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MICHAEL LESY,
Wisconsin Death Trip

“
By the end of the nineteenth century, country towns had become charnel houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones
. ”

W
isconsin, the natives will boast, is a garden state, and as you head north on the highway from Madison on a limpid spring day, you see at once that the claim is simple truth. On either side, the road is lined with postcard-pretty vistas—massive red barns, silos like silver bullets, tranquil white farmhouses nestled in thick groves of trees. The rich, rolling pastures are dotted with ponds, cattle graze lazily on the slopes, and the soil is dark and loamy. An air of prosperity pervades the landscape, as palpable as the aroma of freshly mown hay. One hundred years ago, the writer Hamlin Garland described this part of the state as a “panorama of delight,” and the region remains as picturesque as ever. This is Kodak country. Brightly painted billboards invite travelers to family restaurants, farmers’ markets, and campgrounds. A roadside advertisement for the American Breeder’s Service promotes business with the kind of gently self-mocking good humor characteristic of America’s heartland: “I Heard It through the Bovine.”

Thirty miles farther north, the landscape changes. The farms thin out; the countryside seems devoid of inhabitants. Occasionally, the highway passes through an improbably small town, a one-street village lined with a general store, a gas station, a tavern, a church, and a handful of white clapboard houses. Even with your speed cut down to thirty, you make it through the entire length of the village within a few seconds. Then you are out in the country again, traveling for miles without passing another vehicle or spotting a single creature, except, perhaps, for a solitary red-winged blackbird settling on a fencepost or the rigid corpse of a run-over deer sprawled stiff-legged by the roadside. Still, the landscape is intensely pretty here, perhaps even more seductively peaceful than the farmland to the south. Here, Wisconsin seems less like a garden state or a vast, thriving dairyland than a lush, sprawling park, an endless expanse of bright green meadows and thickly wooded hills.

It is not until you cross over into the south-central plain area, sixty or so miles north of the capital, that you feel you have suddenly entered a different—and far less hospitable—world. Though the signs along the shoulder offer a variety of neighborly greetings—“Marquette County 4-H Club Welcomes You,” “Welcome to Waushara, Christmas Tree Capital of the World”—the area has a lonely and distinctly desolate air. The few ramshackle farms you pass look as though they haven’t been worked in years. Across a yard littered with the rusting scraps of farm machinery, a wasted old man, dressed in ragged bib overalls and supported by a pair of wooden canes, makes his way painfully toward a tumbledown barn. The sense of hardship and privation here is as tangible as the smug prosperity of the south. Every part of the landscape seems bleak and ungiving. The grass looks parched; the sky, even on a perfect spring day, presses down on you; and the soil is a faded pink, the same sickly color that the makers of children’s crayons (in the days before anyone recognized the inherent racism of the label) used to call “flesh.”

To some Wisconsinites, this flat and infertile section of the state is known as “sand country.”

Others have called it Wisconsin’s “great dead heart.”

Within the past twenty years, parts of this region have been resuscitated by advances in agricultural technology. Sophisticated irrigation equipment in particular has given the dead heart some life and kept it beating. Hundreds of failed, ramshackle farms have been razed, replaced by high-yield potato fields. Scattered throughout the countryside are modest ranch houses, some with satellite-dish antennas and backyard pools. Still, this has always been a poor and underpopulated land, oppressive in its emptiness, where most of the inhabitants have struggled to eke out a living in remote and isolated farm communities—places with humble, quintessentially American names: Friendship. Wild Rose. Plainfield.

Plainfield—the name seems particularly well suited for a place so flat and featureless that even an official state guidebook characterizes it as completely “nondescript.” It’s surprising to discover, then, that the name doesn’t refer to the region at all. It was bestowed on the town by one of its founding fathers, a transplanted New Englander named Elijah Waterman, who settled there in 1849, put up a twelve-by-six shanty which served as both his home and the area’s only hotel, and christened the town in honor of his birthplace in Plainfield, Vermont. Within thirty years, the little village boasted several churches, a bank, a weekly newspaper, and a variety of businesses: three general stores, two blacksmiths, a drugstore, a tailor shop, a farm-implement warehouse, a gristmill.

The population remained small, however, never rising much above eight hundred inhabitants, most of them poor, struggling farmers, toiling to wrest even a marginal living out of the dry, stony soil—growing some rye, raising a little livestock, cultivating potatoes that often turned out to be too inferior to sell as food and had to be hauled by the wagonload to the local starch factory. The land mocked their efforts. Everything about it seemed to speak of barrenness and futility, even the big lake set in the southeast corner of the township, whose name reflected the sterility of the surrounding countryside: Sand Lake, the settlers called it.

In spite of all they had to contend with—the poverty, the crushing isolation, the unremitting struggle with the hard, unyielding land—the people of Plainfield took pride in their community. It was a solid, decent, neighborly place where old-fashioned values prevailed—where the whole town would turn out for the grade-schoolers’ annual Christmas operetta, where Mrs. Duane Wilson’s potluck dinner for the Plainfield Homemakers was a special event, and where Merle Beckley’s trip to the National 4-H Congress would make front-page news in the local paper. Even the minuscule size of their village—a small strip of houses and stores with a single paved road running through it—was a source of affectionate good humor. One thing about Plainfield, the townsfolk would josh, you never have to worry about kids hanging around the street corners. There aren’t any street corners.

