Denting Goliaths: Citizens Unite Against Regional Low Level Flights

By Marilyn Leys

When cartographers recounted Wisconsin's Past and Present in a series of maps, the only civilian opposition mentioned in The Military in Wisconsin was organized in part by Citizens United Against Low Level Flights after the Air National Guard proposed establishing new routes over southwest Wisconsin and eastern Iowa to train jet fighter pilots in low-level, high-speed flying.

Diverse groups and individuals participated in the Guard's Environmental Impact Study by writing letters citing specific problems that had already been caused by slow, low-flying transport planes or loud military jets that would cause problems in the future. Most opponents were long-time residents; a few were pacifists. Opponents included area farmers whose dairy cows and other animals spent much of their time grazing in small pastures. Five hundred Amish in southwest Wisconsin signed a letter to the military objecting to the fear that low-flying jet planes might cause their horses and danger to the passengers in the buggies the horses were pulling.

On the night after the worst snowstorm of that winter, the first organized public meeting drew hundreds of residents; it also drew aides to both of Wisconsin's U.S. Senators and our congressman. At other public meetings for more than a year, and appearances at local festivals during the record-breaking heat of the summer, many showed up, but hardly anyone agreed with the Guard's proposal. In areas where jets might fl y low, government officials and wildlife and political organizations passed more than 100 resolutions of opposition, only sometimes at the urging of CUALLF.

Though otherwise supportive of the military, Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl had been somewhat wary of this proposal even before it was made public. What would it take to make their opposition more certain, and would this opposition cause the Guard to withdraw the proposal?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504912228

Marilyn Leys

A pair of visits to a Wisconsin State Historical Site, ten years apart, presented Marilyn Leys with two different stories about the parents of the young man who commissioned Villa Louis. The second docent was the one who talked about Jane Fisher's previously unmentioned first husband, who had been the most powerful fur trader in the frontier town of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in the period just after the War of 1812. Another fact learned late was that Jane Fisher Rolette was the first woman in Wisconsin Territory to file a petition for divorce. Leys had been looking for a project to pursue in order to qualify for a sabbatical leave from Milwaukee Public Schools. Working toward a JBA from the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had taught her how to speed-read through paper documents and interview the best experts about their areas of expertise. Teaching writing -- both journalism and creative writing -- and editing her students' work had taught her how to critique her own. She had already published freelance stories in the Milwaukee Journal. Research for the novel involved visiting sites, sorting through more than 15 boxes of family papers stored in Madison and St. Louis, and reading other papers from southwest Wisconsin courthouses. Interviews included a priest/history professor at Marquette University and the most knowledgeable local historian in Prairie du Chien. There were books too, since the two husbands were central figures and the first husband was so important that the second in command to John Jacob Astor was the godfather of the Rolette children. After the first draft of the novel was complete, Leys and her husband moved from Milwaukee to a farm in northeast Crawford County. After 20 years there, they moved to the only city in the county, Prairie du Chien, where the author has learned firsthand what it's like to live beside -- and keep an eye on -- the Mississippi River.

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DENTING GOLIATHS

Citizens unite against regional low level flights

Marilyn Leys

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© 2015 Marilyn Leys. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/15/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1223-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1221-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1222-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015907714

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1   MEANWHILE #1

CHAPTER 2   A REASONABLY DESOLATE AREA

CHAPTER 3   GOOD NEIGHBORS

CHAPTER 4   FORMAL PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT

CHAPTER 5   SPEAKING OF VAMPIRES

CHAPTER 6   MEANWHILE #2

CHAPTER 7   THE IOWEGIANS AND THE QUARTERBACK

CHAPTER 8   NUMEROUS MEETINGS ARE REQUIRED

CHAPTER 9   OUR HEARTFELT PLEA

CHAPTER 10   FEEDBACK IN GREEN

CHAPTER 11   GOD’S COUNTRY/GUARD’S COUNTRY AND OTHER RESPONSES

CHAPTER 12   TRUE AMERICANISM – SPRING, 1995

CHAPTER 13   MEANWHILE #3

CHAPTER 14   SO MANY CONCERNS – SUMMER, 1995

CHAPTER 15   THE CORE ISSUE

CHAPTER 16   BATTLES ON THE GROUND

CHAPTER 17   PUBLIC ACCESS — LIMITED AND OTHERWISE

CHAPTER 18   ARRIVAL AT ORANGE COUNTY

CHAPTER 19   FANTASTIC NEWS

CHAPTER 20   MEANWHILE #4

CHAPTER 21   THE TUMBLE

CHAPTER 22   IT NEVER ENDS

CHAPTER 23   IN PLACE OF EMOTION

To tireless volunteers who keep contributing

whatever they can despite determined opposition

and

to any of our elected representatives

who listen to us even if we can’t donate to their campaigns and

schedule public meetings even if they can’t predict that audiences will be friendly

