Prairie du Chien, Mississippi River

Since I’d just been talking about Nathan Myrick coming up from Prairie du Chien to establish La Crosse, it felt fitting that my journey brought me downriver to the place he once called home. There’s a lot to explore here, even if the town itself is modest in size, so I tie up the boat and wander ashore, grateful for the chance to stretch my legs and get a feel for the place.

The town sits right at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Wisconsin River, and I can feel the importance of that junction immediately. The Wisconsin River, a quieter, sandy-bottomed waterway, cuts deep into the interior and once acted as a natural highway for Native people and early French explorers, funnelling travellers and traders to this very spot. Glancing across the river, I spot the small town of Marquette, named after Father Jacques Marquette. Along with Louis Joliet, he passed through here in 1673 while charting the Upper Mississippi. It’s kind of amazing to think that the same waters that carried them centuries ago, full of curiosity, are the same waters I’m now floating on, filled with my own sense of wonder.

I walk through Fort Crawford first, pausing at the reconstructed blockhouse, one of two originally located on the corners of the fort. These double-storey wooden structures were typical American frontier blockhouses. They featured square log buildings with a second storey that overhung the first. This way, defenders could fire down on anyone who got too close, from gun ports or, sometimes, small cannons that pierced the walls. Over time, the blockhouses fell into disrepair, largely due to rotting walls caused by seasonal flooding. The fort was eventually abandoned, so this careful reconstruction gives me a real sense of what it must have been like.

Nearby, a second fort was built, where Dr William Beaumont, the frontier medicine pioneer, once worked. Beaumont conducted groundbreaking experiments on digestion with his patient Alexis St. Martin, who had been accidentally shot in the stomach, leaving a hole that never healed properly. Beaumont realised he could study the workings of the human stomach directly, discovering that digestion was primarily a chemical process. He also observed that vegetables digested more slowly than meat and that the stomach’s churning motion helped break food down efficiently. 

From there, I head to Villa Louis, a Victorian mansion and a time capsule of 19th-century elegance. Walking through the rooms, each preserved with over 90% of the original furnishings, I can almost see the Dousman family moving through the parlour, heading onto the enclosed verandah for afternoon tea, the warm sunlight filtering through the windows. Much of the house’s originality was maintained thanks to surviving family photographs that illustrated the precise placement of furnishings and the patterns of wallpapers, allowing restorers to recreate the interiors faithfully. The architect added Italianate touches to the design, while Joseph Twyman of the famed William Morris Company of London oversaw the interior. Twyman believed that every furnishing should be either beautiful or useful. In this home, they are unmistakably both, from the restored Steinway grand piano to the glass-fronted cases filled with books by Dickens and Shakespeare.

Next, I made a brief stop at the Dousman House, a hulking former railway hotel built in the 1860s. I can picture travellers disembarking from steamboats or stepping off the Milwaukee & Mississippi line, heading into what was once Prairie du Chien’s most luxurious accommodation. Its life hasn’t been straightforward—hotel, chemical company, meatpacking plant, warehouse—but careful restoration has returned much of its dignity, and it now serves as an elegant event venue.

Returning to my boat, I glance over the Mississippi as it stretches before me, wide and glinting in the late afternoon sun. Prairie du Chien may be small, but it’s a treasure trove of history, from frontier forts and pioneering medicine to grand Victorian homes and echoes of the fur trade, all nestled at the meeting point of two great rivers.