Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Black River Falls, WI

Black River Falls is the county seat of Jackson County, set on the falls of the Black River at the northeast edge of Wisconsin's Driftless Area, where the river cuts through granite.

The city is the headquarters of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, whose name for the place is Nįoxawanį.

Although a sawmill operated at the falls in the winter of 1818-19, Jacob Spaulding is generally identified as the founder of Black River Falls in 1839, and the city was founded to harness the river's waterpower for sawmills.

From 1841 to 1845, Mormon lumber colonies operated sawmills at Black River Falls, milling timber floated down the Black River that was then rafted some 400 miles downriver to build Nauvoo, Illinois.

The Ho-Chunk people who lived around the falls were removed to Nebraska in the winter of 1873-74, but they returned to the region the following year, and the Ho-Chunk Nation now has its administrative center in the city.

Black River Falls is the focus of Michael Lesy's 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip, a celebrated collage of local photographs and newspaper accounts of hardship in the 1890s, which was adapted into a film in 1999.

Local photographer Charles Van Schaick's studio portraits of Ho-Chunk people, taken between the 1870s and 1930s, are now held by the Wisconsin Historical Society and were published in the 2011 book People of the Big Voice.

The falls themselves are now covered by a hydroelectric dam that forms the 200-acre Black River Flowage, and much of the surrounding land is part of the Black River State Forest.

The Black River Falls area supports a large population of the endangered Karner Blue butterfly, and the city celebrates with the Karner Blue Butterfly Festival held annually on the third Saturday of July.

The Ho-Chunk Nation operates a casino and hotel in Black River Falls, and nearby Lake Arbutus and the Levis/Trow trail system draw visitors to the area.