by Jim Noles
By World War II, the reputation of Wisconsin’s cows was such that the state legislature placed the slogan “America’s Dairyland” on automobile license plates—a reputation sullied only by California replacing Wisconsin as the nation’s top milk-producing state at the end of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, today Wisconsin is home to approximately 17,000 dairy farms and 1 million cows, which on average produce an annual 17,306 gallons of milk each. Fifteen percent of the country’s milk comes from those cows, earning the unnamed bovine a well-deserved spot on Wisconsin’s state quarter.
The demands of Wisconsin’s cheese industry are directly related to the cow that shares the quarter with the round of cheese. Ninety percent of milk produced by Wisconsin’s dairy industry is used for cheese production, and those cows boosted Wisconsin to its ranking as the nation’s top cheese-making state, producing as many as 500 different varieties, types, and styles of cheese.
In total, Wisconsin leads the nation in production of cheddar, American, mozzarella, Muenster, and Limburger cheese and at the same time can claim to be the origin of such varieties as Colby, baby Swiss, and brick cheese. That litany does not even count the foam headpieces seen adorning the noggins of Green Bay Packers fans.
Cheese-making in Wisconsin owes much of its success to the state’s diverse immigrant heritage. Swiss immigrants introduced Swiss cheese; Italians brought mozzarella, provolone, and gorgonzola. From the French came Camembert, Brie, and a variety of blue cheeses. The Germans, for their part, brought Muenster and Limburger; the English, cheddar, and the Dutch immigrants brought Gouda and Edam.
Historians credit Charles Rockwell as ranking among the state’s earliest cheese makers. He began production at Koshkonong near Fort Atkinson in 1837, eleven years before Wisconsin became a state. In those days of limited transportation and storage capabilities, cheese, which kept longer than milk or butter, simply made economic sense.
Over the course of the next two decades, the potential for cheese production in Wisconsin had reached such a point that J. I. Smith, of Sheboygan County, erected the state’s first cheese vat in 1858. He then became the first cheese maker to market outside the state when he shipped barrels of cheese to Chicago.
By the end of the Civil War, thirty cheese factories operated in Wisconsin; by 1870, the number had grown to fifty-four, with the state producing over 3 million pounds of cheese. That number more than quadrupled within ten years as cheese production eventually concentrated in three counties: Sheboygan, Green, and Jefferson. By the 1920s, there were over 2,800 cheese factories in the state.
Today, cheese remains a primary focus of Wisconsin’s dairy industry; 90 percent of the state’s total milk production is directed to cheese-making. In fact, Wisconsin’s government Web site serves up 5,234 hits in response to a search for the word “cheese.” And in the Wisconsin Historical Museum in Madison, the treasured artifacts include a round copper kettle, five feet in diameter, capable of holding 2,500 gallons of milk—enough to make one 200-pound round of Swiss cheese at its original home at the Tuscobia Cheese Factory.
Corn also earned its place on the state quarter—and, like the cow, arguably at the expense of wheat. The collapse of the state’s wheat market in the 1860s encouraged crop diversification. Innovative farmers learned how to grow corn in the state’s higher latitudes and added oats to their agricultural portfolios as well. In total, the production of corn and oats rose from slightly over 5 million bushels in 1849 to more than 67 million bushels in 1879.
In the years to come, Wisconsin’s corn farmers never looked back. In 2002, Wisconsin led the United States in corn silage production and, with 391.5 million bushels produced, ranked fifth in the production of corn for grain. In total, corn production contributed $882.4 million to the state’s economy in 2003 and accounted for roughly one-third of Wisconsin’s 12 million acres of cropland.
Thanks to the growing demand for ethanol, the prospects for the Badger State’s corn farmers continue to look bright. Corn is the main ingredient for ethanol, and it takes 1 bushel of corn to make 2.8 gallons of the fuel. By 2010, U.S. ethanol plants will need 2.6 billion bushels of corn a year—the kind of demand that, in the summer of 2006, helped propel corn prices to their highest prices in a decade.
