Door County, Wisconsin - Chapter 32: The Sage of Shivering Sands, 1917

About nine miles northeast of Sturgeon Bay, on the shore of Lake Michigan, "Ties Shivering Sands. It is little known and seldom visited by Door County people. Yet it is a beautiful place, lying on both sides of a little creek or bayou shaded by cool stately evergreens. It received its name of Shivering Sands because the whole sandy shore sometimes seems to shiver or quiver.

In this obscure little paradise it was that Joe Marden, one of the most eccentric characters of Door County, lived and reigned, hunted, trapped and philosophised. He was better known under the name of Joe Wildcat. This name he received because his favorite sport was that of catching wildcats. When he discovered one of these animals in his trap he used to throw an old overcoat over the captive and then immediately fling himself on top. Then followed a tremendous chorus of screechings and cussings accompanied by much clawing and kicking until Joe emerged triumphant and victorious. He was also rather partial to skunks and when he occasionally made his appearance in Sturgeon Bay it was with his long hair braided down his shoulders and surrounded by an odoriferous halo of smells from his captive game. At the time of the Worlds Fair in Chicago he got the notion of sending several crates of live skunks to the exposition. They were safely loaded on a Goodrich passenger vessel, but becoming annoyed at the rolling of the vessel after it had left the harbor they protested by the means given them by nature, whereupon the captain ordered the whole outfit to be thrown overboard to Joe's unspeakable indignation.

Among other distinctions Joe Marden was one of the first in the county to sense its possibilities as a summer resort. The first building erected in Northern Door County intended for the accommodation of summer visitors was built hy him. This was an amazing structure, four stories high, built chiefly of slabs and logs picked up on the beach. These were lightly trimmed with an axe and then solidly fastened together with huge spikes, bolts and twisted irons in the fashion of a breakwater crib or mountain castle. It was a most romantic looking building and Castle Romance was the name he gave it. In the first story he kept pigs, in the second geese and in the fourth, ducks. The third story was reserved for the weary summer resorter and was fitted out with a couple of iron beds and a piano. Unfortunately, he had neglected to put a foundation under the structure, whereupon it soon sagged forward toward the bayou as if weary of a useless existence and meditating a plunge beneath the waves with piano and all.

Old Joe was a veteran of the Civil war and was rather vain of his exploits - some real and some imaginary - of those days. At public gatherings in Sturgeon Bay he would frequently mount a box and declaim of the glorious republic and the great war that saved it. On such occasions he would be dressed in knee breeches, his long slim legs ornamented with many ribbons. The front of his old army jacket would be covered with a profusion of army badges and society pins which he had borrowed, while his long hair reaching half way down his back would be tied with as many gaudy ribbons as a backwoods girl's at her first dance. He was such a sincere, kindly disposed old fellow that no one took any offense at his speeches. Physically strong as he was he was unable to endure tobacco smoke and lost no opportunity for testifying against the terrible evils of nicotine.

In 1882 he decided to travel and started out afoot, which Joe rightly believed was the only way to see the world. Although he had only 50 cents in his pocket when he started he was able to send a' few dollars home occasionally to his family. This he did by going from house to house repairing tinware. He was gone for seven months and traveled 2,200 miles throughout the Northwest. Part of this time he wallowed around among North Dakota blizzards encountering snowdrifts so high that he was able to touch the top of the telegraph poles while walking on the huge piles of snow. His conclusions were that the farmers out West had a desperately hard time of it and that "North Dakota was a good country for wild geese."