10-30-26

In 2023, husband Art and I attended our first Fron Male Voice Choir rehearsal in North Wales. At the break, Chairman David Jones introduced us to the ensemble, mentioning we were from Kansas.

Later, chorister Ken Benbow greeted us by singing a few lines of "Kansas City," a song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, "Oklahoma."

While we sincerely appreciated Ken's effort to find common ground, we likely feel little more connected to the song than he did. Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein didn't know much about the U.S. Midwest, first visiting Oklahoma four years after writing the song. The line - "The corn is as high as an elephant's eye" - from the show's "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," creates the impression Oklahoma is a big corn producer. In reality, it raises less than two percent of the amount grown in Iowa.

Long-time friend Jan with
Fron chorister Ken Benbow

But one choir piece from my childhood does resonate with me. The music has a haunting and melancholy nature, yet the lyrics are not sung in a reflective way, but in full voice. The words don't really tell a coherent story, as if they weren't all from the same writer. While the piece is known by several names, "Shenandoah" is the one most familiar to me.

Hearing it at a recent rehearsal, I was spurred to learn the story behind it. To my surprise, Art was completely familiar with its back story, having discovered it quite by accident some years ago. While chatting with a woman who had previously mentioned never being in Art's native Wisconsin, she commented many people of French ancestry must live there.

There aren't, so why would she think that?

It was because Wisconsin has so many geographic names of French origin. Art's family once lived in the city of Fond du Lac. Eau Claire has the Leinenkugel brewery. Our cottage is near the Nicolet Forest. Prairie du Chien is the upper Midwest's oldest city. Some of my ancestors lived in Trempealeau County.

Green Bay, the home of the Packers football team, is one of North America's earliest settlements. It was originally named La Baie des Puants, meaning "stinking bay," due to decaying vegetation in nearby marsh lands. Charles Michel de Langlade, its first permanent resident, is often referred to as the "father of Wisconsin."

The French influence in North America began about 1640 with trade between those on the northeastern coast and nearby Native Americans. European-made goods were traded for fish.

While the French were looking for a Northwest Passage to the Far East, the appetite for furs in Europe and Great Britain grew, causing the French government to establish trading centers at Quebec and later, Montreal. From there, 40-foot canoes proceeded westward, each paddled by ten voyageurs - French for travelers. Upon reaching Lake Huron, they hugged its northern shore. Upon arriving at the eastern tip of what is today Upper Michigan, they would divide.

One group traveled northwest to Lake Superior and paddled along its northern shore until Grand Portage, located where present-day Minnesota and Canada meet. There they joined other voyageurs returning from canoeing the Pigeon River and its tributaries to the northwest. These men, with canoes half the size, brought furs obtained from Native Americans along their route in return for European goods obtained from the Lake Superior paddlers the previous year. Goods were exchanged and the two groups would once again separate, one returning to Montreal with the furs, while the other paddled into Canada’s interior with more European goods to trade.

The other group of Lake Huron Voyageurs would turn south and enter Lake Michigan, with Green Bay being their initial destination. There, the mouth of the Fox River provided access to central Wisconsin.

At Portage, the Fox River and the Wisconsin River are separated by only two miles. Carrying their canoes across the gap, voyageurs gained access not just to upper Wisconsin, but to the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri river lands as well. Routes were established through New Orleans, a city that would challenge Montreal's supremacy.

Today, Iowa has the cities of Dubuque and Des Moines. Missouri has St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, St. Joseph. François Chouteau was the father of Kansas City. Kansas has the village of Frontenac, the Marais des Cygnes River, and the Louis Vieux Elm. South Dakota has the Vermillion River and a city of the same name. All these, and many others, speak to the range of these voyageurs.

Their travels involved day after day of paddling. Music historians believe these voyageurs - well known for their singing - created "Shenandoah" and other songs to entertain themselves and help the watery miles slip by.

Some versions had words about their travels on the Missouri River, while others spoke of the "river of misery." Many voyageurs married Native American women, prompting a lyric about a love affair between a voyageur and the daughter of Shenandoah. The name probably refers to John Skenandoa (1706 - 1816), also called Shenandoah, who was a chief of the Oneidas in New York state.

Chief John Shenandoah
(oneidaindiannation.org)

But mostly, the songs were about the highways of their lives - the rolling rivers.

Poor economic conditions in Europe and rising land prices in the East caused Wisconsin's population to balloon from 31,000 in 1840 to a little more than a million by 1870 - greater than a 3,000 percent increase in just 30 years.

As a percentage of the population, today almost 50 percent of Badger Staters identify themselves as German - the most of all states. Norwegians are the second largest group at 10 percent. Even these late arrivals outnumber the French, who had preceded them, by more than three to one.

But those French men, whether searching for a passage that didn’t exist, or furs that did, named places that were important in their work. Today, these are clues in plain sight of their once-dominant role in a place where they are now virtually absent.

And they left something else as well. They left us "Shenandoah" - a haunting song that speaks to their courage and endurance, but also of a life filled with seemingly countless hours of aloneness.