Even the corn on the Wisconsin state quarter promises to be valuable. Due to a brief problem with one of the Denver Mint’s coin presses in November 2004, 50,000 of the Wisconsin state quarters were minted with an unusual flaw—an apparent extra leaf on the left side of the bottom of the ear of corn.
By the time the error was noticed and corrected, the flawed quarters had been commingled with quarters from the other four presses. Before long, they began appearing in cash registers and coin purses mainly in the Tucson and San Antonio areas—and sparking a renewed collecting interest in the already popular 50 State Quarters® Program. According to an article in USA Today, a set of three Wisconsin quarters—two flawed and one in good condition—sold the following January on eBay for $2,800.
“These days, a coin pulled out of circulation is probably worth $100 to $300, and a coin pulled out of rolls before entering circulation is probably worth $300 to $500,” said Patrick Heller, who owns Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Michigan. “It all depends on the coin’s condition.”
31
CALIFORNIA
California Dreaming
Over the course of a life focused in its latter half on preserving America’s greatest natural treasures, Sierra Club founder John Muir never shied away from contentious controversy. It was only fitting, therefore, that the California state quarter that bears his image sparked heated debate as well.
Perhaps aware of the threat of such disagreement, Governor Gray Davis began California’s design selection process by forming the twenty-member California State Quarter Commission. The commission then solicited design concepts from California citizens. Californians responded enthusiastically, offering up 8,000 designs.
After culling the list to twenty semifinalists, the commission forwarded its recommendations to Davis.
Davis picked his own five finalists from the twenty—no easy task for any politician, particularly one leading a state as diverse and expansive as California.
One image, designed by San Diego artist Jon Louie, featured a giant sequoia tree. Another design, crafted by James Cody of Santa Barbara, featured a coastal scene of sun and waves. A third design, submitted by San Diego artist Sarah Bailey, included the iconic Hollywood sign. A fourth candidate, designed by David Biagini of San Francisco, depicted a miner panning for (and discovering) gold. The fifth finalist, submitted by Garrett Burke of Los Angeles, featured John Muir gazing at Yosemite’s Half Dome.
By the winter of 2004, when the U.S. Mint returned the five designs, revised to reflect the challenges of converting artistic designs to a coin engraving, Arnold Schwarzenegger was California’s new governor. Some thought, perhaps only half-jokingly, that the former actor’s presence in the governor’s mansion meant that the Hollywood sign design would have the inside track to a historic place on the state quarter. Others surmised that his bodybuilding nickname the “Austrian Oak” might favor the sequoia design. Skeptics wondered if the Hummer-driving governor would give serious thought to a design featuring naturalist John Muir.
To hear Schwarzenegger tell it at the unveiling of the final design, it was a tough decision.
“This was one of the first decisions, I remember, that I had to make after I was elected into office,” Schwarzenegger said. “And we had these five designs there, and for a week we went back and forth, debating over which one it should be, and we couldn’t make up our minds.”
“And all of a sudden,” he continued, “one day we got a phone call from Kevin Starr, who was the state librarian at the time. He was on the phone, and he said, ‘Governor, it is extremely important you make up your mind. The people of California are looking at you now; they want to decide how quick are you with the decision-making process. And remember
that the decision is very, very important, because this is not like the financial situation, the crisis California is in. This is a much more important decision. We need it right away.’”
“So, talk about putting pressure on someone,” the governor lamented. “My wife and I were scrambling, because we couldn’t make a decision right away, because there were five beautiful designs there. And of course California is an incredible state that has so much to offer.”
“So anyway,” Schwarzenegger continued, “I was thinking about calling the Mint and to just tell the Mint, ‘What’s wrong with all five designs? Let’s just produce all five designs. I mean, we are an incredible state, we are the most spectacular state in the Union, and we are the sixth largest economy—we deserve five designs.’”
