Harry Whitehorse may soon be forced to leave Monona site his ancestors settled (with audio)

Mary Ellen Gabriel
Special to The Capital Times  —  11/28/2008 3:50 pm

Harry Whitehorse considers himself lucky.

"I got to grow up beside a stream," he says, smiling.

That stream now carries runoff from the Menards parking lot in Monona and is considered a "stormwater conveyance" by urban planners. The 81-year-old Ho-Chunk elder and well-known artist, who still lives nearby, may be the only one left who remembers how it used to be.

The stream sustained the Whitehorse family and generations of Ho-Chunk before them. Whitehorse's parents built a wigwam -- a domed hut with bark siding -- close to the stream and fished for trout in its clear waters. Kids, including Harry and his brothers, swam in the deep "holes" under the cottonwoods, and mothers collected drinking water from the springs. Fathers and uncles trapped mink, beaver and muskrat along its banks.

But those days are long gone. Silted up and channeled through concrete culverts, the stream still flows -- sort of -- from Edna Taylor Conservation Marsh, past Menards, under Broadway Avenue and out to Mud Lake. But most of it would be barely recognizable to those Ho-Chunk families today. The people of Monona don't remember its name, if it ever had one, among white folks.

At the Whitehorse place, the stream pops up from under the road and begins to look more like its old self: a winding ribbon lined with cottonwoods and willows. The water flows 25 feet from Whitehorse's modest gray ranch house on a busy strip of Broadway Avenue. In front, traffic whizzes by. But out back, from his deck or kitchen window, Whitehorse watches a variety of wildlife -- warblers, wood ducks, sandhill cranes. His memories are as vivid as the orioles that return every spring.

(Hear Whitehorse's memories of wildlife below)

After almost 80 years, this may be the last spring Whitehorse welcomes the birds back to the creek.

John K. Livesey, the developer behind the Pier 37 project at the corner of Broadway and Monona Drive, wants to build a multi-use office and retail complex that includes a 140-room hotel on property owned by the Whitehorse family for generations. Monona officials say the development is on track, and they are talking with the developer about offering tax incentives.

Livesey was offered an option on eight acres -- the site of the now-closed Chief's Auto Parts store -- owned by other members of the Whitehorse family. Harry is the former owner of Chief Auto Body, which was next to the parts store, but he sold the business and that land to his brother in the 1980s to focus on his art. Livesey has no option on the acre of land where Whitehorse's house is, but the Livesey Co.'s online schematic site plan shows a restaurant and parking lot where it now stands. Livesey did not return phone calls for comment. But clearly, the developer is banking on the idea that Whitehorse, his wife, Deb, and their teenage daughter won't want to stay and watch a hotel go up in their backyard.

The Whitehorses are guarded in speaking about the negotiations under way, but they have hired both a lawyer and a real estate agent.

At 81, Harry Whitehorse has no idea where he'll go to start over.

"This is the only place I know," he says. "I grew up here. My mother's relations all came from this area."

During a recent conversation in his sunny kitchen, Whitehorse seems more worried about the stream than his own relocation. He suspects the developer will clear its banks to create an unobstructed sight line from the Beltline.

"Once they chop down all the trees, the birds and wildlife will leave," he says gloomily. "That's what my day-to-day life is all about -- seeing the animals come up the creek this way. I see the animals and I say, 'I'm still here, and I see you're still here.' "

Many of his sculptures and paintings have been inspired by the stream's wildlife.

Deb Whitehorse believes the stream is a wildlife corridor. For the past 15 years, she's kept detailed records of creatures the family has observed along the banks, including beavers, mink, and one year, a river otter.

"This creek deserves some respect," she says.

So does Harry Whitehorse. A World War II veteran and former owner of Chief Auto Body, Whitehorse is best known for the art he's been creating for the past 60 years. He has made commemorative sculptures from historic trees for Thoreau Elementary School and Edgewood College. His works adorn public parks and civic buildings in Madison, Monona and beyond. Whitehorse also created the National Native American Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the Highground in Neillsville. When his wooden "Effigy Tree" sculpture, erected in the 1980s to commemorate the Indian mounds at Elmside Park, began to rot, the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood association helped raise funds to have it cast in bronze. The bronzed memorial will go back to the park sometime next summer.

In honor of the family, Livesey plans to call his development "Whitehorse Commons."

Asked whether this is an appropriate way to commemorate his family's ties to the land and creek, Whitehorse shakes his head.

"I don't agree with it," he says, adding that he's seen plenty of change to this area, but that this would be the biggest change so far. "There's no way this area can be replaced."

One could argue that this landscape was lost to infill and asphalt long ago, so why not redevelop it? Livesey has a good track record, from a city planning standpoint. His Pier 37 development, which includes a Copps grocery and a Starbucks, quickly recouped Monona's tax incentive investment.

In that context, what's a few hundred yards of overgrown streambank? Wouldn't Harry Whitehorse and family be better off in a nice residential development, instead of hunkering down between the former Chief's Auto Parts and an RV sales lot?

But like the tip of the muskrat's tail, one old man's story is connected to something much bigger.

Whitehorse is here because his ancestors lived here. His mother, Annie Greencrow Whitehorse (the noted educator for whom Whitehorse Middle School is named), camped in the Four Lakes area as a girl. She led her own family back to these marshy acres from Black River Falls in the late 1920s. Along with relatives like the White Wings, for whom Ahuska Park is named ("ahu" means wing in Ho-Chunk and "ska" means white), they lived in wigwams at first. Ho-Chunk people were not accustomed to purchasing the land where they camped, hunted and fished.