Tim Jenkins climbed halfway up the Boscobel gym’s concrete bleachers, turned and looked down. Below him, friends and strangers were milling around. A few of those strangers wore the pale blue shirts of the Wisconsin Air National Guard.

There were tables on the municipal gym’s floor, and Air Guard exhibits on the tables. Two television sets blared taped messages about why the contracting military establishment needed two kinds of expansion in Wisconsin.

In February 1995, the Air National Guard had scheduled the fifth of six programs in this gym in order to defend an expansion of a military air corridor that would pass over the town. The Guard termed these scoping meetings because they were supposed to let the Guard know the scope of research they should do. Like all of the other meetings, this one was not being held in the largest city in its area.

For the Air Guard, the proposal it was advertising tonight had started four years earlier, a thousand miles away. Plans were made, maps drawn and re-drawn. A 48-page document was published two months before tonight. Then meetings were scheduled in accordance with precedent and the law; informational open houses, the Guard called them. But what was happening below Jenkins was that the Guard was talking and everyone else was listening. Or so it seemed to him. He was appalled at what he saw below him. He shouted, Folks, this is not a meeting!

Suddenly people stopped sitting like zombies in the folding chairs near the television monitors, or standing and listening politely to the Guard experts posted beside the exhibits. Suddenly people were grabbing chairs and heading for the only empty corner of the room, believing they’d be able to convince these Guardsmen of the wrongness of the proposal if finally they could speak.

In this small place, a grassroots revolution was beginning. It would always be underfinanced and disorganized, especially in comparison to an effort the Air National Guard seemed capable of.

This is a story about very different Goliaths: the military and political establishments; the prejudices against one or both of those; the inertia resulting from the belief that nothing can be done to change the minds of large organizations.

It’s about coincidences: about people happening to be in the right places at the right times; about people knowing people or having useful knowledge; about making the political process and the publicity process work. It’s about eagles. It’s about Amish. It’s about an ironic death. It’s about a federal law that’s supposed to protect everybody’s environment through mandated research. It’s about what happened on the way to some of the research that might or might not have been done.

It’s also about actions that happened while the people whose lives might be changed were not even aware that anything was being done. Chapters headed meanwhile are about times like these.

MEANWHILE #1

At first the western line on the Air National Guard’s chart crossed the Mississippi River where the Wisconsin River joins it. The line was drawn at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland. It represented one of two proposed low-altitude military training corridors. In each 20-mile-wide corridor, more than a thousand military jets would be flying each year as fast as 600 miles an hour, as low as 300 feet above the ground.

The Air Guard’s experts in Maryland created the corridors by zigging and zagging around what they realized were areas where it wouldn’t be acceptable to fly jet fighter planes at low altitudes. Because the Federal Aviation Administration would have the final say, the planners at Andrews looked carefully at the public airports in these regions of Iowa and Wisconsin, then they zigged their line around the airports that they knew about. Then they considered the national parks and wildlife refuges they knew about, producing a few zags.

The original western line went directly over some of the spots they didn’t know about. It went over Pike’s Peak State Park, west of the confluence, where visitors at the top of a high bluff came to enjoy what had been rated as the most spectacular view in all of Iowa, and sometimes to camp in the park’s campground. The line went over Wyalusing State Park, on the Wisconsin shore south of the confluence, that has equally dramatic views and a campground. It went over Effigy Mounds National Monument on the western bank of the Mississippi, where tourists were led up a winding hiking path to the top of the bluff in an effort to duplicate the experience of the mound builders who honored the two rivers in distant, pre-aeronautical times. The character of this property is such that it is extremely susceptible to intrusion by various impacts, including visual and noise impacts, a resident archaeologist would write to one of the Guard’s researchers.

