Hell Holes, Hell Hounds, and Hell Fire: A Tale of the Wild Midwest

Content warning: Discussion of kidnapping, abuse, slavery, rape, prostitution, and murder. The events in this story are true history. No graphic descriptions.

The land along the Upper Michigan and Wisconsin state line was a wild place in the 1880s. All manner of unsavory characters came together there and made their homes in the woods and logging camps and little mining towns. 

A veritable hellhole of the wild midwest was Florence, Wisconsin. It was the base of operations for the Mudge Gang, so called because Louis Croin Mudge and his daughter Mina were the master and mistress of a most foul enterprise manned by many persons: Mudge’s Stockade. 

A mile outside of Florence, atop a hill in the woods, Mudge’s Stockade was barricaded round about with a ten-foot-tall palisade of pointed logs, with loopholes cut through the wood. Only three entrances led into that terrible place: a door just large enough to admit one man at a time, a strongly-barred gate sized to admit a horse-team and wagon, and a cedar-timbered tunnel that had its exit in the swamp puddled at the base of the hill. Inside the fence, a three-story building contained a hall for dancing, and well-stocked bar, and many small rooms where the miners and woodsmen of infirm morals were wont to spend some of their time with a woman, for a price.

Mudge traveled about northern Indiana and Ohio claiming to be a preacher, enticing girls and young women to accompany him to his home. Once in Florence, they were taken to the log fort in the forest, handed over to Mudge’s daughter Mina, and forced into prostitution. Mudge’s Gang was just one part of a widely-dispersed network of sex trafficking that stretched across the Northwoods. 

No matter what he was doing, Louis Croin Mudge was always seen wearing a plug hat and Prince Albert coat with a tie, even when feeding the four live timberwolves he had somehow gotten his hands on. He kept two of the animals chained on either side of the main door to the stockade. 

Gambling went on outdoors in Florence in all but the worst weather. Gang members, including bold prostitute women, frequented the streets. Everyone was either under the Mudge Gang’s thumb, too scared to defy them, or dared to defy Mudge but had no way to cause a change. 

The territory of Mudge’s Gang stretched for 500 miles throughout Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada. They were involved in every dirty business that could be gotten into, including kidnapping, slavery, forced prostitution, and murder. Any person who did not do as the gang liked was intimidated into compliance or killed. This included possible witnesses against them when they committed crimes near the law-and-order line. It was a known fact that the Mudge Gang absolutely would not tolerate newspapers, and the owner-operator of the Florence newspaper had only recently disappeared. 

Hiram D. Fisher, the man who discovered the mine in Florence, sent a telegram to Colonel J. A. Watrous in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asking that he “send up a young fellow not afraid to run a newspaper.”

Then onto the scene came Chase Salmon Osborn, a police reporter of Milwaukee known for running to find his stories rather than taking a cab. The police officers themselves had helped him out, telling him details they didn’t share with the myriad of other reporters. 

The newspaper men in Milwaukee had put him up to it, and he brought his wife and one-year-old daughter to Florence fully intending to change everything. The morning of his second day in Florence, Chase found all the glass windows of the newspaper office shot to shards, and one of the presses was missing a leg, also to bullets. A warning, Chase concluded. He did not heed it. 

Chase quickly found friends in the local Presbyterian mission minister Harlan Page Cory, the undersheriff Charley Noyes, and Charley’s brother Bill, who stood over six feet tall and was a remarkable shooter, tracker, and woodsman. They wanted things changed as much as he did. 

One evening Chase and his wife found a young woman at their door. She was obviously terrified, and once the Osborn couple coaxed her inside, she revealed she was an escapee from the stockade. Mudge had brought the orphan girl from a farm in Indiana, and Mina had deprived her of food and beaten her. When Mistress Mudge left her tied up outside overnight near the wolves, she escaped her bonds and the stockade. The swamp below the hill offered a hiding place until hunger drove her to risk a trip into town, where the newspaper man and his wife offered her refuge. 

When the woman he and his wife had been caring for disappeared, Chase went to the local sheriff, an Irishman who also worked as a saloon keeper, about the matter. The man never acted as far as Chase could see, and the newspaperman decided he must be either one of the enemy or too frightened to go against them. He only later found out that the gang had managed to kidnap the young woman, and she was sold to an Ontonagon County brothel keeper and eventually murdered not far from Lake Superior.

Chase took the precaution of always carrying a loaded rifle when he left the house and holding it as he conducted his business. He hired men to work in the newspaper office, buying a repeating Winchester rifle for every worker and hanging the guns on the type stands, easy to hand. Chase gathered more support, and along with that support came inside information. He was able to avoid direct assassination attempts by being out of the office when the gang planned to wreck his work and off him. 

