Force & Resistance: Ruin, Recovery in the Mississippi Watershed

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Pages: 211-214

211

Force & Resistance:

Ruin, Recover y in the

Mississippi Watershed

By G. Tracy Mehan III

Historical Ag riculture and Soil Erosion in the Upper Mis sissippi

Valley Hill Country, by Stanley W. Trimble. CRC Press Taylor &

Francis Group. 242 pages.

From the January/ February 2014 issue of The Environmental For um.

The settlers coming into the Hill Coun-

try of southwestern Wisconsin in the

early 19th century were overwhelmed

by the beauty and fecundity of the landscape.

Stanley W. Trimble describes it as “a sort of

rural paradise, an Arcadia in America” in his

monumental history of environmental devas-

tation and renewal, Historical Agriculture and

Soil Erosion in the Upper Mississippi Valley Hill

Country. Here natives of New Eng land a nd

northern Europe found beautiful valleys with

cold, clear, owing springs with a mple brook

trout outside the front door of their farm

houses. Prairie soils were rich and fertile. Al l

was well for six or seven decades.

ings began to change for the worse. e

springs eventually dried up but then lled with ra ging waters with even a

moderate rainstorm, bringing with it “torrents of mud, sand, and boulders,

all threatening your house and farmstead. Of course, the brook trout are

long gone.”

On larger streams and in the oodplain, oodwaters destroyed crops a nd

fences, undermining the fertility of the elds, swamping pastures, decreasing

farm income, and often driving farmers o their land.