Fishing by Torchlight on the Fox River

Fishing by Torchlight on the Fox River by Paul Kane

In the early 1840's Canadian artist, Paul Kane, captured this scene of Menominee fishing on the Fox River in northeast Wisconsin. Within 25 years, the birth and rapid growth of several small cities along the Fox River would render this scene a faint memory. Wisconsin was, by treaty, a territorial possession of the United States since 1783, it remained effectively part of British Canada until 1818 when a detachment of American soldiers arrived in Green Bay. When Kane recorded this scene, the fur trade that had once dominated the Fox River was in sharp decline. Once the single most important economic highway of the French colonial empire, plans were already being made to harness the rivers’ water power potential into reality. A 164 foot drop in the river from Appleton to Green Bay (the height of Niagara Falls) was about to be filled with dams, locks and sooner than anywhere else on earth, hydro-electric power turbines. In 1882, Appleton became the first electrified city in the United States outside of New York. Four years later, it had the first electric street car in North America. Through it all, the Menominee had no chance. A series of treaties soon left them with 230,000 acres of timberland on the Wolf River. In 1817 they controlled 4,000,000 acres of land. Nearly two hundred years of French and the light touch of British rule seemed benign compared to what they were facing. As the Fox Cities area grew into a worldwide industrial powerhouse during the late part of the century, some small ragged groups of Menominee could still be seen along the river, moving from place to place, sleeping rough, reduced to begging. The painting is housed at the Royal Museum of Ontario in Toronto.