Chase filled his newspaper with accusations of anyone he had even a logical suspicion of. This quickly showed him who was in which camp, as it brought many visitors to his door, some to berate him, some to deny his accusations and pledge their allegiance. 

He and his friends soon formed the Citizen Regulators, and after the first meeting, the sheriff and the district attorney had a gun duel in the street. The sheriff was shot through the lungs, and his friends barely refrained from trying to hang the lawyer. While the sheriff had been talking of throwing in with the Regulators, the lawyer was known to be sympathetic to the Mudge Gang. 

At last, Chase thought the best thing to do was enlist powerful outside help from his friends in Milwaukee. He planned to take an evening train, but learned the gang was planning to catch him at the station before he could board. 

With that plan no longer safe to carry out, Chase decided the next best course of action was to run two miles through the woods to Commonwealth, armed with a Colt revolver. One of his workers, a printer named Billy Doyle, was waiting for him there in a buckboard wagon with a Winchester rifle in the back.

They took off onto the corduroy roads, rattling wildly over the long trails of logs laid close together and tamped into the earth. The Mudge Gang was after them, on horseback, in carts, and on foot. Chase felt sure they planned to put an end to him if they caught him in Wisconsin. He thought himself a decent shot, and vowed they would not take him without a struggle.

On the edge of the city of Iron Mountain, Chase leapt out of the wagon and Billy drove on while his boss hiked around the city and started along the railroad tracks. Beyond Iron Mountain, between Keel Ridge and Quinnesec, men came out of the gloom and put a gun to his head and ordered that he come with them. Back along the tracks they went, straight into Iron Mountain. Chase shouted for all he was worth before they locked him in a building that was certainly not the jail. Before too long help was sent: The Honorable A. C. Cook, a judge from Norway, a town beyond Quinnesec, got the men Chase pegged as Mudge agents to release him. 

Chase continued his quest to Milwaukee, avoiding capture in Marinette and Green Bay. The Mudge Gang sent telegram after telegram demanding their allies in law enforcement get Chase arrested. 

In Milwaukee, Chase’s first move was to visit his old friends Lemuel Ellsworth and John T. Janssen. Lem had recently been made Chief of Police, and John was part of the detective staff. On seeing his old friend Chase, a veteran police reporter, Lem gave him a telegram to examine. It ordered that Chase Osborn be arrested. 

“Glad to see you, Chase,” he said. “Now, let’s do something to those hell-hounds. I will wire I have you and ask them to send for you with a strong guard. This will possibly bring a crowd of them down, and I will throw them all into the bull pen.”

Chase objected, for he had not come to draw them all to Milwaukee but to get help and take the fight to them. Lem and John instead got him a meeting with the Governor of Wisconsin, Jeremiah M. Rusk, who wholeheartedly backed Chase up. He appointed a lawyer to succeed the district attorney who had shot Florence’s sheriff through the lungs in the street duel, and told Chase, “Go after them, boy, and if you need help just say the word. I’ll back you with the troops if it is necessary.” 

Having secured his object, Chase raced back to Florence, and found the Gang in a panic. He capitalized on this in his paper, making the situation sound as terrible for them as possible. With a good circuit judge named Claudius B. Grant on the Michigan side, and the Citizen Regulators on the Wisconsin side, the Mudge Gang was soon leapfrogging back and forth between the states. 

Deciding that the present outlawry had gone on long enough, the Regulators took the law into their own hands. 

The Regulators called it a rodeo. They took to the streets of Florence as one, wielding Winchester rifles, Colt revolvers, and blacksnake whips. They chased every man and woman of the Mudge Gang off the streets of Florence, and and then to the Stockade outside of town, where six of them fled, including Mudge’s second in command, Pat McHugh the former prize fighter. The Regulators rode through gunfire, replying with their own, and set the stockade on fire. The occupiers took to the tunnel and emerged in the swamp, where Bill Noyes went after McHugh. 

McHugh ran, ducking behind trees and snapping off shots. Bill did the same, but he had an ability the prizefighter didn’t: Bill could run and load his gun at the same time. When Bill caught up with McHugh, he gave himself up and begged for mercy. Bill later told the newspaperman, “Chase, I reckon I oughta killed that red-handed devil that day I got him in the swamp, but I’m kinda glad I didn’t, cause it goes agin the grain with me to kill anything I can’t eat.”

Chase wrote, “What became of Mudge will never be told. Only a half dozen Regulators ever knew.” 

The Regulators burned more stockades, and the Gang fled deep into the Upper Peninsula, beyond the jurisdiction of Judge Grant. Chase Osborn lived four more years in Florence with his family before moving on to many other pursuits. He eventually became the first and only governor of Michigan to hail from the Upper Peninsula instead of the Lower.