People have been telling mythical stories about Oshkosh ever since the city has existed. Here’s a taste from 1878. The article below first appeared in the Fond du Lac Commonwealth newspaper. This is an abridged version, but you’ll get the drift...
π’ππ΅πΈπΌππ΅, ππ½πΏπΆπΉ π―π¬ – π πͺπΆπ°πΈπ²π± ππΆππ. This is a hard town to write about, because if you tell the truth you have to write hard things. Three years ago Sunday, Oshkosh was nearly consumed by a fire started by Spaulding & Peck’s mill. To commemorate the third anniversary, a brewery burned Sunday night. Immediately back of the Beckwith House is a man who administers Turkish baths, and he told me nearly all citizens of Oshkosh who have lived here five or more years are web-footed. Many people in this city eat fish with neither salt or pepper, but with their fingers. Yes, Oshkosh is the Sodom of the Northwest.
I've posted a few other stories like this one. If you'd like more in this vein you can get it HERE and HERE.
This is a the second in a two-part series of posts concerning myths about Oshkosh spread by American newspapers. You can find the first post here.
More reports on the city that couldn't possibly exist – Oshkosh. Tall-tales continued being spun about Oshkosh throughout the latter half of the 1800s. But not all the stories were myth. As we'll see, Oshkosh's unruly reputation wasn't unwarranted.
The Main Street of Myth, circa 1887. - Photo courtesy of Dan Radig
Let's start with a whopper. In February 1868, the Fond du Lac Commonwealth ran a story titled Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh. The point of the piece was that mayhem and violence were the natural state of affairs here. Papers everywhere picked up the story and ran with it. If there was a single fable that cemented Oshkosh's reputation as a wild town, this was it.
The late Oshkosh historian Jim Metz explains what Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh was all about.
Metz is absolutely right when he says, "Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh became a euphemism for mayhem.” It was repeated constantly. I can't count the number of times I've comes across it in old newspapers.
Almost 50 years after it was introduced, the catchphrase was still in use. In 1910, Wisconsin author Jerome Watrous wrote in the Milwaukee Sentinel, “Having fun with the boys in Oshkosh — There may be back towns in China and a few dark spots in Africa where the inhabitants haven't heard the remark, but I doubt it.”
It became part of the common vernacular. You can see why. Fun with the Boys in Oshkosh. There’s a mad kind of ring to it. It ought to be revived.
Here's another one that made the rounds. It's boosted by a dose of pure bullshit.
– Tallulah, Madison Parish, La., Madison Times, March 27, 1886
Well there is some truth to this one. There really was a man named William Waterman aged 109. But he didn't live in Oshkosh. He lived in Grand Rapids (now known as Wisconsin Rapids). Why move him to Oshkosh then? Because when you're a newspaper editor filling up space, it's sexier to have your boozing ultracentenarian living in sin city. It's not as though, Waterman's life wasn't interesting enough. He was born six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and had seen George Washington in the flesh. Better yet, he married for the second time when he was 100 years old. When Waterman died at the age of 113, he was supposedly the oldest person in the United States.
As the 1800s drew to a close, myths about Oshkosh continued to be perpetrated by American newspapers. But a number of them – perhaps recognizing that the joke had gotten out of hand – attempted to put a damper on the Oshkosh phenomenon. Here's the New York Times with a feeble stab at setting the record straight about Sawdust City.
– New York Times, February 28, 1888
By the 1890s, some of the fictions were giving way to facts juicy enough for print. When Mayor Charles Oellerich launched a campaign to have Oshkosh saloons close on Sundays, the nation's newspapers took notice. Here's a story on the ensuing showdown, This appeared on the front page of the Bismarck, North Dakota Weekly Tribune on March 30, 1894. The story ran verbatim in dozens of American newspapers.
I like that bit about Oshkosh being a wide-open city. In terms of pure vice, this town had few rivals. New York City was one of them. The saloon closing caused the New York Evening World to draw the connection between these two dens of iniquity.
– April 2, 1894
Oshkosh saloonists weren't giving up their hard-won reputation that easily.
– Jamestown, North Dakota, Weekly Alert, April 12, 1894
Can you guess who won the battle? Of course, you can. By the end of the year, Oellerich was out on his ear and the saloons were going full bore all week long.
Here's another ordeal involving Oshkosh saloons that was reported nationwide.
– Rock Island, IL. Argus, December 7, 1898
Not so fast. The tradition of Oshkosh saloons giving away a free lunch to boozers proved more durable than anyone expected. Many of the pre-Prohibition saloons in the city continued offering their patrons free grub at any time of day or night. Here's an example of just that from the 1905 Oshkosh City Directory.
The building that housed Klawun's saloon still stands on the corner at Boyd and Merritt streets. You can still get lunch there, too. You'll have to pay, though. Here's what it looks like today.
Just one more. This article was widely circulated in 1897. It's about more fun with the boys from Oshkosh. Goes to show you can take the boys out of Oshkosh, but you can't take Oshkosh out of the boys...
By the 1870s, Oshkosh's had achieved national renown. It was known as a wild, wide-open, city. The legend was fueled by newspapers from every quarter of the United States. Articles about the strange goings-on in the Sawdust City were standard fodder. All the better, the tales often had little or no basis in reality.
