From Sawmills to Sunfish
A History of Onalaska, Wisconsin
By John and Joan Dolbier, 1985

Robert and Hettie A. Rand, natives of Vermont,
started West in the early 1800's with the early pio-
neers. On the way, they became sick and were
forced to stop at several locations, including Ohio
where they lived for a time. They returned to West
Virginia where they remained for 20 years, and
where Robert died at the age of 65. The couple had
ten children.
Hettie continued to move West with some of her
children. She married five times and had children
by three of these husbands. Her last husband was
the grandfather of Hamlin Garland. In her later
years, she lived on Brice Prairie with her daughter,
Lucy Pittinger, and became well known in
Onalaska.
Hettie's ancestry is very interesting. Her father
was Artemus Reed, one of the "Green Mountain
boys." He fought in the Revolutionary War and
was one of the men who disguised themselves as
Indians and threw the British tea overboard in the
Boston Harbor. Her uncle was Thomas Buchanan
Reed, a well known author and poet. One of his
works is "Sheridan's Twenty Miles Away."
One of Robert and Hettie's children continued to
move West in the pioneer spirit. He became known
as "Buckskin Jack" and was apparently a very pic-
turesque fellow. He was a large man, said to have
been 7 feet tall, to wear size 14 shoes, and weigh
280 pounds. He hunted deer and tanned the hides
for clothing and moccasins. He became a United
States Scout in the Bad Lands of the Dakotas and
later operated a hunting lodge in Colorado.
Another son, James B. Rand, the seventh of the
ten children, was also a very large man. He was
born in Brooke County, West Virginia, in 1822. As
a young man he started to work digging out grubs
and making railroad ties. At the age of 16 he
worked on flatboats on the Ohio River, loading
them at Cincinnati for New Orleans. When he was
in his mid-20's, he came to Wisconsin settling in
Dane County where he farmed. He lost his right
arm in a threshing accident while he was
harvesting his third crop of grain.
By the time he recovered from the accident, he
had lost nearly everything and left the farm. He
then began working with a logging crew on the
Lemon Wire River. He became teamster for the
logging headquarters coming into La Crosse during
the winter of 1850-51, before there were any roads
here.
James settled in Onalaska, in 1852, and became
one of the oldest settlers to remain in the city, and
lived to be one of the oldest settlers in the county.
He engaged in various types of business: he kept a
hotel, was in the cattle business for many years,
was a land speculator, was Deputy Sheriff under
the first Sheriff in the county, and served in the
post for 25 years. In 1884, he went into the livery
business with his son-in-law, A. N. Moore; and in
1889, acquired a meat market in the city.
Mr. Rand had married Elizabeth Latimer in West
Virginia in 1846. She was born in Pennsylvania
and was of Scotch descent. She came to the Coulee
Region in 1848.
James and Elizabeth had six children. They were
Isabell (Mrs. William Evans); George, who farmed
near Holmen; Artemas, who worked in logging;
Martha (Mrs. Charles Staples); Anna (Mrs. A. N.
Moore); and her twin brother, Willie, who died at
age two. Mrs. Rand died in 1892. Later Mr. Rand
married Mary Hartley. He died in 1898.
Artemus, who was named after his grandfather,
Artemus Reed, and his wife, Clara, are best de-
scribed by their son, Clayton Rand, who wrote the
book, "Ink on My Hands." Following is his descrip-
tion of his parents and grandparents:'
"According to the grapevine that climbs my particular
family tree, my paternal ancestor originated in Wales
and landed at Rye Beach, New Hampshire, about 1630.
Whether he came seeking religious freedom or to escape
justice is of no consequence.
"For ten generations, on both sides of the house, my
forbears kept pace with the American frontier. They
joined the colors of the Republic in the Revolution,
fought Indians and were on both sides of the War
Between the States. By the time my father, Art, appeared
on the scene, their offspring had reached Wisconsin...
"I remember my Grandfather Rand as having a heroic
countenance and a huge frame. He pioneered in Wiscon-
sin and once exchanged forty acres in what became La
Crosse for a yoke of oxen. He owned the livery stable
and meat market at Onalaska, and one of his arms had
been torn from its socket while he experimented with a
threshing machine. I used to ride his knee while he tried
to read his newspaper with a magnifying glass. He was
gentle and kind and, with his gray locks and flowing
beard, he looked like the pictures of the saints that em-
bellished the pages of the family bible . . .
"My father was of average size, wiry and tough, and
is said to be made of iron. Though he had little formal
schooling, men said of him, 'He is the best-informed man
in the community.' An omnivorous reader of newspapers,
he had a sticky memory. In his younger years he had ac-
cess to good books, and could quote for hours from the
classics.. .
"Among the letters he wrote me, . . . were several
written altogether in verse, for he had the gift of
rhythm. An excellent clog dancer and agile of limb
when he was past sixty he could hold a broomstick at
each end and jump over it forward and backward
without turning his hands loose.
"My mother was the most versatile and industrious
person I have ever known. She could do anything. She
soled our shoes, cut our hair and made our clothes. She
could handle a hammer and saw, paint pictures of some
merit in oil on canvas, play a tune on a cooking stove,
work miracles on a sewing machine and embrodier deli-
cate designs on fragile cloth."
In the second part of his chapter on Onalaska,
Rand describes the city and the lives of the people
in such a way that we are left with a vivid mental
picture of how things were for the people during
the last days of the logging industry. His descrip-
tion follows:2
"Onalaska, tucked in among the romantic rolling hills
of the so-called Coulee country, was in the Wisconsin
Woods. Here my pioneering parents eked out a bare exis-
tence on a cleared patch, supplemented by the wages of
