Mrs. Wilsons True Tales Retold

The Motto of the 
graduating class of ’96 was:
 “Vim, Vigor, Victory.”Badger State Banner18 June 18961896 was the last year of a severe depression that had begun with the bank Panic of 1893. At its height 19% of American workers had lost jobs, the middle class lost homes on foreclosed mortgages by the thousands, 15000 companies shut down, more than 500 banks failed. The worst of it occurred in the mid-western states like Wisconsin. By 1896, however, times began changing. The progress of science and affluence put forth promise and portent. The Klondike Goldrush began in earnest after Kate Carmack and Skookum Jim found motherlodes in Bonanza Creek. Tens of thousands stampeded north for their fortune. In that year too scientists used x-rays for the first time to reveal the skeleton in a live human body. In that year history recorded the first time that an automobile killed a pedestrian, a mother holding the hand of her child, as she crossed a road.Our story takes place twenty-five years earlier in 1871 w