About the Event
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The Wisconsin Historical Society Speakers Bureau offers an exciting opportunity for our historians, curators and authors to visit your community and share the stories of our great state.
Albert Coryer, the grandson of a fur trade voyageur-turned-farmer, had a gift for storytelling. Late in life, this lively man who had worked as a farm laborer and janitor drew a detailed illustrated map of the Prairie du Chien area and began to write his stories out longhand, in addition to sharing them in an interview with a local historian and folklore scholar. The map, stories, and interview transcript provide a colorful account of Prairie du Chien in the late nineteenth century, when it was undergoing significant demographic, social, and economic change.
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Mary Elise Antoine, author of Enslaved, Indentured, Free: Five Black Women on the Upper Mississippi, 1800-1850 and The War of 1812 in Wisconsin: The Battle for Prairie du Chien, is president of the Prairie du Chien Historical Society and former curator of Villa Louis. Her research focuses on the material culture and mix and confrontation of cultures on the upper Mississippi prior to Wisconsin statehood.