Continuing yesterday's story:

The Kickapoo Valley has always been a highly diverse country. Originally Ho-Chunk country, it was also a crossroads of Sauk and Dakota peoples. It was a battlefield in the Blackhawk War of the 1830s, and a real melting pot of migrants from all over: Cornish, Irish, German, and above all, Norwegian immigrants; Yankee settlers and free blacks.

It was, actually, one of two settlements of black farmers in Wisconsin. There are few blacks there today—but not because of relocation to cities: they melted into the dominant white population. This in itself is a remarkable story. There are precious few stories of racial intermarriage in the rural north of the US.

During the Dust Bowl, Lynne Healy explains in A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley farmers here pioneered the technique of controlling erosion by plowing along the contours of hills, leaving an incredible pattern when viewed from the sky: see the book cover on the left.

Amish farmers started showing up after WW2, relocating from parts of Pennsylvania subject to suburban sprawl; and Hippie farmers began moving in during the sixties. The Amish and the Hippies, not natural allies, found a common interest in what would later be called organic farming.

Everybody, the dairy farmers included, worked so hard to preserve the land that the area became attractive for vacation homes starting in the 80s.

These mixtures of people did not always come effortlessly: a lot of legal fighting took place. The Amish have been accused of tearing up the blacktop roads with studded horseshoes; the dairy farmers have been accused of reckless erosion by grazing their cattle on steep hillsides; the organic farmers have been accused of holier-than-thou attitudes, and so on.

Meanwhile, the Ho-Chunk have returned. Once removed by treaty, they have lived as plain old US citizens back in their homeland for many years. But recent years have seen an enormous infusion of money, thanks to a casino in Wisconsin’s biggest resort area. The Ho-Chunk have acquired large tracts from a cancelled dam project, and have bought other land outright.

The story is not about to resolve, because the area is firmly integrated into American society, with all its contradictory forces. And yet, in a day in which voluntary, de facto segregation is becoming the norm, this quiet—though hardly gentle—story of integration is remarkable.