Campus Connection

And four other stories you didn’t know from La Crosse history

Alumna Jenny DeRocher’s work takes place in a back room of the La Crosse Public Library filled with old papers nestled inside boxes, folders, and grocery bags.  As an archives librarian, her job is to sort these historic documents, make sense of them, and, ultimately, make them accessible to the wider community. 

Finding her “dream job in public history” is all thanks to the UW-La Crosse History Department, she explains.

“I had never felt passionate in a class before and then took my first history class,” says DeRocher. “I fell in love with this process of looking at primary and secondary sources and building a story from what happened at some point in history.”

DeRocher credits the UWL Public & Policy History program for instilling a passion for policy history and the role our local government plays in shaping our community's history. Professors like Ariel Beaujot, James Longhurst, and Víctor Macías González mentored DeRocher while she was an undergraduate, helping her get internships and grants in public and policy history projects. DeRocher says that without these mentors guiding her, she wouldn't be where she is today.

After declaring her major in her sophomore year, DeRocher became immersed in a whirlwind of historical and library-related projects throughout college. Post graduation, she carries on her excitement for the subject, not only during her day job in the archives, but also guiding local history tours, running the library’s History Club (which you can join), and finding ways to get more people interested in local history and cultural heritage. 

In her nearly six years at the library, she has learned a lot about La Crosse. Below DeRocher shares five things you likely didn’t know about the river city.  

The day the Mississippi flowed backwards

Between 1811 and 1812, a strange natural phenomenon was documented in La Crosse history. Early primary sources said it “appeared” the waves of the Mississippi River were flowing backward. Boatmen out on the water reported it actually moved backward. 

While some speculated that the odd river behavior was the result of steamboats that were traveling the river for the first time, geology records tell the real story. 

From Dec. 16, 1811 through March of 1812, over 2,000 earthquakes shook the central Midwest, and between 6,000-10,000 earthquakes were rumbling near the epicenter in New Madrid, Missouri, located near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

Amounting to the largest earthquakes in American history, three of the biggest earthquakes measured a magnitude of between 7.8 and 8.8 on the Richter scale. Called the New Madrid Earthquakes, the movement was strongly felt throughout much of central and eastern U.S. and produced a force great enough to turn the river against itself to flow backwards.

La Crosse ice cream server becomes crime-solving bloodhound trainer extraordinaire

Bank robbers, thieves, and murderers of the mid 1900s had to answer to a man named George Brooks, along with his loyal canines. Brooks, of La Crosse, was an ice cream and soda server at Bodega Brew Pub who had a hobby training bloodhounds to track down anyone, anywhere.

Brooks and his bloodhounds helped solve crimes throughout the Midwest for nearly 40 years from 1932-1968, earning him a national reputation. He assisted law enforcement officials in over 3,000 cases tracking criminal suspects and finding missing people. His bloodhounds tracked searchers to the spot where the vehicle departed in the Evelyn Hartley disappearance of 1953, and he was allegedly contacted in 1958 by the president of Cuba to help find revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro in the hills although he didn’t accept the job. 

 He trained his dogs by paying kids who came to the Bodega to run around the city, creating a trail of scent for the dogs to follow. Bloodhounds do better in a natural setting with plants and grass to capture scent, so the pavement produced a real challenge, which helped his hounds hone their tracking skills. If he had a case that would take him away from his job, he could close the Bodega for the day and be out for weeks until it was finished. 

Want to hear more stories like this?

Dark La Crosse Stories podcast is a La Crosse Public Library Archives (LPLA) program produced in collaboration with the La Crosse Tribune that shares stories from the darker side of La Crosse’s history. It can be accessed on multiple platforms: as a videocast on YouTube, as well as on podcast platforms like Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. Each year beginning in 2020, Fox 25|48 and WI Proud has collaborated with LPLA staff to produce Rivertown, a short historical documentary reimagining Dark La Crosse Stories. See the Dark La Crosse Stories episode about George Brooks and his hounds and the 2023 Rivertown production that includes Brooks.

Rethinking the city’s founder 

Nathan Myrick, a fur trader from the 1800s, has long been commemorated as La Crosse’s founding father. But what makes a founder? And why did La Crosse give the title to a man who only lived in the city for about six years in his teens and early 20s?  

