…11 degrees for a high. Warm enough for a few squirrels to venture out, but not warm enough for me. Still windy.

Reading As The Twig Is Bent, a memoir by Wallace Byron Grange, an environmentalist, from whose book Those of the Forest I took, some time ago, an excerpt for my nature anthology.

This memoir almost seems an afterthought for Grange, as the manuscript was found in his papers by two retired UW professors who edited and condensed it and arranged for its recent publication by the U of Wisconsin Press. Grange was a contemporary and colleague of Aldo Leopold and an expert in the developing science of game management.

While Grange’s focus is always on wildlife, the memoir unselfconsciously and somewhat inadvertently provides an arresting picture of pioneer life. Grange grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, but moved when he was 13 with his family to a parch of rough, cutover land near Ladysmith, Wisconsin.

By the early 20th century, almost all of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been logged over—all the great white pines cut away, leaving stumps and slash, marsh, and sandy, infertile soil. Much of the land experienced horrific wild fires, such as the Peshtigo fire that burned well over a million acres and killed something like 2,000 people.

Cutover land was mostly worthless for farming, but that didn’t stop land promoters from hyping it as “Cloverland” and promising incredible opportunity at low prices. Grange’s father, having met failure in all his other ventures bought into the hype, and, at age 64, moved his family north to establish a farm.

And what a hard life it was. The family lived in a tarpaper shack for nearly a year until they were able to build a log cabin from logs they cut on the property. Their first attempt at a potato crop failed, as did their attempt at oats. Much of the family income came from selling cordwood, and lycopodium, or ground pine, (for Christmas wreaths). They subsisted largely on lagomorphs (rabbits and snowshoe hares). When Wallace was old enough for high school he boarded in a shed in Ladysmith and cooked his own meals on a little woodburner stove. Every weekend he walked 12 miles home to help with chores.

It goes without saying that, at that time, in 1919, there was no social security, medicare, television, internet—and in Northern Wisconsin, no telephone, radio, or automobile. No central heating, indoor plumbing, and not much in the way of electric light.

Grange did well in school, was able to work his way through college, and find employment in the nascent Department of Natural Resources.

Having not quite reached the end of the memoir I don’t know what happened to his parents and the farm. My guess is that the farm failed, as did most that tried to make it in cutover country.

Hard to imagine living there and then, knowing that the weather was often even even tougher that what we have been experiencing here and now.