When the planners in Maryland were done, the proposed routes on the chart looked like a headless, armless runner whose legs had been broken in a number of places. The runner’s footless left leg began in eastern Iowa and continued northeast. The footless right leg traveled northwest in Wisconsin from an area near the Illinois border. The crotch between the legs was in Crawford County, Wisconsin, the next county north of Boscobel. Then the headless body, the united training corridors, led to the existing Hardwood Bombing Range in central Wisconsin, and to a proposed expansion that would double the size of the range by taking over a private cranberry bog and more than 6,000 acres of county forest that drew hunters and their dollars to the area.

By the time the public first saw a sketchier version of the chart at the scoping meetings, the western line had been moved so far that it missed both the confluence of the rivers and the Mississippi River city of Prairie du Chien, the only sizeable city in Crawford County, the county seat.

Perhaps this change was the result of showing that original chart to a member of the Wisconsin Air National Guard for his comments. The local Guardsman might have taken one look at the line and the rivers and exclaimed, I’m not the DNR, but I know I’d never go for that! For the confluence of the two major rivers was a likely place to find eagles if there were eagles in the area. And there were eagles in this part of the Mississippi Flyway, and a state Department of Natural Resources to worry about them.

In August of 1994, well before the general public would be informed, two senators and nine congressmen signed a letter to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. As letters would in the future, this correspondence concentrated on a single proposal. There were signatures of four Iowa congressmen, five congressmen from Wisconsin, and both of Wisconsin’s senators, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold. The letter referred to a proposal for an expansion of the Air National Guard’s Hardwood Air to Ground Training Range near Finley, Wisconsin, and the related expansion of military training routes. The letter was probably triggered when the National Guard Bureau announced that it was going to conduct an environmental impact study instead of simply doing an environmental assessment, or, in the jargon of people who deal with these reports, the Guard was going to do an EIS instead of an EA.

These terms are the stuff of NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, the law passed in 1972 that is designed to protect the environment, including the people who live in that environment. EIS and EA are alphabet soup. When a government agency does an EA, the research process is totally controlled by the agency that wants to make the change. Which questions get asked and the researchers who will supply the answers to those questions are totally the choice of the people who want to use the research to justify their project.

On the other hand, when an EIS is carried out, NEPA says that public comment must be sought or, as the legislators’ joint letter put it, the agency should get involved in engaging the public at an early stage of the project. The agency still gets to choose the researchers, but at least that research is supposed to answer all of the questions that the public submits.

Known as a delegation letter, the communication from the senators and congressmen expressed their concerns about the potential impact this project could have on the people and environment of the affected region … . Both natural areas and farmland will be affected by the presence of military aircraft flying as low as 300 feet.

The letter asked why the expansion of any military facility was being requested at a time when the number of troops was being cut nationwide, other military installations were being closed, and Air National Guard units in the region might be receiving fewer aircraft in the future. The United States has considerable military airspace in the Western United States, the letter went on. We have been told that the major justifications for this project are the enhanced training opportunities it will provide and an expected savings in training funds. We would like to see the evidence supporting these claims.

More than two years later, when a senator’s aide tried to track down the history of that letter, all of the staff directly responsible for writing it and getting the signatures were gone. But that aide had had other dealings with the military, and he knew how these things came about in a general way. He told me the military would contact a legislator’s military affairs legislative aide in Washington, sometimes well in advance of the issuing of a proposal, sometimes with just one day’s notice. The Washington aide then contacted the military affairs aide in the home state. Have you heard about this? one would ask the other. Do you think it will cause concern? The staffers tossed the questions around, trying to predict what those concerns would be. But they wouldn’t actively seek input from the general public. Yet if, eventually, a legislator acted, that action would often be driven by public pressure. In all of the aide’s experience, no other military issue in the state of Wisconsin ever generated as much heat as the proposal for the expansion of the bombing range and especially the proposed addition of the new low-level flight routes.

Delegation letters were not uncommon, and it was not unusual to caution the military, Let’s be sure that public comments are received. But the spread of signatures was a little different on this letter. Usually, state lines would not be crossed when signatures were sought. But if more than one state were represented, senators as well as congressmen in each state would usually sign on.

