Ann and I had a couple of Indian friends that lived on the
shore of Clear Lake
by the name of Mary and Tommy Haskin. Mary was one of the Devines from Danny
Devine’s children, he had several children there. He lived on that shore there
and Danny Devine was a trapper and also a guide and worked in the camps, lumber
camps. He was married to a full-blooded Indian squaw [sic]. How they got the land and
that I don’t know because Mary could never tell. She used to tell a lot of
things about when she was a little girl, about what things were around the
lakes in those days. She was up close to her fifties when she was telling those
things.
So we would sit in the [kitchen], they would come and visit us and
especially in the winter time when things were slow. ... Mary would tell us about all the different
things. How the lakes were years and years back when she was a little girl. So
one time I asked her, I says, Mary, I says, was you born here on the lake? She
says no, she says, I don’t know where I was born because we were on a trapping
trip, my father was on a trapping trip when I was born. So she says I can’t
tell you where I was born. And that was the same way with one of the other ones
because when I was working for Ilg he had some litigations to take care of, and
one of them was Tommy Devine, who was one of the older ones. He asked him where
he was born and that was the same thing, he was born on the trapping trip. So
that’s way back in the early, early days of the timber industry in Wisconsin.
Mary would tell about how they would pull the lakes down so
low sometimes that there would hardly be any water in them. She said at times
we could walk across from the north side of the dam where we used to pick up
our food before the bridge was in over the dam over the lake between the north
and south end of the road. They could almost walk across the bottom of the bay
over to Nash’s island on the other side of the lake (Rest
Lake – Fox
Island), where the donut king had
built his big fancy home years back.
And other things she would tell about, the
Manito Island
on Manitowish Lake.
She says there was an Indian chief died on that island and was supposed to have
been buried there. And the same way, where Deer Park Lodge was on that point,
there was an Indian stopping place when they were traveling on the lakes. When
they were fishing and coming through there traveling. Those days, you know,
they just traveled with the seasons. There was a lot of other things she used
to tell about how that country was and so forth. How they made their living
hunting and fishing and everything else. Her father was a big trapper. His name
was Danny Devine and he was a red-headed Irishman.
He had a son that lived on the lakes too by the name of
Danny Devine. He was a guide and [trapper] because at that time
there was fur to be gotten yet, beaver and things of that kind. In the deer
seasons and that Danny would be one of the biggest guides that you could get up
there. He had a party that he was guiding up around Winchester.
He came out on the main roads, on W, going on the road to Winegar, and they
were all gathered together there and they were going to make another drive.
Danny was talking to the men and he lifted his left arm up to make a point, and
as he did that, he dropped down. They checked him out and he was dead.
So when
they got down to Pat Gaffrey’s (sp?) undertaking parlor in Eagle
River they had a post mortem on
him, an autopsy. They checked him over to find out what it was. And what
happened as he raised his arm up – a bullet hit him in the arm pit, went down
through his heart, killed him instantly. No one heard the shot. They never
found out where that came from or anything else. They found the bullet – it was
a thirty six bullet, a high powered rifle bullet. They never knew where that
ever came from. That was the end of poor Danny Devine.
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