Sean Pavone
This is the latest installment of It’s Still a Big World, our series on underrated destinations.
“Where that white tower is just to the left…that’s where they found the canoes,” said Ho-Chunk Elder, Janice Rice, pointing in the distance across Lake Mendota. Rice was giving me a First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour in Madison, Wisconsin. Two ancient canoes were recently found on the bottom of Lake Mendota—one was 1,200 years old and the other 3,000 years old—and they belonged to her Ho-Chunk ancestors.
I was here at the invitation of Destination Madison to learn more about the city, its history, and culture, and what makes this Wisconsin Capitol tick. Madison is many things—a complicated history, a university town, an endless source of cocktail bars—but being simple is not one of them.