The Beaver and the Bear

Preface

The period between the two World Wars saw a sudden influx of new residents to the previously wild areas of Northern Wisconsin.  The great depression of ’29 forced an exodus from the cities where the manufacturing companies had closed their doors.  Many, who had embraced the urban life when they returned from the war, found the farm work in the rural north no stranger.  It had been their roots before the conflict in Europe interrupted their young lives.  Pay was meager, sometimes only room and board and a little “tobacco money”.  The farmers they worked for were also suffering from the depressed economy, but on a farm, there was always enough food, a wood stove to provide warmth in the winter and a dry bed to sleep in.

There was one organization in the big cities, especially New York and Chicago, that had been strong enough to withstand the depression.  They had enjoyed a thriving business during the “roaring twenties” and while people did not have as much cash to buy the product, they provided, the depression made the demand even greater.  Their board rooms did not include a DuPont, Carnegie or Vanderbilt and they were not listed on the stock exchange.  They produced and imported alcoholic beverages, outlawed in the United States with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920.  Their migration to the north was not to escape financial hardship.

Al Capone, constantly pursued in Chicago by rival gang leader George Moran found refuge in a palatial hide out in Sawyer County, Wisconsin while brother Ralph bought land for a permanent residence near Mercer in Iron County.  Had it only been the pressure of the gang wars Alphonse might have stayed in Chicago, but in 1929, the same year he had struck a major blow to the Moran gang on St. Valentine day, he encountered a new and more formidable enemy.  A young treasury agent named Elliot Ness had just formed the Untouchables, a group of agents specifically charged with the job of eliminating the illicit alcohol trade.

The Capones were rarely seen in Northern Wisconsin but the threat to their empire produced a larger outmigration.  Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The cease of majesty dies not alone,” and rarely was that so clearly demonstrated as the eventual fall of Al Capone.  The massive wheel of his influence included an army of body guards, drivers, mechanics, bookkeepers and domestics, plus his customers, the owners if the speakeasies and their employees who also found refuge in the northland.

There was one migrant from Chicago who fell into neither of those categories.  He found his paradise in the Northern Wisconsin wilderness, but he had arrived years before any of the others.  Chauncey Bottom came to Bayfield County in 1926.  Chauncey was not concerned about a lack of money.  Though he had none, the depression had little effect on him.  He didn’t need money.  Nor did he need a job, save working for himself to build a lodge on one of the states most remote lakes.  He was one of a kind.  He called himself Chauncey the Bear Hunter, but few of the anecdotes about his unconventional life involved hunting.  Chauncey was not just a character in a story.  He was as real in Northern Wisconsin history as he was remarkable, but in this work his persona is revealed as he becomes a central figure in a fictional mystery.