Helen
Sanvidge lives on the Wolf River, near the town of
Pearson. She and her husband love the Wolf River.
They enjoy fishing for trout. They enjoy watching
the river, and just being next to it. They enjoy the
feeling of it.
"When
I look out there on the river, I feel like a caretaker,"
she says. "You don't own the river. It's only loaned
to you. You'd better take care of it."
One
day in the 1960s, Mrs. Sanvidge read a report in the
newspaper that really bothered her. She read that
a company was planning to build a dam on the Wolf
River at Pearson. The dam would create a large lake
behind the dam. Many people thought the dam was a
good idea because they thought it would encourage
more tourists to come and spend money in local resorts.
Helen
Sanvidge thought the dam was a bad idea. She thought
it was bad for the fish and bad for the people who
lived below the dam. In her mind, Wisconsin already
had plenty of lakes, but it had very few rivers like
the Wolf.
The
Wolf River is a river with cold water that some fish
need. It also has many places where the water flows
over a sharp rapids. That's unusual today. During
the past 150 years, most rivers in Wisconsin were
dammed at where rapids were found.
Mrs.
Sanvidge wanted to stop the dam project, but she did
not know what to do. She started asking questions
and talking to her friends and neighbors. Some people
told her it was too late to do anything. Mrs. Sanvidge
turned to her father for advice. He told her not to
give up if she believed she was right. "If you sit
there and do nothing about it," he said, "then the
dam will be built. But if you do something about it,
even if you fail, at least you know that you've tried."
To
build a dam requires a government permit. The dam
could be stopped if the government did not give the
permit. So Mrs. Sanvidge wrote a letter opposing the
dam, and she went door-to-door asking people to sign
it. Other people started to help her. Soon she had
thousands of signatures. Some government leaders started
to support her, and the Wisconsin Legislature passed
a law saying the dam should not be built.
Mrs.
Sanvidge helped change history because she did something
about the newspaper article she read in 1963. Today
the Wolf River is still a white water wonder.
Source:
Oral history archives of the Fox/Wolf Rivers Environmental
History Project and Wisconsin Assembly Record,
1963.
