Zoe's other blog.

(directed at aj, but a wonderful learning opportunity for everyone.)

Hooray! You hear you’re going to the Wisconsin Dells to spend a weekend having fun at one of the 9 amusement parks with your family! How wonderful! Maybe you can get a tan alongside one of the hotel’s water parks. ;D

When you hear “The Wisonsin Dells” what do you picture? A small city with a population of about 3,000, filled with pine trees and 100-year old houses seated alongside a Cambrian gorge flooded with the Wisonsin River? No? How about amphibious vehicle tours, roller coasters, log rides, t-shirt shops, hotels with themes and restaurants boasting 4 floors, psychedelic atmospheres and fluorescent, incessant signs beaming “open 24 hours!”? (check, check, check, check, check and check-check.)

Granted, the amphibious vehicle tours no longer exist since the flood destroyed their courses, but for this post, that matter is trivial.

SO.

Do you know what the Wisconsin Dells are?

A dell is actually different from Dells. A dell, as we learned previously, is a grassy area. But who cares about grassy areas, really? Dells, besides the R&B group from the 50’s, are rapids or currents that run through a gorge.
Picture this: Arizona gets a hugh-jass rainstorm and the Grand Canyon floods. The water stays. Then the water starts to move and the Grand Canyon, instead of being a massive gorge, is now the Grand River. Or, rather, the Grand Dells. That is, if they don’t come up with a better name than that.

Granted, that would require a massive amount of rain and would result in a massive river. Maybe they’d get by with “Grand River”  (…Also trivial.)

The Wisonsin Dells, now part of the Wisconsin River, actually once looked something like a mini Grand Canyon. The gorge was formed in the Cambrian period by a glacial lake (like all gorges, it would seem) and was named the Wisonsin Dells by some French explorer back in the later 1800’s. 

The town of Wisconsin Dells used to be called Kilbourne but then changed it’s name since locals and people who had heard of it (so, in other words, everyone in the world to whom it was relevant) referred to it as the “Dells”.  Maybe Kilbourne just figured the name was more marketable.

The Wisconsin Dells attracted people and provided trade trasnportation for French fur trappers and the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Native American tribes for years. When someone finally recognized that people liked going there to visit, they started adding things like the amphibious vehicle tours:

(picture from 1950-something)

and ski shows on the river:

(probably from around the same time??)

and, of course, the boy who could jump between two rocks:

(Now this boy is too old to jump around on rocks, so they have replaced him with a dog. People will pay more to see a dog jumping anyway. Photo credit to the famous and important-to-the-Wisconsin-Dells-area-photogorapher, H.H. Bennett)

So that’s what the Wisconsin Dells are. Also, I don’t actually have anything against roller coasters and fun-looking restaurants, just for the record. I just dislike that everyone thinks “Wisconsin Dells” means “town with lots of tourist traps” when in fact, those tourist traps are just the result of entrepeneurs grabbing a hold of potential for economic opportunity and running with it.