Why neither of Iowa’s senators signed this letter was as much a mystery as why one of the Wisconsin congressmen bothered to add his concern and his signature to the letter. Thomas Petri expressed his philosophy to a pacifist in his district: In the current climate of military downsizing, many believe that we will lose the military facilities in our district if we don’t cooperate with efforts to continue the expanded missions which they now perform. That may be fine with you, but these installations make important contributions to the regional economy of west central Wisconsin, and I believe that a majority of area residents supports them for that reason.

Petri would repeat this sentiment after the opposition to the proposal exploded, telling 100 Republican faithful at a dinner meeting that although almost all of the letters he’d received were against the Guard’s proposal, he knew what was really in the hearts of the people of his district: unwavering support for the military. A number of the people in Petri’s district earned their livings at or from the Army’s Fort McCoy, a much larger facility than the Air Guard’s Volk Field and the nearby Hardwood Bombing Range. In fact, Fort McCoy was the only sizeable military installation in Wisconsin.

Deborah Lee, the recipient of the delegation letter, wrote back about a month later. Let me assure you that the Air National Guard will continue its policy of public participation in assessing the environmental impact of the proposed expansion on the citizens of Wisconsin and Iowa, she wrote. Numerous meetings—soliciting comments and concerns—are required in the Environmental Impact Study Process.

The evidence for the expansion sought by the legislators ran to four sentences. It included this one: According to units using Hardwood Range, the absence at this location of low-altitude and supersonic airspace have prevented several units from meeting training requirements without deploying to various locations 800-1600 miles away. According to the documents that had been issued and would be issued, nobody was planning to fly at supersonic speeds over Wisconsin.

Nothing further seems to have been done at this point in time, except that all the parties who already knew about the proposal settled back and waited for the EIS process to take its course.

A REASONABLY DESOLATE AREA

In central Wisconsin, the Air National Guard had maintained a sometimes-obvious presence since the mid-1950s. Here, Guard pilots from five Midwestern units, plus other military pilots just passing through, followed a Military Training Route (MTR) east from Minneapolis at altitudes as low as 500 feet. They passed over Volk Field, the Air National Guard’s training facility, then dipped down to drop practice bombs on the Hardwood Bombing and Gunnery Range. In large Military Operations Areas, or MOAs, with Volk and Hardwood as their centers, the pilots did intensive maneuvers.

Volk Field belonged to the Air Force. When a new proposal for the Hardwood Bombing and Gunnery Range was issued, part of the existing range was nominally a Juneau County Forest that had been leased to the military long before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law. Almost all of the remaining thousands of acres of land beneath the airspace that were used for low-level flying and dogfighting did not belong to the military. In 1991, Guard planners in Maryland published a document that proposed doubling the size of the Hardwood Range, for military policy required bombing runs to take place over government-owned territory; it makes for poor public relations if bombs -- even dummy bombs -- ricochet after they are dropped and bounce onto private property. As newer, faster, higher-flying aircraft were handed down from the regular Air Force to the Guard, the bombs were beginning to push the edges of the existing Hardwood Range.

In parts of central Wisconsin, the hills are low and far apart. Toward the bombing range, the land becomes flat and sandy. Some farmers in the area grow potatoes and onions and other vegetables in this sand, and they water their crops using above-ground irrigation rigs that roll easily across the perfectly flat landscape. Some residents keep dairy cattle. And the pine forests that spring out of the sand supply raw materials for the paper mills that perfume the air in the Wisconsin River cities of Wisconsin Rapids, Nekoosa and Stevens Point.

But the agriculture that is the real moneymaker up here, the farming that the Guard paid significant attention to when it first proposed expanding its operation, is the industry that requires the ditches and dikes lining many of the sandy roads. Ocean Spray and Northland are the cooperatives that most of these farmers belong to. Although central Wisconsin is a thousand miles from salt water, in 1995, the state was one of the country’s two largest producers of cranberries. Of the world’s 26,000 acres of cranberry bogs, 11,000 were located in Wisconsin, and 75 percent of those were located in the land of the MOAs, where jets staging dogfights had been known to endanger the low-flying, slow-flying, crop-dusting planes that the tender cranberry vines require. The cranberry industry was a growing industry; the Guard’s preliminary proposal mentioned twice that encroaching cranberry bogs already threatened the Pentagon-granted exemption that allowed military aircraft to do preliminary maneuvers over privately-owned land.

The military operations area was also home to two industries that had nothing to do with agriculture.

