is there a casino in black river falls wiconsin

Janis Joplin was playing somewhere in the distance. He remembers the space was dark and empty. Bored one day, he found himself at the Wisconsin Historical Society. It all started quite by accident in 1968, when Lesy was a college student in Madison. “The book took on a life of its own for reasons beyond me.” Now a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the 73-year-old surmises that “maybe it reminds people of their own predicament, this gigantic, relentless nightmare of being alive.”

But why? “I’m not really sure,” confesses author Michael Lesy. And now, 45 years later, the fascination continues. The tome struck a cord and quickly became a cult classic.

This darker side of life was chronicled in the 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip, a poetic and disturbing collection of photography and newspaper accounts about life in small-town America. Some very unsettling things were happening in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, from 1890 to 1900: epidemics, insanities, suicides, burnings, bank closings, early deaths. Photography provided by Wisconsin Historical Society | WHS-29160

Is there a casino in black river falls wiconsin