The Wooden West: Industrial Capitalism and Indigenous Dispossession in the North Woods, 1825-1860

• In Event: Deep Cuts: Forests and United States History

Abstract

The history of the Upper Midwest’s lumber industry is one typically centered around the region’s post-Civil War boom thanks to the (over)expansion of railroads. However, the exploitation of the region’s North Woods forests began by squatters, farmers, and miners who moved into adjacent areas north of the Illinois border in the 1820s before commercial lumbering arrived in the late-1830s. In fact, to focus on the commercial lumber industry in a timber-rich region such as early-nineteenth-century Wisconsin Territory, one needs to examine a number of adjacent industries; settlers used timber for far more than milled lumber, which represented just a fraction of the overall exploitation of forest resources. Yet, as white settlement pushed farther into the interior of Wisconsin Territory, the Anishinaabeg, Dakota, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk Nations controlled the vast timber region of northern Wisconsin Territory. This presentation examines how access to timber was essential to both Indigenous dispossession and industrial expansion in the Upper Midwest. Wisconsin’s commercial development was largely dependent on its access to timber resources, and dispossessing the Native Nations inhabiting the North Woods provided a wealth of timber that supplied the framework of the region’s expanding economy. This presentation seeks to push the engagement with the northern forests back to the early 1830s, illustrating the centrality of the forests to Native livelihood and dispossession, as well as regional commercial development. Native Nations inhabiting the North Woods relied upon the forests and its vast resources for economic, cultural, and spiritual sustenance, and their dispossession was integral to both industrial growth and the overall growth of the regional economy. The settler’s axe not only cleared the forest, but constrained Indigenous economies through deforestation, and in doing so became an essential tool to clearing the social landscape by forcing treaties and extending the United States’ domestic empire.

Author

• Hayden L Nelson, University of Kansas