Wicked Fox Cities: The Dark Side of the Valley

By Frank Anderson

The History Press, historypress.net

By Jim Lundstrom

I’ve taken my son across the former rail bridge bike path from Menasha to Fritse Park on the Neenah side many times to go sledding on the steep hills or just to goof around, and each time I felt a gloominess about the place. Even on the sunniest days, I felt an unease and a darkness there.

I never voiced this ill feeling about Fritse Park to anyone, nor was it disturbing enough to me to do research on the park. Once I left the place, the sense of unease lifted and I simply forgot about it.

Then I recently received an advance copy of Frank Anderson’s Wicked Fox Cities: The Dark Side of the Valley and all was explained.

The opening chapter is titled “Hills of the Dead.” It tells the story of how an ancient Menominee burial mound overlooking Little Lake Butte Des Morts was in the way of progress and commerce, so in 1863 railway workers leveled the Hill of the Dead and used the remains as fill for the rail bed.

“Fritse Park in Neenah is where the hill stood,” Anderson writes. “The railroad into Menasha has become a bicycle trail, and most of the homes that surround the park are set beside or directly on top of burial sites.”

The hair on the back of neck stood up when I read that.

“Hill of the Dead” is just one of a series of historically relevant and engagingly told stories in Wicked Fox Cities.

The book actually opens with a scene-setting prologue called “Sedan Day,” in which Anderson lists a variety of bizarre incidents that all took place in the same day in the late 1800s, from a drunken Prussian War veteran celebrating Sedan Day (you can look it up) by himself on the streets of Appleton to an Oshkosh insane asylum resident who slit her own throat.

The prologue seems to be setting up a localized version of Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip, a compendium of period photos and outrageous stories culled from Wisconsin newspapers of the late 1800s.

“That book was a big deal to me when I was a young teenager,” Anderson said. “I love that book.”

While he says Wicked Fox Cities is similar to Wisconsin Death Trip in that it documents the economic collapse of the 1890s, Anderson gives us a bigger picture of the place.

While this is Anderson’s first book, as a musician and filmmaker he is not new to storytelling. Those forms of storytelling require conciscion and being able to get to the heart of the matter. Anderson brings what he has learned working in those two other forms to Wicked Fox Cities. He is especially adept at reducing sweeping historical events into essential moments.

His take on the American manifest destiny that relegated the natives of this land to reservations is worth the price of admission. If you don’t know about the slaughter and swindle your ancestors perpetrated on the people native to this land, here is a good place to start your education.

“We live our blissful lives, but they’re based on one thing, that the beginning of America is just one big land grab,” Anderson said.

Anderson is an Appleton-based musician, filmmaker and artist. He hadn’t even really thought of becoming an author until contacted last year by The History Press of Charleton, South Carolina.

“They asked me to do the book,” he said. “They’d been reading my blog, Wisconsinology (http://wisconsinology.blogspot.com/) and following it. I guess they do books like this in cities all over.”

That call came last October. Anderson agreed to do the book.

“Unbeknownst to me it became my busiest work time in my regular work in many years. So I was doing many hours. I’ve never written a book, so that was a crash course,” he said.

The assignment began with research.

“I just read everything I could read in every library in every library in this state. I just haunted all the libraries and read and read and read, daily newspapers mostly,” Andersons aid. “Appleton Library is really wonderful.”

While he searched for colorful tells to tell about the sordid history of the Fox Cities, Anderson said he knew from the start there was one story he had to tell.

“I wanted to begin with the French rule because people forget that. Not only do they forget it, most people simply don’t know about the 150 years of French rule. It’s such a fascinating time and I don’t want that to be forgotten. Few people know that a full-scale war was fought on the shores of the Fox for 30 years. I love that part. It was a lot of fun to research and discover.”

Anderson said the biggest revelation he discovered while doing the research is that the romanticized notion of the not-too-distant past is a crock.

“A big surprise for me was the day-to-day unsteadiness of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly in Appleton. Oshkosh to me, that was a given. We view those days with such wonderful nostalgia. Nobody today could live a single day in that time. If they were transported in a time machine, they’d be shocked out of their minds. They could not stand it. The other thing that surprised me is how nobody wanted to pay for anything government service-wise. There weren’t that many government services, but they were awfully quick to shell out money for an insane asylum.”

About that Oshkosh crack – this is how he describes Oshkosh in Cahpter 7, “Sin City, The Second Mrs. Paige and Lizzie McCourt”: Oshkosh. The city defies time, GPS and zoning. Always the butt of jokes and knowing winks, from the moment it was named  – that fateful day when locals voted in favor of Oshkosh over Osceola, Stanford and the snooty-sounding Athens – Oshkosh was known as a rough, wicked place and proud of it.”

That is the Oshkosh Anderson came to love during his research.

“I have favorite incidents, because it really is a collection of incidents. I loved reading about the ratting craze in Oshkosh. I love anything Oshkosh does. It’s so completely wrong. But they don’t care. They’re proud of it.”

One chapter in particular jumps off the page with muscular prose and essential storytelling. It is titled “The Prizefighter” and tells the story of bareknuckle Australian middleweight champion Jim Hall, whose raucous life ended at a TB clinic in Stevens Point. Hall is buried at Oak Creek Cemetery in Neenah.

“The Jim Hall chapter was a lot of fun,” said Anderson, a boxing fan who grew up in the Philippines and idolized Filipino champ Gabriel “Flash” Elorde.

“I couldn’t get enough of Jim Hall. Jim Hall is the guy I’d like to know. He’s so impossibly incorrect that it’s funny. And he’s so consistent. He won’t let go of that bottle and he won’t give up any of his vices. There’s nothing you can do about it. I love that guy. I don’t know why Jim Hall is not a movie. His story definitely is begging to be filmed.”

A book called Wicked Fox Cities would be incomplete without a chapter devoted to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, which Anderson begins with this intriguing line: “I’m always meeting people who claim to have urinated on Joe McCarthy’s grave.”

“That follows me,” Anderson said. “I’m a filmmaker. I travel a lot. Everywhere I go, when people ask ‘Where are you from?’ and I say Appleton, they know two things. No. 1, Cleo’s, and No. 2, I pissed on Joe McCarthy’s grave. That’s it.”

Having to deal regularly with Tailgunner Joe, Anderson has come to the conclusion that he remains a much misunderstood man.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “Nobody knows anything about Joe McCarthy, on the right or the left. They hate him for a reason that doesn’t exist and they love him for another reason that doesn’t exist. The worst commie hunter ever.”

Anderson is already thinking of a second book detailing battlefields of Wisconsin.

“We have dozens and dozens of them full of interesting history,” he said. “The British expedition down the Fox River to defeat the Americans at Prairie du Chien, that’s forgotten by some people. The Fox-French Wars, Blackhawk Wars. I’m trying to pull something together with that in mind.”

However, we could see more Wicked stories.

“I could easily do a sequel,” Anderson said. “I have so much information left over. These kind of books you should keep short, entertaining and move fast. But I’ve got a lot more.”

Anderson will be reading from and talking about Wicked Fox Cities as part of the Meet Wisconsin Authors series at the Appleton Public Library at 6:30 p.m. on lucky July 13.