Via Medium.com:

Authored by Michael Lesy and published in 1973, this non-fiction work, labeled by many today as a cult classic, looks at the darker side of the great American Dream, circa 1890 in rural Wisconsin. The result is at times laughably absurd and strangely unsettling…

Lesy is a writer and professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. In a statement posted on Hampshire’s College’s website, Lesy describes his working theme as using “historical photographs from public archives…to tell a variety of difficult truths about our country and our shared pasts.”

Wisconsin Death Trip would become his first, and most famous, published effort to date. And it all came about because one day the young scholar got tired of studying.

In 1972 Lesy was studying for his masters degree in American social history at the University of Wisconsin. One afternoon he decided he needed a break.

“I was really quite bored,” he would later say of the day when he started paging through a photography book and came across an old picture published by the Wisconsin Historical Society. On a whim he walked over to the very same Wisconsin Historical Society building on the Madison campus and asked if he could see some more.

What he found was a collection of portraits taken in the late 1800s by one Charles Van Schaick, the town photographer and Justice of the Peace in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

Lesy pored over thousands of Van Schaik’s old photographs that afternoon in Madison and saw something haunting start to emerge from the grim Scandinavian faces staring back at him.

His first impulse was to somehow tell the story of these pioneering people in the form of a documentary film. But he was quick to realize the more practical approach would be to compile these pictures in a book and let them tell the story instead.

Following up on his newfound inspiration, he started scouring through newspaper archives of The Badger State Banner from the 1890s, sifting and picking out any bizarre reports that complemented the dark vision he had seen reflected in Van Schaik’s subjects.

What he found was a treasure trove of stories referencing madness, suicide, disease and crime in the hinterlands of Wisconsin.

These snippets would become the other half of his picture book. By combining words and pictures in just the right way Lesy hoped to create a black and white montage of images no reader would soon forget.

Michael Lesy

A few samples:

• “James Carr, residing in the town of Erin, Vernon County, was discovered dead in his log house recently, having died of starvation.”

• “Mrs. Carter, residing at Trow’s Mill, who has been in charge of the boarding house at A. S. Trow’s cranberry marsh, was taken sick at the marsh last week and fell down, sustaining internal injuries which have dethroned her reason. She has been removed to her home here and a few nights since arose from her bed and ran through the woods…. A night or two after she was found trying to strangle herself with a towel…. It is hoped the trouble is only temporary and that she may soon recover her mind.”

• “Lena Watson of Black River Falls gave birth to an illegitimate child and choked it to death.”

• “Alexander Gardapie, aged 90 years, died at Prairie du Chien. He walked into a saloon, drank a glass of gin, asked the time of day, sat down, and died.”

• “G. Drinkwine, father of Miss Lillian Drinkwine, attempted suicide a few days ago at Sparta. He swallowed a large quantity of cigar stubs.”

Or finally, this charming little sketch:

• “Frederick Schultz, an old resident of Two Rivers, cheated his undertaker by suddenly jumping out of the coffin in which, supposed to be dead, he had been placed.”

… Were these incidents just isolated oddities, or were they more telling of what life was really like back then? Michael Lesy figured the answer to both questions was yes.

Reading through the accounts in Death Trip today, one is left to wonder — only half in jest — if the entire countryside wasn’t awash with crazies. Well, times were indeed tough back then, especially for the farmers and homesteaders who had little money to begin with.

All across the country in 1893, a run of bank failures and the depletion of the gold reserve set off an economic depression that quietly became “one of the worst in American history,” and many folks in Wisconsin felt hardship like never before. Doubtless a fair number did fall prey to madness and suicide as a result.

And why not? Back then, facing an empty bank account or a child rasping for dear life with diptheria, or looking out over a season’s failed harvest and wondering how food was going to be put on the table, who wouldn’t question their ability to make it through another day?

In an interview in 2003, Lesy said that the aim of any book should be to “allow the reader the ability to free associate and not be lost.”

That’s what the reader is invited to do with Wisconsin Death Trip once the pages start turning. The mind starts to skim across the photographs and in free association ponder what was going on in the life of each of these people when their picture was taken? What hardships could have pushed some to taking such grisly extremes written about in the local papers?

Michael Lesy is an American non-fiction writer. His books, which combine historical photographs with original writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (1976), Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life (1982), Visible Light (1985), Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (2007), Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer, 2013), Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2017), and Snapshots 1971–77 (September 2021).

Paperback, 148 pages