Blue Men and River Monsters Format: Paperback

The north is a treasure trove of folklore. From magical creatures of the old country to legends of the mysterious and macabre, such lore is a fascinating record of the stories people held on to and the customs, foods, and cures that filled their lives. Collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Program, a Depression-era works project, these are the stories of Norwegian and Swiss immigrants, Native American medicine men and storytellers, and pioneers with memories of the earliest days of settlement in the Old Northwest. In search of stories, legends, songs, and other scraps of traditional knowledge, researchers fanned out across Wisconsin and other states. The resulting handwritten notes, thousands of pages in length, capture history as people remembered it. Blue Men and River Monsters collects the most interesting and noteworthy of these tales, placing them alongside stunning artwork collected by the Federal Art Project in Wisconsin. Peruse these pages and discover a new history of the people and places of the old north.

John Zimm received a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has worked for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press since 2002. His articles have appeared in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, and he is the editor of This Wicked Rebellion: Wisconsin Civil War Soldiers Write Home and the author of The Wisconsin Historical Society: Collecting, Preserving, and Sharing Stories since 1846.


Michael Edmonds is the Deputy Director of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Library-Archives. A member of the staff since 1982, he leads the effort to digitize manuscripts and rare books for the Wisconsin Historical Society website. His 2009 book on Paul Bunyan, Out of the Northwoods, won the Wayland D. Hand Prize from the American Folklore Society.