “driftless,” region in the southwest corner of Wisconsin. The granite rock of the Baraboo Hills is among the oldest in North America— more than a billion years old in sections. Too steep for farming, much of the land of the hills is forested, forming one of the largest upland hardwood stands in the Upper Midwest.4 In addition to this interesting ancient geology, the rolling hills and scattered ridges around the Leopold Memorial Reserve show the traces of several glaciers that over the millennia have advanced, come to a final rest in the area, and then retreated. The most recent glacial activity, during the Wisconsin period of the last ice age, started 70,000 years ago and lasted until 10,000 years ago. During this era, debris left behind by the terminal moraine of the receding glacier plugged the main outlet of the Wisconsin River, creating a vast inland lake. The release of this glacial dam and the tremendous impact of gushing lake water forced...

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