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ix Introduction Most of the events in this book take place in northern central Wisconsin. Described in the early nineteenth century by eastern Euro-Americans as a part of the“Old Northwest”or even the“Far West,”it became in the late nineteenth century the “West” and then part of the “Midwest.” Euro-Americans spread westward from eastern states and south from what is now Canada. So too did a number of Native groups. Europeans immigrated from all directions. By , the people of many cultures called this place home. To Native peoples already there, it was their homeland. Settler families there participated actively in the Civil War: husbands and sons went off to the battlefront; women and older men farmed and supported the Union cause from the home front. After the war, farm families settled the southeastern area of the state rapidly. In north-central Wisconsin in , however, only a sprinkling of non-Native settlements existed. Much of the land was only marginal for farming. On this northern frontier, Natives and settlers still jostled for space to live. They experienced the transition from a fur-trading to a lumbering economy, and as that latter economy waned at the turn of the century,all people scrambled for economic alternatives.This northern Wisconsin frontier was similar to that west of the Mississippi during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both frontiers shared common characteristics: a swift and ruthless exploitation and destruction of natural resources, settlement by non-Native peoples, enclosure and containment of Native communities in circumscribed areas which the national government attempted to control. Wisconsin has long been the locale of a search for theories about the settlement process. When in the early twentieth century Frederick Jackson Turner imagined the frontier as a process of settlement that influenced national character , he was living in and looking back at his youth in Wisconsin. To some extent,his theories inscribed the early peopling of southern Wisconsin by EuroAmericans . He envisioned a frontier moving west across the country under the impetus of white men while white women were subsumed under the term “family.” In his theory, indigenous Native peoples were quickly replaced by “pioneers.” Turner’s vision of the West and the frontier process has been challenged during the last thirty years by many historians attempting to restore a more diverse and complex history to the region. This book is a part of that revisioning of the West and the frontier. The multicultural heartland was the scene of great rural population change. The filling by European and American settlers of northern and western space, of a land already settled by people native to this area, is still the defining story of the Midwest. Non-Native settlers filled up this northern frontier as they did the western frontier in the late nineteenth century, like a great wave moving through the land. The wave flooded this land and then receded as economies and cultures could no longer sustain the large numbers of people. To stay in place settlers developed tourism and dairying, while experts offered them advice on modernizing their farms and cultures. Through this great wave, buffeted by settlers and their governments, Native communities survived at great cost to themselves and to their cultures. This book covers the years from  to , a time during which the lumbering economy grew, attracting new immigrants. Once most of the profitable forests were gone, the settlers turned to food production and recreation for a growing industrial and urban nation. This book spans a period during which reformers and communities tried to come to terms with the quick industrialization and settlement of the hinterland. It explores three aspects of rural women’s lives: building economies, protecting families and communities, and making new homes. It ends with the exodus of settler daughters to earlytwentieth -century cities and includes a final chapter on how we may remember the histories of the women absent in most accounts of this era,the women who formed the bedrock of the families and communities that occupied this area. Native and settler women lived through dramatic changes in the time covered by this book.During this period,immigrants from Europe and Americans from the East arrived on this northern frontier to claim parts of these Native homelands as their own.Through these changes,Native women preserved their cultures, adapted to new circumstances, and created new cultures; settler women did the same. Both groups played a crucial social and economic role as the fur trade declined in...

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