come on by

Swing by the library to view the coat Carl Christensen wore when he was shot by Baby Face Nelson, on display in our foyer!

Carl Christensen was the Manitowish Waters (then Spider Lake) town constable in 1934, when the FBI tracked down John Dillinger and his gang at Little Bohemia. Carl took place in the resulting shoot-out, having been asked to accompany several FBI officers to the scene. They had just driven up in their car when Baby Face Nelson, driving out, shot and killed one officer, wounding Carl and the other. Carl was subsequently hospitalized for his eight bullet wounds and received federal funding to cover his medical bills.

It is perhaps no surprise that Carl's scrapbook, in our possession, contains the grim images showing Dillinger's and Nelson's bodies in the mortuary after they were later tracked down by the FBI (and successfully killed). Though I must confess my initial distaste at these photos, it struck me that Carl had a simple reason to want them in his scrapbook. The men who had threatened his life -- who could so easily have killed him -- were now dead. They could never trouble him again. There must have been a reassuring finality in such images.

Such things serve as a reminder that the "Dillinger days" are not fiction. Real people lived in those times: experienced real fear: died real deaths. When we visit Little Bohemia to see the scene of this shoot-out, we must remember this, and though we all enjoy the exciting nature of the stories told, it must be said that not one of us would have wanted to be there on the night of April 22, 1934.

Memories & Memorabilia

Carl Christensen's coat, riddled with holes courtesy of Baby Face Nelson

We've come across some of Carl Christensen's memorabilia, including the coat that he wore when he was shot by Baby Face Nelson. Six holes from the bullets are visible in the coat, going through the back and on the undersides of the arms. Their placement suggests (to me, at least) that Carl must have thrown his arms over his head in an attempt to protect himself from the attack. (He also took bullets in the foot and knee, which resulted in his hospitalization and being on crutches for several months. Photos from the original newspaper articles to come!)

Carl Christensen's scrapbook

Carl put together a scrapbook that included newspaper clippings and articles about Dillinger and the shoot-out at Little Bohemia. (We will share some of these treasures in the near future!) After he was shot by Baby Face Nelson, Carl's local fame sky-rocketed, and he was the subject of a number of articles and interviews. Piggy-backing off of this media attention, he made up postcards that showed him holding up the coat he was wearing (pictured in this blog post as well as in its current condition, above). Obviously, Carl knew how to turn a life-threatening situation to his advantage! The story about his survival certainly seems to have enhanced business at his place, as well as being a source of personal pride to him.

Carl Christensen built and owned the main building and cottages that make up what is now Cozy Cove. The Cozy Cove is right on Highway 51, less than half a mile north of the Koller Library and on the other side of Rest Lake Road. Here we have pictures of Cozy Cove as it looks today.

Cozy Cove, Manitowish Waters

Cozy Cove & Cottages

Cottages at Cozy Cove

a final blessing from Carl Christensen

Carl Christensen in his old age -- still looking pretty hale!

A bon voyage from Carl at the end of the transcript. We are grateful to him, as well, for preserving all this history for us!

I’m very happy to know that there is someone that has interest enough in Manitowish Waters to bring back some of this history. I’m very happy that Hurley is going to relinquish and let the folks pick up my coat and my scrapbook and bring it to Manitowish Waters, where it really belongs. Because at the time that I sent that to Hurley, I sent it up to one of the reporters, Armand Cirilli (sp?), a reporter for the Iron County Miner [whom] I knew very well. I asked him if he would take care of it and bring it over to them. He wrote back to me, that’s too bad, he says, that you don’t send it to Manitowish Waters, he says, because that’s where it really happened, that’s where it should be.

I didn’t write but I telephoned back to him and I says, you know Armand, I says, there’s no place in Manitowish Waters that they can keep it. I didn’t know at that time that they had the nice new town hall and all those different things that they have there now. So that’s how it got into Hurley. Now I know from the curator up there, I’ve talked to her both on the telephone and also correspondence, that they are willing to turn that coat over to Manitowish Waters. I’m very, very happy to know it.

I also, through Mark (Leistickow), I have learned so much about Manitowish Waters and how it has grown and everything else. It really does my heart good. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left in this world now because I’m going to be ninety two years old now on July the fifth this year (1993). I’m still physically able to be around but when you get up in years, why, your get up and go is went. Mine is beginning to go. I would love to see what Manitowish Waters was like now, but there is no chance at all anymore. So take care and God bless all you folks in Manitowish Waters, and enjoy life as much as you can.

Carl's Postcard

"Carl Christensen, Victim of Eight Bullets in Dillinger Raid, April 22, 1934"

Our regular readers will remember that Carl, newly elected as town constable, went to investigate the Dillinger shooting at Little Bohemia. Baby-Face Nelson shot him eight times in the back, chest, hip and foot! Here is a postcard where he displays the coat he was wearing, showing the bullet holes.

Carl Goes Dancing

In another reflection, Carl Christensen recalls how the Northwoods community would get together to organize dances and activities in the shoulder season. Read on for his tongue-in-cheek description of classic northern Wisconsin fun...

After the season was over, the women could all get together and they would organize our card club. And then once a month they would go from one place to another place and they’d play cards and spend an afternoon and enjoy themselves.