Saloons and beer were common threads uniting many of the odd tales. If you lived in Missouri and only knew of Oshkosh from stories printed in your local paper, the place must have seemed beyond belief. If Oshkoshers weren't boozing it up, they were burning it down.
Smoking cops, dark beer and high times – the Oshkosh of yore.
The New York Times chimed in on the phenomenon in an article titled Mythical Towns. Citing fables inspired by Oshkosh, the Times was only half-joking when it suggested that no such city could possibly exist.
The unthinking majority of the public, of course, believe that Oshkosh has an actual existence, and bona fide inhabitants. There are those, however, who not only look upon Oshkosh as intrinsically improbable, but who insist that altogether too many things happen in that alleged town… Wisconsin people, when asked questions concerning Oshkosh, always turn the conversation into other channels, and persist in declining to discuss that hypothetical and suspicious town… The very fact that a vast quantity of extraordinary things are constantly said by unscrupulous newspapers to have happened in Oshkosh is extremely suspicious. Why should that unseen Wisconsin town have almost a monopoly of remarkable events?
- New York Times, July 10, 1877
While researching other things, I regularly come across these "unscrupulous newspapers" and their "extraordinary" reports on Oshkosh. It always brightens my day. Over the next couple weeks, I want to share some of these stories. Here's a taste of the sort of things they used to say about our "mythical" Oshkosh.
Let's start with a couple of early one-liners. These began popping up in numerous papers in the summer of 1870. Like many such stories about Oshkosh, these were used by newspapers to pad content and fill in blank spaces.
This first one is pretty mild, but sets the tone of incredulity for the stories to come. The Franco-Prussian War had just started. Newspapers were tying Prussia to everything. They looked for an Oshkosh link to spice things up. This one ran in dozens of papers. I've yet to figure out who exactly this Prussian nobleman is.
From the Evening Argus, Rock Island, Ill., August 25, 1870
Not long after, American newspapers were blurbing about Oshkosh's whiskey drinking dog. Here we find our city mentioned in a southern newspaper.
From the Weekly Sumter Republican, Americus, Georgia, September 9, 1870
In the wake of the disastrous downtown fire of 1874, Oshkosh began rebuilding. Newspaper editors were quick to notice that reports of the reconstruction included numerous mentions of beer halls. A Pennsylvania editor, borrowed pieces from an Oshkosh Daily Northwestern article to paint the downtown as one, big beer hall.
An Oshkosh, Wisconsin, newspaper prints a list of new building started upon a burnt district as follows: “Beer hall, store, saloon, beer hall, grocery and saloon, beer hall, store, beer hall, saloon, grocery, beer hall, store, saloon, beer hall, grocery, beer hall, saloon, beer hall.” Oshkosh would seem to be “hall beer,” as a cockney would say.
- The Carbon Advocate, Lehighton, Pa., September 26, 1874.
Hall Beer. Get it? Drop the "H" when you're doing the cockney accent. Now you do!
Here's one from South Dakota that is total bullshit. The Calkins in question didn't exist. Neither did the smashed saloon.
From the Daily Press and Dakotaian, Yankton, Dakota Territory (now South Dakota), March 03, 1876
The biggest whopper in that pack of lies is the assertion that Temperance was once all the rage here. That was never the case. I'm insulted!
Let's jump ahead a few years to 1891. I especially like this one. By this time, our reputation had been thoroughly sullied. All you need do to smear someone was to say they sold booze in Oshkosh. The Uncle Jerry mentioned here is one Jeremiah M. Rusk, former Congressman and Governor of Wisconsin. At this time he was the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Rusk was loved by many, but still had his enemies.
"The meanness of his satanic majesty was never more offensively manifested when he put it into the mind of a man to circulate the story that Uncle Jerry Rusk once kept a tavern in Oshkosh. The charge that Jerry kept a tavern is monstrous enough without the addition of the scandalous assertion that he kept the tavern at Oshkosh. Tradition has it that in the region of Oshkosh the worst fire water on earth has been marketed."
- The Anaconda Standard, Anaconda, Mont., December 21, 1891
That story was widely reported. But here's the good part: Rusk had almost nothing to do with Oshkosh. He certainly never operated a saloon here. He did run a tavern in Viroqua, though, for a short time. What does that have to do with us? Nothing. Dragging Oshkosh into the picture was just a way to make the matter seem more salacious. Kind of makes me feel proud to live here.
More from Montana. A real gut buster.
From the Daily Missoulian, Missoula, Mont., December 12, 1912
Funny, right? Well... Here's the not funny part: the story is true. Albert Reuchel died on November 29, 1912 during a poker game at Gus Jeschke's saloon on the corner of 9th and Knapp streets (where the abandoned Sister's Pizza now languishes). Reuchel had won a hand. He reached forward to take the pot and abruptly died. Heart attack. Poor guy. He was only 33. Papers across the country picked up on the incident and turned it into a joke about card playing. They usually including something about a lack of hearts in his last hand.
Inside the Saloon where Reuchel died.
That's enough for now. If all goes well, there'll be more here next week about forgotten events that might have never happened in our mythical city (And here that post is).