One was the Ho-Chunk Rainbow Casino and Bingo Hall, center of activity for a tribe (formerly called the Winnebago) without a reservation in Wisconsin. In addition, there were communities and sacred sites scattered all through the area the Guard was already using for maneuvers. The Ho-Chunk senior citizens center, pre-school daycare center, and housing development, clustered near the tourist-attractive casino, were three miles from the border of the proposed expanded range.

The other non-agricultural industry was the Marshfield Clinic, one of the largest diagnostic medical centers in the tri-state area, a destination for low-flying, slow-flying MedFlight helicopters.

In 1995, the city of Marshfield was home to more than 19,000 people. Stevens Point had a population of 23,000, Wisconsin Rapids, 18,000. There were also a number of smaller towns in the area. Moreover, because deer did well here, hunting cabins and small, ramshackle resorts testified to a sizeable seasonal population. These were hunters who treasured the large public hunting area on the southern border of the county, the 6,700 acres of county forest where a wounded deer could be tracked a long way without angering a sequence of private landowners. Nevertheless, the Guard’s 1991 preliminary proposal for the expansion touted the area as reasonably desolate.

The flatness of the existing training route offered few challenges to pilots; the planners in Maryland shifted their eyes southwest. According to Gunther Neumann, the plan did not originate in Wisconsin. We’re just the instruments at the local level, said the major who was in charge of Volk Field.

On maps of the Upper Midwest in the age of glaciers, one hole always appears, representing an area where glaciers never arrived. Elsewhere in Wisconsin and Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, mountains of ice, working like gigantic bulldozers, leveled the countryside, leaving behind former valleys now filled with the debris known as drift, and long, narrow piles of rock, gravel and dirt that are now low hills called moraines. The glaciers disrupted the natural patterns of the rivers, and left behind small craters called kettles, some of which filled with water and became small lakes.

But in the area where the hole appears on the map, the world is different. It is sometimes called the Driftless Area, since it lacks glacial drift, or Coulee Country, after the local name for its narrow valleys. In the offices of the Air Guard planners in Maryland, it looked just like Bosnia, the hot spot du jour. The planners knew about the unusual terrain, but they never thought about the intangibles: southwest Wisconsin is not only different from the sandy flatness of central Wisconsin, it is also a strikingly beautiful anomaly. Therefore, it has a lot of admirers.

The flatter land between the coulees is rolling farmland, worked by dairy farmers who plant it to hay and corn, mostly as feed for their own livestock. Seen from above by night, the area is an almost continuous strip of lights -- orange or blueish-white yard lights between farmers’ houses and their barns, lines of white or orange streetlights in villages of 500 to 1,000, white grids marking cities of up to 50,000.

In winter, bald eagles congregate below the dams on the Mississippi River to go fishing in whatever open water they can find. When temperatures well below zero cause these birds to condense at small patches of open water, there may be as many as 40 eagles decorating trees near a dam and 25 more on the ice waiting their turns for dinner, and two dozen more eagles wheeling above the open water, and additional eagles perching on trees overhanging the highway that twists along the water. When the winter is open and warm and the steep, wooded hillsides are bare of snow, an aerial whirlpool of eight or ten or twelve eagles may ride together on the same thermal. In spring, most but not all of the eagles depart, leaving the water to low-flying, slow-flying herons and egrets who nest in the wildlife reserves that occupy the floodplains, and to slow-flying buzzards who work the thermals along the bluffs. In spring and fall, migrating ducks spackle stretches of the River. Tundra swans spend several weeks on the River, resting before their final journey to the Chesapeake Bay. Occasionally, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources sends low-flying, slow-flying airplanes to count these birds. One clear autumn day, a DNR pilot, flying 250 feet above the River, was startled to spot a military aircraft flying faster than he was, and lower.

Bird books identify the area as the Mississippi Flyway; it would take the Guard’s experts more than a year to conclude that a significant number of birds fly along and near the Mississippi River, and that they are often flying at about the same altitudes mapped out for military jets.

Two-lane state highways follow the highest of the area’s ridges, offering vistas miles wide. In Coulee Country, the contrasts between high land and low land were so great, the microclimates so distinct, that the chewing tobacco grown here was judged at fairs in separate categories, Ridge and Valley. In the world of high school sports, Ridge and Valley is still the name of a local conference.

