El Paso daily herald. (El Paso, Tex.) 1881-1901, 1896-12-09
REVOLVING REVELATION.
Famous Wisconsin Spring Rises
from a Graveyard.
Supposed Medicinal Waters Issue from
Ground Occupied by Old Skele-
tons of Winnebago
Indians.

/
: years been deriving much real or fan
cied benefit from drinking the medi-
; cinaI waters of Big Indian spring, on
the farm of Hans Egerede in the town
of Springvale. Wis, are now afflicted
with qualms of the stomach that threat
en- to counterfeit all the good the spring
may have done them.
In a narrow valley of the wild region
of the southeastern Wisconsin water
shed, lies, or until the other dav Law,
Big Indian spring. The country
roundabout is the hilliest and most
rugged of the central west the pre-
cipitous hills lacking only height to
give the scenery all the characteristics
of a mountain landscape. Some of the
hills are indeed quite high, rising
1000, 200 and $500 feet into the
pellucid Wisconsin air. Everywhere
are the ruins of an older world, the yet
undestroyed battlements of the ancient
surface of the globe, left behind when
the rains and rivers cut down the land
and graved the valleys, for these Wis
consin mountains are not wrinlllings of
the earth's crusts, or upheavals of vol
canic fires like other mountains, but
| fiint-capped eminences which. once part
| of n general level, now tower high
above the rest Of the country, their for
mer surroundings having been washed
away.
In the very widest part of this re-
gion, oozing out from under an i'm
mense monoIith that at a distance bears
| the appearance of Il rude sembance of
a man, is Il lively little spring that, flow
| ing some 20 feet deep. drops into a
nearly circular pool some so feet in cir
| conference Il barrier ledge damming
| back the current to form the pool.
| This is he Big Indian spring, its name,
| according to the belief of the Morse
| folk who make up the population of the
township, being given to it on account
of the big rock at whose base the spring
arises.
But an inmate of the county poor
house, a daft old man of unknown and
vast age, the last of the Yankee pioneers
vino first won the land from nature
and then sold out TO the Norseman and
moved on after the retreating Indian,
this old man has always insisted that
the spring got its name for some other
reason, and that it should be stunned
by all. His memory Went no farther
than this, and though he always striyed
to remember what this reason was and
why the spring should be Stunned his
aged mind could never quite call back
what he wished to know.
But the reason for the name OF the
spring and the reason why the waters
should be stunned by all is now sicken-
ingly apparent. The last four years
have been dry ones in Wisconsin,, at
mospherically, not eXcisely, for the
normal amount of beer has flowed, but
the rainfall has been deficient. This
year the rainfall has returned to the
normal, but the effect of the dryness
of past years has not thereby been re-
paired. Whole forests dropped their
leaves in the early summer and are now
decd. Dozens of lakelets, some of them
u square mile in extent, are now
marshes and even cultivated land.
Springs and wells have gone dry every
where and among them Big Indian
spring. and the real reason for its name,
long hidden beneath its cold, iron
impregnated waters, long sought in the |
dim mind of the pauper pioneer, though |
not the reason for its medicinal virtues |
has been disclosed.
Big Indian spring is a CLEARINGHOUSE. |
Its bottom for depth of four feet is
covered with human bones, heaped |
upon each other, packed down by the |
infiltration of the waters, covered with |
Il light film of mud. At the upper end of |
the basin there are no bones, and stand !
ing there one sees that the heaps of hui |
man remains rise to Il height of some |
four feet above the floor of the pool.
No single skeletons are to be dis |
cerned. All the bones lie in an indis-
criminate mass, parts of skulls pro-
truding here and there. Whether this
is a burial place of the Indians of our
own times, the Sacs and Foxes, who
We're in southern Wisconsin when The
white man came. the Ojibeways and
Winnebagoes, who preceded them, or
the Dakota Sioux, who, before Column
bus, were Wisconsin Indians, none can
say. The old pioneer is dead and no
one can jog his faltering memory with
the recital of the late discovery, so who
the dead of Big Indian spring were
when alive seems likely to forever re-
main a mystery.-Chicago Chronicle.