“Maria, as usual, held me back, not to make the phone call,” the governor admitted. “And so therefore we went back and forth again. And the more we went through the five designs the more we decided that Garrett’s design is really the most beautiful one and it says it all. With Yosemite, with the California condor, with John Muir—I thought it was spectacular. A beautiful, beautiful design and a beautiful coin.”
Not everyone agreed, however. The dissidents’ ranks included David Biagini, who had submitted the miner design—a design entitled “A Golden Moment” and that had actually claimed the majority of votes in an Internet poll commissioned by the California State Quarter Commission. In response to the Muir selection, he created a Web site, www.caquarter.com, to press his arguments for his miner in cyberspace.
“The facts are that the people chose ‘A Golden Moment’ for the California quarter, and there were great efforts to ensure that the people’s choice would never become the California quarter,” Biagini argued.
John Muir, on the other hand, would have been delighted with the outcome—an outcome that, one might say, represented the culmination of a chain of events that began in 1849. That year, a year before California gained statehood, Muir’s family emigrated from Scotland to the United States, bringing the eleven-year-old Muir with them. He grew up on a farm near Portage, Wisconsin, and later studied at the University of Wisconsin. A talented woodworker and inventor, he worked odd jobs around the northern and midwestern United States and Canada for several years.
But in Indianapolis, Muir suffered a frightening eye injury. Reflecting back on the incident, Muir said, “I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone—that I should never look at a flower again.” Accordingly, once his eyesight returned, Muir resolved to focus on the natural world. He tramped from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, sailed first to Cuba and then Panama, crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and sailed up the West Coast. He landed in San Francisco in March 1868.
Taking a job as a sheepherder, Muir soon made his home in the Yosemite Valley. He famously described the Sierra Nevada Mountains as “the Range of Light . . . the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have seen . . . . I came to life in the cool winds and the crystal waters of the mountains, and were it not for a thought now and then of loneliness and isolation the pleasure of my existence would be complete.”
Suitably inspired, Muir devoted the rest of his life to the conservation of natural beauty in Yosemite and elsewhere, ranging as far afield as Alaska and South America. He published more than 300 articles and ten books that expanded his naturalist philosophy. Some would later christen him “The Father of Our National Parks” and “Wilderness Prophet.” Considerably less seriously, Muir described himself as a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.”
Despite Muir’s self-deprecation, his accomplishments were indeed serious and long-lasting. His writings, particularly a series of articles in Century magazine, contributed greatly to the creation of Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon National Parks, and, perhaps most famously, Yosemite. To help protect such creations (“to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad,” in his words), Muir helped form the Sierra Club in 1892, serving as that organization’s president until his death in 1914.
In 1901, Muir published Our National Parks, bringing him to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In response, Roosevelt visited Muir in Yosemite two years later. Over the course of a legendary camping trip, the two men sat beneath the trees and laid the foundation of Roosevelt’s conservation programs.
Muir did not always meet with success, however. Perhaps his most painful failure came in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, when the Tuolumne River was dammed to create a water reservoir for San Francisco. Years of polarizing debate followed—to no avail. Congress approved damming the river in 1913; Muir died the following year in Los Angeles after a sudden bout with pneumonia.
“John Muir was best known to the general public as a great lover of nature,” his obituary in the New York Times noted. “But aside from being a naturalist—‘more wonderful than Thoreau,’ according to his good friend Ralph Waldo Emerson—Mr. Muir was a geologist, an explorer, philosopher, artist, author, and editor, and to each of his avocations he devoted that deep insight and conscientious devotion which made him its master.”
After Muir’s death, some went so far as to claim that the naturalist had died of a broken heart in the wake of the loss of the Hetch Hetchy. If so, then it would be of no small consolation to Muir to know that because of the perpetuation of his image on California’s state quarter, he might survive to see the Tuolumne River flow free once again. In 2004, the same year that Governor Schwarzenegger picked Muir to stand astride California’s quarter, he directed the state’s resources agency to review the idea of draining the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and restoring what Muir once called a “second Yosemite.”
