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HOEL WRIGHT SETTLES AT WRIGHTSTOWN, RUSSIAN ARTILLERY POUNDS KIEV
by Eric Chaet

Hoel Wright is called the first settler (1833) of what became the Township of Wrightstown and the Village of Wrightstown. He set up a ferry, inn, tavern, and trading post where Plum Creek runs into the Fox River, at the eastern end of the current bridge.

But he can’t have been the first settler, because he traded with the preceding settlers — members of the Menominee tribe. Those who preceded them had been here for at least a thousand years.

During that time, Europe went through what would later be called its Dark and Middle Ages, then its early industrialization. Germanic tribes conquered the dissolving Roman Empire, and their descendants became the feudal landlords (Dukes, Counts, Kings, etc.) over armed and mounted vassal knights and common peasants and serfs. Between and among the lords’ domains, towns — burgs — came into being — independent of the lords, walled, to protect handicraftsmen and traders from the rampages of the tribute-demanding knights. Those named Berg or Burke or Thisburg or Thatburg are likely descended from such townspeople.

Lords gradually lost some power, fighting one another, and fighting and losing the Crusades, while towns became slightly more prosperous and secure, as commerce among them developed.

Scandinavian Norsemen (Vikings) along the western coast of Europe and Varangians sailing and rowing south on the rivers of Eastern Europe, conquered and extracted trribute from those they encountered — in France and England, for instance, and what is now the Ukraine, where they intermarried with Slavs — tribes driven west out central Asia by Huns and Mongols, for instance. Mongols (khans) came to rule all of what is now Russia — China and India, too.

Just before 1100, Russians appear in history — at Kiev (the Kievan Rus). It was just at this time that the French-speaking Norsemen, William the Conqueror and his knights from Normandy, conquered England, then Ireland.

Kievan Rus gradually spread northeastward, and became Muscovy (at Moscow), paying tribute to the khans of Mongolia, thousands of miles east. Ivan the Terrible and his soldiers fought the Russians free of the Mongols, then fought Moscow’s western neighbors, trying to gain a seaport on the Baltic (where Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are now). It would take the Russians a couple of hundred years to gain that seaport, at St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, Russians conquered the lands the Mongols retreated from, northern Asia, Siberia, all the way to the Pacific. (They sold Alaska to the United States in 1867.)

In the 1200’s Timur and his army of Mongols and Turks briefly restored the conquests of Genghis Khan’s Mongols, and, retreating, left behind them the great plague of the 1300’s — probably some of the pathogens that decimated North American tribes after 1492.

The Portuguese sent ships down the west coast of Africa, looking for a way around it, to the spices and fabrics of India, China, and the Indies — trying to by-pass the Muslim winners of the Crusades, now unified under the Turkish Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Portuguese found some gold and also tribes willing to trade with them — captives of other tribes — slaves. The Portuguese and also the Dutch (what are now Belgium and the provinces of the Netherlands were a unit, until 1830) began to operate sugar plantations, first on islands off the African coast, with slave labor.

Columbus stumbled on North America, seeking a westward route to the (East) Indies. He was an employee of the royal rulers of Spain, who were also the heads of the Holy Roman Empire, a loose confederation of small “nations” mostly in central Europe — what are now Germany and Italy — allied with the Pope in Rome — while Russia was allied with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople (renamed Istanbul by the Turks).

The Polish-Lithuanian Confederation was the biggest nation of Europe between the mid-1500’s and mid-1700’s. Ukraine was its biggest component. It was inhabited by Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Jews, Gypsies, Germans, and Russians. Just before the time of the American Revolution, Prussia (a fast growing German military autocracy), the Austrian Empire (which had emerged from the Holy Roman Empire), and Russia divided the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation among them, and it ceased to exist.

Spaniards conquered the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Inca Empire of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, enslaved the inhabitants, “intermarried” (formally or informally) with them — and extracted enormous quantities of silver and gold, which caused great inflation in Europe, eventually bankrupting the rulers of Spain — who also ruled the Austrian Holy Roman Empire (which included the Netherlands), and who were carrying on a war with the Ottoman Turks, and trading, from their Philippines colony, with China — silver and gold for silk and porcelain, for instance.

Young Frenchmen joined tribes living north and south of the Great Lakes and between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, hunting for beaver pelts. Europeans wanted fur. Russia was another provider. Beavers, then, like buffalo later, were hunted relentlessly.

British-supplied Iroquois-speakers fought with Algonquin-speakers for fur-bearing territory, and the British, as part of the war by which they defeated the French in India and the West Indies (where slaves worked themselves to death on sugar plantations), seized Quebec and the maritime provinces of what is now Canada from the French — and, also, without consent of the inhabitants, control of what would be called “The Northwest Territory,” including Wisconsin.

You learned about the American Revolution in school. It’s a little more complex than that. You may have learned about the coal-fueled steam engine, which revolutionized manufacturing. Factory-produced fabrics and clothing — women and children working long hours operated steam-driven machinery — became more economical than what households could make for themselves. The prosperity of India, now ruled by the British, based on production and distribution of fabrics, was destroyed. A series of famines began there. Transportation was transformed, too — steamboats and railroads.

European-Americans (Americans of the new United States) surveyed the territories they now controlled — Hoel Wright’s day job was surveyor — so European-Americans could buy and sell deeds to land the natives were amazed to learn that the European-Americans considered theirs. Hoel Wright set up his trading post where Plum Creek runs into the Fox River. There was no need for the United States government to collect income tax — revenue from selling land to settlers (plus tariffs collected on luxury goods plantation owners were importing) was sufficient.

During the time of the American Civil War, there were civil wars in Mexico and China, too. Who would rule, for whose benefit?

Tsars and aristocrats who “owned” many serfs ruled Russia until the terribly bloody Bolshevik Revolution and civil war of 1917 to about 1923. Then, and during the 1930’s, Stalin and his Communist party “knights” took grain Ukraine produced for the Russian state and army, producing famine in Ukraine. When Russia fought Nazi Germany, some Ukranians allied themselves with the Nazis, to fight the Russians. (Putin refers to this.) Millions died in the Ukraine in the war between Germany and Russia. Jews, persecuted in Tsarist Russia, were nearly eliminated by the Nazis and their Ukrainian allies. Millions of Ukranians also died. Millions of Russians also died. Millions of Germans also died. And lots of Americans, British, Poles, Czechs, etc. Hundreds of millions more had their lives severely disrupted and degraded.

Like historians whose books I’ve mined, who didn’t know almost everything, and had to leave out most of what they knew, I don’t know almost everything, and I’ve had to leave out almost everything I know, too. (And, since it happened before my time, out of my sight and hearing, my “knowledge” is only probable.)

It’s a long way from 1833 to Wrightstown and Kiev, today. And history matters a great deal less than what you will do, now, or refrain from, or fail to do — and how you will do, refrain, succeed, or fail to do it. But it’s a platform you take advantage of, or have to do without.

Never forgetting that Wrightstown is part of Kiev and Kiev is part of Wrightstown, but not utterly distracted by the most recent terrible events you are not able to undo — not oblivious or stampeded into making matters worse — you compose yourself, if you can, and organize yourself to be of the greatest possible use, starting exactly where you are, who you are, now — not helpless, not imagining you are capable of more than you are capable of, so far.

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Article #3 © Eric Chaet 2022, used in The Wrightstown “Spirit” by permission. To use this article in another publication, email Eric Chaet at chaetsarticles at gmail dot com.