"The European concept of ownership didn't fit with their land view," says Jennifer Kolb, deputy director of the Wisconsin Historical Museum. "From what I have been told by elders, they have a different sense of land and water -- a deep appreciation for those resources."

Whitehorse concurs.

"The Ho-Chunk always said, 'You don't own the land; the land owns you,' " he recalls.

But Annie Whitehorse was unusual for her time. She bought land, and the family built the first house with a wood floor in the area. The house was located a few dozen yards from where Harry's current home stands.

"It was almost like the other Indians thought Nani was an atheist, because she wanted title to the land," Whitehorse says of his mother. "But she could see the writing on the wall."

The writing was glaring and the story tragic. Though the Ho-Chunk people (formerly known as Winnebago) were here when the first white settlers arrived and are considered indigenous to Wisconsin, they were pushed off 8 million acres of fine, rolling land in the interests of farming and lead mining. In the 1830s, the government began a removal program that lasted more than 40 years. Ho-Chunk were rounded up at gunpoint, loaded into boxcars, and shipped off to neighboring states, including Nebraska.

Whitehorse remembers "Old Lady White Wing," a neighbor who lived to be 111, talking about the removal.

(Hear Whitehorse talk about the removal below)

"They put her on the train, and two days later she was back in Wisconsin," he says. "All those Ho-Chunk, they took them to Nebraska and they came right back. They knew these lakes, these marshes; they knew where they could eat and get shelter. There were people who would let them camp on their property as long as they didn't make any waves."

Except for a two-year stint at the Tomah Indian School, ending when he was 6, and four years in the U.S. Navy (1944-48), Whitehorse has never left his home by the stream. He hung on while infill and development changed the landscape beyond recognition. But when he looks out his kitchen window, he sees into the past.

(Hear Whitehorse's memories of Tomah Indian School below)

"My brother Walter and I would take a fry pan, some lard and a couple of tarpaulins, and set out in our canoe," Whitehorse says, grinning at the memory. "We'd canoe all the way from here to that big marsh off 51, near Stoughton. We'd camp on a big island in the middle. We just ate what we caught -- frog legs and fish."

The family never had a food bill: Annie Whitehorse cooked what her sons brought home and grew the rest in her garden. She could fix a mean muskrat soup with dumplings.

(Hear Whitehorse talk about his family's food below)

"The muskrat was like the Indians' pig," Whitehorse says. "They ate everything from the nose to the tail. The Indians liked to live near the marshes because of the muskrats. And we never needed horses, because we had canoes."

Whitehorse's voice is that of a born storyteller: warm and pleasant. He has just come from his workshop, where he's been working on a wood sculpture. His gray hair is full of sawdust. Deb reaches over to brush it out. She is concerned about how hard a move will be for him.

"Why do you live where you live?" Deb asks. "Probably because you like the neighborhood, it's convenient, or the schools are good. We're here because Harry's Ho-Chunk ancestors had their own idea of what was important in a place to live. Their criteria was water. I think that concept has been lost."

The Ho-Chunk have an ancient history near the waters in Four Lakes area, which they called Tay-cho-per-ah. Early white surveyors found Ho-Chunk campsites, villages and gardens ringing the four lakes, and their shores were lined with birchbark canoes, according to a 1922 article in the Wisconsin Archaeologist by Charles E. Browne, the first director of the Wisconsin Historical Society and co-founder of the Wisconsin Archaeological Society.

Browne believed that the Ho-Chunk's ancestors were the original builders of the effigy mounds shaped like bears, birds and other animals clustered around Madison's lakes. Archaeologists date the mounds to the years between 700 and 1100 A.D., but they have found camps in the area used by native people that are far older than that. Historian David Mollenhoff reports that one such camp, dating between 4000 and 8000 B.C., is located where the Beltline crosses the Yahara River, about a mile from the Whitehorses' house.

In modern times, as lakeshore acreage was gobbled up by developers and marshes were filled in -- often with the contents of effigy mounds that were energetically leveled for the purpose -- the Ho-Chunk retreated to small pockets of land near sources of fresh water.

"We got along pretty good with the white people," says Whitehorse. "They didn't mind the Indians camping in the marsh, because they didn't use it."

They've been dispersing and assimilating ever since. There are still plenty of Ho-Chunk people in and around Monona, including some of the many brothers, sisters, cousins and children of Harry Whitehorse. Janice Rice, the outreach coordinator for UW's College Library and who is related to Whitehorse on her mother's side, says it's harder and harder to find those who remember.

"I think it is important for people to tell those stories," she says.

One Monona resident with a long memory is 85-year-old journalist, author and local historian Dorothy Haines Browne, a volunteer with the Blooming Grove Historical Society who fought to save the few mounds that are left in Monona. Her parents were acquainted with the area's American Indian history, and Haines absorbed fascinating stories as a child.

"Our family had a boathouse near Winnequah Point," she recalls, adding that her mother had heard stories that on quiet nights, the Ho-Chunk could talk across the lake to one another from Winnequah to Turville Point.

At the house by the stream, Deb lifts one of Harry's paintings onto the kitchen table. The peaceful scene shows a Ho-Chunk woman and four kids standing close together over a stone fire pit. Three bur oak trees spread protecting arms in the background.

"That's my mother, and two of my sisters, and my little brother," says Whitehorse. "I painted it from memory."

The name of the painting, which hangs in Whitehorse Middle School, is "Everything We Need is Here."

Now, almost everything is gone. Instead of Whitehorse Commons, perhaps there should be a Whitehorse Creek.

Mary Ellen Gabriel
Special to The Capital Times  —  11/28/2008 3:50 pm