Plainfield, they would tell you, was a nice place to live.

Of course, they had their full share of tragedy and disaster, too. Fires raged through the town on several occasions, consuming most of the buildings on Main Street. Cyclones, blizzards, and savage Midwestern thunderstorms took lives, killed cattle, and occasionally destroyed entire farms. Men were shot in hunting accidents, maimed by farm machinery, or left paralyzed when their pickups went skidding off icy roads or collided with trains. And suicide and murder took their toll. Indeed, for many years, the nice little community of Plainfield was identified in local history books as the site of a particularly vicious killing that occurred at the very beginning of the town’s existence.

It happened in 1853, just five years after the first settler to the Plainfield area established the town by marking off a tract of land and setting up a simple log dwelling. A local squatter known as Firman was on a trip to Milwaukee, where he met a New Yorker named Cartwright, who was looking to migrate with his family to the Midwest. The territory around Plainfield—Waushara County—desperately needed more settlers, and Firman was willing to give Cartwright forty acres of his own property to entice the Easterner to the area. Cartwright accepted the offer.

For a short while, things went smoothly between the two men. But Firman was of a volatile and, according to contemporary accounts, lawless character. It wasn’t long before he picked a quarrel with Cartwright over some trifling matter. The bad feelings between the two men intensified. Finally, Firman tried to oust Cartwright and his family from the land, claiming it as his own and accusing them of trespassing. The matter ended up in litigation. On the day the issue was to be decided, Firman failed to make it to court. The case was decided in favor of Cartwright, who decided to celebrate by stopping off in the barroom of the Boyington Hotel at Wautoma, the county seat. There he ran into Firman.

The men exchanged angry words, until, stung by a particularly bitter insult, Firman sprang upon Cartwright and knocked him out of his chair. Cartwright fell backward, hitting a potbellied stove, which tumbled over, scattering live coals across the floor. Cartwright jumped to his feet and fled the building, pursued by Firman, who caught him by the collar, wrestled him to the ground, and dug his thumbs into Cartwright’s eyes. Unable to break Firman’s hold, Cartwright groped for his back pocket, pulled out a pistol, and fired into his enemy’s body. At the third discharge, Firman emitted a deep moan and slumped to the ground. He died within the hour, and Cartwright was immediately arrested.

Cartwright was held in jail at Oshkosh until he was released on bail. In the meantime, the friends of Firman—a bunch as wild and disreputable as the deceased—had promised to lynch the killer if he ever came back to Waushara County. Ignoring the threat, Cartwright returned to his home. On the second night following his arrival, Firman’s cronies attempted to make good on their word and broke into Cartwright’s house. Cartwright, armed with a rifle, stationed himself in the attic, his weapon leveled at the ladder. The first of the mob to show his head above the floor was shot and killed instantly. The crowd hurriedly withdrew from the house and held a parley. Deciding to burn Cartwright out, they began to kindle a fire at one corner of his house. Cartwright immediately poked his rifle through a chink in the logs and felled another of the party.

Again, the lynch mob pulled back, held a hurried conference, and this time concocted a devious plan. One of their members, a constable, was dispatched to the home of a judge named Walker, who resided in Plainfield. Walker was roused from his bed and apprised of the situation. The treacherous constable then presented Walker with a seemingly reasonable offer. If the judge would persuade Cartwright to turn himself over to the constable, the lynch mob would disperse. Cartwright would be escorted, under the constable’s protection, to the Oshkosh jail, where he would remain until he could be tried for Firman’s murder. The unsuspecting Walker agreed to do what he could and proceeded to Cartwright’s home. The beleaguered man listened to the judge, agreed to the terms, bid farewell to his wife and children, and started from his home.

A nineteenth-century history book describes the “dread culmination of the tragedy.” Cartwright, Walker, and the constable “had not proceeded twenty yards from the house when they were surrounded by the mob. Cartwright was taken from the constable, who made no resistance, put into a sleigh by the crowd, and driven rapidly to Plainfield, where a pole was run out of the upper story of the hay barn belonging to the tavern. A rope was attached thereto and several bunches of shingles were piled up for Cartwright to stand on. Walker, who had followed and was appealing to the mob to desist, was told that if he did not leave he would be hanged with Cartwright.

“The rope was noosed about Cartwright’s neck, the shingles were pushed from under him, and he was left hanging until he was dead. Then the rope was untied from the pole and attached to the rear of the sleigh, and Cartwright’s body was dragged behind the sleigh to his home and thrown into his house, where his horror-stricken wife and children had been wondering at his fate.

“To the shame of the good name of Waushara County, the human fiends who participated in this murderous outrage against law and right were never punished nor even prosecuted, though many if not all of them were known.”

*   *   *

The story of Firman and Cartwright and the “dread culmination” of their feud remained, for many years, the most sensational episode in the history of Plainfield. To many of the townspeople, it seemed woefully unfair that their honest little village should be associated with such an infamous event.

How could they have known that living in their midst was a “human fiend” immeasurably more depraved than any nineteenth-century lynch mob, a man who would (to the enduring dismay of its inhabitants) make the name of Plainfield, Wisconsin, forever synonymous with darkness, insanity, and unimaginable horror?