Then they would organize parties. Every once in a while, some birthday or something would come on, they’d have a party. We’d have it in the town hall and everybody was invited. We’d all chip in about fifty cents apiece to buy half a barrel of beer and the women would all bring something for pot luck and we’d get together and we’d have a dance.

the story of dan devine

Back in May, we posted some photos and information about Danny Devine, who was killed by a mysterious gunshot off of Hwy K. The perhaps less than politically correct Carl Christensen fills in some of the missing pieces of the story. Read on...

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.

Carl Christensen & Baby Face Nelson

Like many Northwoods "old-timers," Carl had his own story to tell about the night that the FBI tracked down the Dillinger gang at Little Bohemia. Read on for Carl's part in the shoot-out!

Baby Face Nelson

We had been very busy, Ann and I. She was making sandwiches, she did a lot of that, sandwiches, and I was tending bar and everything else and we hadn’t even had a chance to eat anything because the people kept coming and coming and coming. So that was toward evening when two fellows walked in. They wanted to know if I was the constable, which I had been elected constable. I says, “Yes.” Well, they says, we need your help. We think we’ve got Dillinger locked up in Little Bohemia but in case they should get loose, we need you to go and show us how to set up road blocks, where we can set up road blocks and roads that were going out from there. So I says all right.

So I got my jacket on [now located in the Frank B. Koller Memorial Library in Manitowish Waters], and I had a pair of old shoes on and a cap. I says to Ann, my wife, I says we’ll be back in a little while and we’ll get a couple of sandwiches. We’ll make some for these men too and I’ll have something to eat. But I never got back. And you know the rest of the story from there on.

Dillinger & Emil Wanatka, owner of Little Bo

We stopped at Koerner’s to check a car out there. Baby Face [Nelson] was in that car and he shot Newman under the hat and also Brown [sic]* was shot right above his vest, through the throat, and he caught me with eight bullets. I never found out till after I was out of the hospital that George La Porte was walking back and forth with a rifle in the crutch of his arm. So I asked George one day what he was doing. Oh, he says, I was on guard, he says, in case they should come back. And another thing I found out was when Emil Wanatka was being held prisoner by Baby Face Nelson in that car, which was George La Porte’s Model T Ford and when Nelson saw us coming he got out of the car. Emil got out and he crawled into a snowbank and he had dark trousers on and Emil told me, he says, I tried to cover my pants with snow, he says, so he wouldn’t see me. I was afraid he was going to shoot me. So all that came out after I was out of the hospital. So the rest of the story that’s newspaper, you have that in my scrap book. [at the Frank B. Koller Library in Manitowish Waters]

Johnny Depp in the Little Bo scene in Public Enemies

After I came home from the hospital, we had a tremendous business. All the publicity, newspaper stories about me and everything else. We really had people stopping, curiosity seekers. They wanted souvenirs from me, and so on and so forth. I had postal cards made up with my picture on it and sometimes they’d buy four or five of them, take them along to give them to friends. I had that much publicity. So things were going along real good and we were taking in money and it was really, in those days, rich money, you know, good money. So I go out to Hank Coonan, he had promised me that if I could make good of that place there he would sell it to me when we first started in. So I says to Hank, I says, now I’m in a position, I says, I can buy from you, buy your share out, buy the building off you. Oh, no, no, he says, I can’t sell that, he says, that’s too valuable a piece of property now. Well, I says, if that’s the case then I’m just going to pull my share out. You can pay me off and I’ll pull out and you can get somebody else to run it. Which he did.

*While our transcript records the name as Brown, Carl Christensen most likely meant to refer to W. Carter Baum.

the powell marsh fire

Powell Marsh went up in flames in 1932, and Carl Christensen was on the scene. Not only did he fight to contain the fire, but he survived it in a pretty amazing fashion when he seemed likely to be engulfed in flames! Read on...

That summer, they had someone out on Powell Marsh and they was gonna heat up a cup of coffee or something. They made a fire out there and they started Powell Marsh on fire. That fire swept up to the Powell Road. We fought with as much as we could fight with to keep it from going across Powell Road because it would have got into Manitowish and wiped out everything. So the wind went down and the fire died out, which was lucky for us, but on the other side, into the marsh, it kept going.

Powell Marsh today: a rather nondescript photo courtesy of the DNR

The life and times of Carl Christensen

Carl Christensen, entrepreneur and man of at least nine lives, moved up to the Northwoods in 1930. We will dedicate several blog posts to following his story, which he recorded on tape and which was subsequently typed up. Janelle and Annette recently uncovered it on the library's dusty shelves and have brought it to light. Here we'll enjoy a few excerpts, cleaned up a bit for easier reading!

Carl did his dictation in 1993. We hope you will come to enjoy his distinctive "voice" as much as we have.

I have to tell you how I came into Manitowish Waters in 1930. That’s 63 years ago. Height of the Depression and there was no work. I was a carpenter. No work, couldn’t get work, any kind.

I put an ad in the “Wisconsin Agriculture,” a magazine, saying that I would do carpenter work for anyone who wanted me for my room and board. Anyone that needed any remodeling or anything else, I would be willing to do it for my board and room. I got a letter from Chicago and we answered it. The letter writer had a resort up in Spider Lake Wisconsin [Manitowish Waters] on Rest Lake and he wanted someone that had a strong back to come up there and take care of it... I answered that letter and told him that I was just the guy he needed – I had a strong back and a weak mind. I got another letter from him that said to meet him at the Northwestern station in Racine. I had another partner that went along with me.