Myrick arrived in La Crosse to set up his business trading goods with Indigenous people, largely Ho-Chunk and Dakota, in the area at age 19. He left by age 25 after a huge flood on the Black River destroyed his sawmill. Myrick also saw less opportunity for business in the area after the Ho-Chunk people, his business clients, were forced to move out of Wisconsin to a Minnesota reservation.  He followed the Ho-Chunk and opened a trading post outside of the Long Prairie, Minnesota reservation where they had moved.  Myrick continued to move, setting up trading posts across central and southern Minnesota. His departure from La Crosse was in 1848, eight years before La Crosse was incorporated as a city.

While Myrick’s work trading with the Indigenous people was good for his pocketbook, the situation wasn’t beneficial Ho-Chunk and other indigenous people. They had been forced off their land and in return received yearly annuity payments from the federal government as compensation. But those payments didn’t provide enough funds to purchase goods throughout the entire year. So, they had to go to government-approved traders at trading posts like Myrick’s that would offer them credit for goods. This dependence allowed traders to choose whether to sell to certain individuals or charge unfair prices.

When annuity payments came in, the local Indian Agent would first pay off the debts at the trading posts before giving the rest to the Indigenous people. In this way, traders like  Myrick knowingly profited from the suffering of the Ho-Chunk and Dakota. One of Myrick’s business partners was his younger brother Andrew, who is notorious for his role in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

DeRocher says Nathan Myrick started writing himself into La Crosse history as its founder, writing to the newspaper and calling himself the “Father of La Crosse.” 

The La Crosse Public Library also has an exhibit questioning Nathan Myrick as the city’s founder. Check out their website history on this topic. 

La Crosse’s global goods - rubber and bananas

We may think of La Crosse as small town without much global impact, but from its early days the city was connected to larger global networks with a history of unfair labor practices and slave labor, explains DeRocher. 

DeRocher points to rubber, a commodity that was shipped to the La Crosse Rubber Mills Company, which opened its doors in 1897 on La Crosse's North Side. 

To meet the demand for this commodity, many rubber companies went to exploitative extremes. La Crosse's rubber came primarily from Brazil or Southeast Asia where slave labor practices were used in its cultivation. By the time they became popular commodities, the slave trade had been eradicated, but by practice it was not eliminated. 

Also, in rubber factories around the world, the working conditions were poor with reports of people’s skin turning blue, working in sweltering heat and breathing in bad chemicals. In an oral history collected by the UWL Oral History Program, and now preserved at Murphy Library Special Collections and Area Research Center, La Crosse Rubber Mills employee Herman Tietz shared how the air was so polluted people would get drunk off the fumes.

Slave labor was also used in picking bananas that arrived at many grocery stores in La Crosse in the early 1800s. Check out this Hear, Here story about a banana warehouse in La Crosse.

DeRocher says a UWL class taught by Tiffany Trimmer called “Sugar, Coffee, Rubber, Bananas: Commodities in World History” showed her how everyday commodities have a history that is based on exploitative labor, and led her to researching how this global history connects to La Crosse. Trimmer’s class impacted DeRocher so much that she got a rubber tattoo on her arm.

“It reminds me that the history of every little thing in our world has a complicated backstory, and it is my responsibility to make sure I never ignore or whitewash those backstories,” she says.

Interested in exploring La Crosse history in a more nuanced manner?

DeRocher publishes two history activities a month on the Public Library website, and at the end of the month her history club meets to discuss. She and Dr. Tiffany Trimmer, the instructor for her favorite course mentioned above, meet and curate primary and secondary sources surrounding the historic themes and then each month’s discussion revolves around the theme. New people are welcome.

A history with homelessness

In modern times we sometimes discuss whether taxpayer dollars should be used to help homeless people. While seemingly a current discussion, the notion of helping people facing housing insecurity or homelessness has long been engrained in La Crosse history.

Police department records dating back through the 1900s show people checking in with their name and belongings at the city jail, the City’s historic effort to keeping people from sleeping on the street. Some records include the meals they ate. Whether staying overnight in the North La Crosse Jail in 1890 or a shelter in 2024, the reasons for their being unsheltered were always different. Some people were not locals, but migrants moving from the east to west coast and looking for a cheap way to travel.  Regardless of their background, documents show that the city was invested in them, and DeRocher believes that these records tell us that we have a societal responsibility to continue to be invested.

“Our records show the humanity we had throughout history,” says DeRocher.