my father who logged at the pinery during winter and
sawmilled in summer.
"I remember that my father would leave for the north-
ern woods with the first fall of snow and returned with
the spring thaw, his face covered with whiskers and his
pockets filled with gold and silver. He always gave me
fifty cents for having kept the kitchen stove supplied
with wood during the long winter, and with a hundred
dollars saved from his labors we became for the moment
one of the richest families in the village.
"Winter in Onalaska in the 'nineties was a kind of hi-
bernation. We banked the house up to its window sills
with manure from the barynard to keep out the cold, put
on storm doors and windows, and spent the greater part
of the time carrying wood from the shed to the house,
feeding fires and trying to keep warm. When the Black
River was frozen over, huge blocks were cut from it by
my Uncle Abel and packed in sawdust in his ice-house
for sale in summer.
"And when the river melted, the logs that had been
piled on its frozen bosom during winter came floating
downstream in turbulent booms. My father was one of
the best log-riders on the river, and no cowboy ever kept
his seat on a bucking broncho in a stampede with more
skill than he kept his feet while breaking a jam or
corralling wild and slippery logs for the mill.
"Winter in the woods was bleak and bare, but the
bursting of spring in the Coulee was a pageant in which
nature covered her naked limbs with incense and flowers.
Then we gathered violets, 'shooting stars' and 'Dutch-
man's breeches' from the surrounding bluffs, and were
given sulphur, molasses and cream of tartar to purify the
blood.
"Even in poverty, childhood has its compensations. It
takes little to make a child happy. To go barefoot, to
heed the irresistible call of the old swimming hole on a
hot, dusty day when one is chopping weeds, to feel the
healing waters of a clear, swift stream on one's nude
skin, even when he knows his hide is to be tanned for
having abandoned his hoe in the field, give one a wealth
of golden memories.
"The only time I can remember when I didn't get
whipped for running away was the day I found a pink
pearl in a clam shell. My father confiscated it and sold
it to a jeweler at La Crosse. Just what he got for the
pearl we never knew, but he came home hilarious and
happy. He had stopped off at Saloon Street on his re-
turn. Times had been hard, and it had been a long time
since he had felt free to make a splurge.
"Saloon Street got most of the spare dimes in
Onalaska in the 'nineties. It was the busiest thoroughfare
in the village. Saloon Street ran parallel with the river
front, and the horse-drawn trolley line that connected
Onalaska with La Crosse, five miles south, had its
Onalaska terminus at the point where the saloons began,
so the bars caught the trade going and coming. Though
the temperance cause, following the campaign for 'free
silver,' was the most militant local movement, the traffic
in rum flourished as Onalaska's major industry.
"The timber was about cut, there was no longer steady
work at the mill, dairying in La Crosse County had not
been developed and the chinch bug was in the wheat. At
that time my family was striving to extract a living from
a small truck-and-berry farm. The first selling experience
I ever had was peddling rhubarb, asparagus, gooseberries,
currants and plums in a community where everybody else
had raised rhubarb, asparagus, gooseberries, currants and
plums.
"When the slaughter of timber was over in Wisconsin
my father, with the usual pioneering urge in his blood
for a new frontier, was torn between the gold rush to the
Klondike and the new wilderness of the Deep South. A
few of Father's friends had made strikes in the Yukon,
and the Canadian wilds were calling; Father dreamed of
an unpeopled empire, of majestic rivers and nuggets of
gold. But J. E. North of Onalaska had built a mill in
Mississippi and had promised Father steady work. Moth-
er was thinking of domestic stability, security for her
children, and her heart was set on the South.
"In the meantime, the great decision was complicated
by my Uncle Will, who threatened to foreclose the mort-
gage on the place. He and Father had a blistering con-
troversy under the apple trees, in which Father, as usual,
had done full justice to the English language and some
of its accessories.
"Of course, Mother won. She prevailed upon Father to
seek his fortunes in the milder climate. We decided to
move to the Gulf Coast country of Mississippi, where
another virgin forest awaited the ravages of ax and saw.
Father went South in advance of his family, earning
enough in a year as log-scaler to send for his flock.
"We had cultivated our truck garden during Father's
absence, and had prospered growing cucumbers, on which
we had made a net profit of thirty-five dollars. We
closed the house and spent the winter on my grandfa-
ther's farm, near Spring Green, on the Dells of the Wis-
consin River. We had taken along a few sacks of dried
beans and other rations to help with our keep, and
several of us were billeted out among uncles and aunts
in the neighborhood to lighten the load. We attended the
log school across the river, three miles away, to which
my mother had gone as a child, until a virulent epidemic
of smallpox kept us quarantined and separated for much
of the winter.
"When spring broke we returned to Onalaska and sold
the truck farm which by now was well covered with
weeds and mortgage notes. We bought two cows and a
calf, and I was loaded into a box car as supercargo, with
the cattle, a crate of chickens, some household goods and
an older brother, and shipped south to Bond, Mississippi."

FOOTNOTES
'Clayton Rand, Ink on My Hands. (The Dixie Press, Gulfport,
Miss., 1940), pp. 1, 2, and 3.
2Rand, Ink on My Hands, pp. 4-7.
SOURCES
Rand, Clayton. Ink on My Hands. The Dixie Press, Gulfport,
Miss., 1940.

Biographical History, Illustrated. La Crosse, Trempealeau and
Buffalo Counties, Wisconsin. Chicago: The Lewis Publishing
Company, 1892.

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From Sawmills to Sunfish
A History of Onalaska, Wisconsin
By John and Joan Dolbier, 1985

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