32
MINNESOTA
10,000 Lakes,
488 Million Quarters
“Land of 10,000 Lakes,” Minnesota’s state quarter declares. In addition to an outline of Minnesota, the quarter features one of those same lakes, with a loon paddling contentedly in its foreground. Behind the state bird, a fishing boat floats. Seated in it, two anglers try their luck.
Fishing is big business in Minnesota, whose 15,000 (rather than 10,000) lakes boast a total shoreline that exceeds 90,000 miles, a remarkable figure that tops California, Hawaii, and Florida combined.
Sport fish include walleye, northern pike, smallmouth bass, crappie, lake trout, bluegill, and whitefish. According to one report, those fish are stalked by 1.5 million resident and nonresident anglers every year.
Minnesota’s anglers contribute mightily to the state’s economy— as much as $1.8 billion, in fact. Most is spent on boats, gas, and lodging, although bait ($50 million), lures, lines, and tackle ($34 million), and ice fishing equipment ($8 million) demand impressive expenditures as well. In short, fishing—and the 15,000 lakes and rivers that support it—makes a significant contribution to Minnesota’s coffers.
But 300 years ago, Minnesota’s lakes—in particular, the so-called Boundary Waters of the state’s northern border with Canada— yielded an equally rich bounty. In doing so, those waters helped write some of the greatest tales of endeavor and adventure in America’s history.
The adventure began in 1679 when the French explorer Sieur Duluth (or Du Lhut, born under the name Daniel Greysolon) pushed westward from Montreal and into modern-day Minnesota. There, he found a land full of economic potential. Covered in great boreal woods, latticed with innumerable lakes and ponds scoured by the glaciers of the region’s last great ice age, it contained forests of pine, birch, balsam fir, white spruce, and white cedar, which sheltered thriving populations of moose, wolves, bears, muskrat, bobcats, falcons, loons, caribou, and, perhaps most enticingly, beaver.
Other explorers followed Duluth’s lead. Some, like Father Hennepin, a Jesuit priest, sought converts. Others, such as Nicholas Perrot, came for national glory. The latter formally took possession of the entire Upper Mississippi region for France in 1689. At that same time, another explorer, Ja
cques de Noyon, pushed into what would one day be known as the Boundary Waters and wintered along the Rainy River.
Further exploration followed in the first half of the eighteenth century and on its heels came the canoes of the hardy French Canadian coureur des bois—literally, “runners of the woods.” These men, operating outside of the auspices of France’s colonial government, began trading guns, copper kettles, blankets, and other trade goods with local Indians for fur pelts, notably beaver.
As French Canada found itself in increasing economic competition with Great Britain’s Hudson Bay Company, the French realized that dramatic steps would need to be taken to open up North America’s interior to French traders.
In 1731, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de la Vérendrye, responded. Leading a brigade of canoes that included his three sons, a nephew, and fifty men, la Vérendrye forged a watery path that linked Lake Superior, Rainy Lake, Lake in the Woods, and Lake Winnipeg. Establishing a network of forts and a patchwork of Indian alliances, he helped ensure the next three decades of French fur trade in the region.
An important part of that trade involved the legitimizing of the individual efforts of the coureur des bois. Montreal merchants began licensing and funding increasingly large-scale fur expeditions to Minnesota and beyond. The men once called “runners of the woods” became known as “voyageurs.”
For the voyageurs, the scattered French forts offered isolated outposts on a remarkable 3,000-mile canoe route that stretched from Montreal, along the Great Lakes, through the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota, and on to Fort Chipewyan on the shores of remote Lake Athabaska. With challenges that included 120 backbreaking portages, 200 treacherous rapids, and fifty lakes capable of being whipped into an oceanlike frenzy in a storm, the route was not for the timid.