To the east of Highway 27, more fields slope away from the ridgetop road toward the Kickapoo River Valley, home to small villages spotted every ten miles or so, and to the solitary rectangle without yard lights or street lights, the only truly desolate parcel of land in the entire proposed low-altitude flight-training area. The 9,000-acre Kickapoo Reserve, once slated for inundation by a proposed federal dam north of the small village of La Farge, was in the process of becoming a recreational area and wildlife reserve, thanks in part to the efforts of Wisconsin’s two senators. The taking of the land was not popular with local farmers; graffiti on a bridge that spans the valley read DNR= Damned Near Russia.

By 1995, many canoeists were already frequenting the northern stretch of the Kickapoo River, inside and outside the Reserve, in summer. Hunters wandered through the now-deserted fields in autumn, snowmobilers came in winter and in spring. Until they wore out their welcome during the wet year of 1996, riders would appear on ATVs. That some of this area was about to become a public park was another fact that kept escaping the Guard’s notice.

From Highway 27 and the other ridge-top roads, county and township roads wind down through the narrower valleys. Some of these valleys are so narrow that virtually the only horizontal places in them are the roads themselves. The side coulees that slant toward the valley roads line up one after the next like forested walls. In these narrow valleys, quiet most of the time, the noise of a tractor or a deer rifle or a military aircraft will echo and multiply.

The northern part of the Iowa corridor was home to dairy farms And tourism along the Mississippi River and in the 6,000 acre Yellow River State Forest. In the 45% of Allamakee County beneath the proposed route, the land was of interest to tourists and hunters. Farther south, when the proposal arrived, the concern was economic development: in Manchester and Vinton the airport boards were talking about expansions for civilian pilots.

By comparison, Iowa County, Wisconsin, and neighboring Sauk County, are tourism territory -- Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen, and the House on the Rock, a monument to one man’s inspired insanity, and The American Players Theater, and artists’ boutiques and one of the largest state parks, Governor Dodge. Lots of summer residents and visitors from Madison and Milwaukee and Chicago were on familiar terms with this area.

Grant County, at the state’s southwestern corner, was among the state’s richest when income from agriculture was being tallied. A county north along the Mississippi River, Vernon County, and east of Vernon, Richland and Monroe Counties, also have their share of lush farmland. Again, they are home to cattle along with the very occasional elk, llama or emu operation. All are animals that are almost always outdoors, often on pasture, but pasture divided in quarter- or half-mile parcels. These are animals easily spooked by loud, low-flying aircraft, but they have little room to run. In those counties, some of the keepers of those cattle, as well as skittish horses, are Amish. There were so many Amish in the area when the proposal surfaced, they constituted a minor, though widely-advertised, tourist attraction; nevertheless, like the Mississippi River birds, the southwest Wisconsin Amish would initially escape the notice of the Guard planners in Maryland.

Between Grant and Richland Counties lies Crawford County. The narrow coulees are closer together here, and the countryside is even more beautiful, but because it is so rugged, it is farmed less successfully. Acreage that can be plowed and planted – tillable land -- is so rare and valuable that a cornfield in a valley may start narrow, then dwindle to a single row of corn. In many years, Crawford County was the second poorest county in the state. The proposed training routes passed over a quarter to a third of the other Wisconsin counties involved in the Guard’s plan; more than 80 percent of Crawford County was targeted.

Many of the Crawford County residents who referred to their lifestyle as alternative, and whom locals called hippies, found out early about the steep back-forties that farmers were willing to sell at very low prices. Many of these residents arrived in the early 1970s and stayed to pick apples in the Gays Mills orchards. Many of them were profoundly suspicious of the government, and particularly of the military; a very few had organized protests elsewhere before they retired to the land of the proposed military training routes.

Vacationers from the cities would feel that they had a stake in these counties too. In the past, the area had not been as popular for vacation homes as the region known generically and sometimes incorrectly as Up North, that area of Wisconsin the glaciers left flat and boring but full of little lakes that were full of fish. But land Up North was starting to get expensive, so city people were turning their attention to Wisconsin’s southwest, starting to buy up steep, less productive farmland, or woodlots on the beautiful hillsides, and turn them into vacation property, city people who drove three or four or five hours to escape the hustle and noise of Chicago and Milwaukee and Minneapolis and sometimes dreamed of retiring to the area as soon as they could.

Big-city hunters had come to