Othaaki-Meskwaki

The Sauk-Fox fithing is home to perhaps the most vibrant Native culture in modern Ouisconsin. It is administered from Saukenuk (*here*'s Rock Island), capital of the old Othaaki-Meskwaki confederacy. The Saukenuk Mining and Freight Company is a major landowner and economic force in the fithing. It was established in the 1830s by Sauk-Fox leaders to maintain their control on the valuable lead mines north of the city. When the mines became unprofitable, the company expanded into shipping. It owns a sizeable fleet of trucks, freight trains, and airships.

Wa-Tho-Huk Thorpe was an important local hero from one of Othaaki's northern villages. After becoming famous as a rugby player, he went on to dominate the track-and-field events at the 1912 World Games in Stockholm, receiving a special award from Archking Christian X of the Scandinavian Realm for his extraordinary performance in so many events. He played various other sports professionally through clubs in Saukenuk and Chicago. Any patriotic Ouisconsian knows that Thorpe was the greatest athlete in the history of humanity. He was also known for his distinctive and prominent humility in regards to the various awards bestowed on him, and is thus considered an exemplary American example of the ideology of Less Is More.

Towns

• Bishop Hill (Biskopskulla): A successful Swedish commune and a pinnacle of Nordicity in the American Midwest, as opposed to a sad, tiny town of like a couple hundred people. Founded by Erik Janson. The breakaway sect that founded the town went from Sweden to New Sweden but was not well received, so Jansen sent his righthand man to scout out the west and choose emptyish, western Ouisconsin as the site of the new Jerusalem. They moved in the spring and thus died less of disease than *here*, and a bit more than 1,850 followers followed Jansen into Ouisconsin. They had their town and farms up and running within a year before the next winter of 1847. The Natives took good care of them so they didn't starve to death, for which the colonial government in St. Francis gave the local chief an accolade for his act of good service. Erik Janson was not assassinated like *here*. He stayed on as a strong leader for awhile and solidified the colony's success. His longer reign as heresiarch and mayor prevented his dual successors from ruining the colony because *here*, they invested the funds into investments that failed and bankrupted the place. Once he did end up dying as a beloved old man, then a group of democratically-elected trustees was elected by the citizens to run the town functionally as a soviet. This radical pietist sect's wacky religious- beliefs mellowed out over time, so any accusations of the sect being a cult are a bit overly-dramatic. This place is basically like the Swedenborgians of *here*. They also claim to be a New Jerusalem (Det himmelska Jerusalem). They built a rather large cathedral out of stone once they got rich enough off their communal investment portfolio but kept the three-story pattern of the original, wooden building. The council that succeeded Jansson invested in some rather good ventures after the death of their prophet or whatever, which gave them enough funds to stay afloat and find an economic niche out on the prairie (is that even considered prairie? Hell if I knew). Their decision to form a joint-stock company (The New Jerusalem Company, Ltd.) ultimately is what saved the colony and ushered in an era of economic success for this town so far from Chicago. Not everything was perfect for these humble religious-extremists, however. A set of religious schisms kickstarted a fracturing of the cohesion of the town that was centered around its faith and three waves of emigration. As all Protestants are wont to do, the colonists of Biskopskulla engaged in spirited debates over theological points and formed new sects. The first wave ended up looking to the Baptists of the frontier to give them stability and help found a new town and a new church, which the the loose confederation of similarly-minded Protestants was all too happy to do in order to secure a beachhead in this part of Ouisconsin. The much smaller settlement just outside of Biskopskulla, New Gävle, was founded by those who quit the Janssonist Church (the Church of the New Jerusalem) for the Baptists. The second wave ended up looking to the new so-called prophet Joseph Smith taking the region by storm and later-on following his great call to settle in Louisianne. Finally, the third and last wave were oddly similar to the Spiritual Christians found amongst the Russian people at roughly the same time in the Volga region and they mass-converted first to Unitarianism but shocked the region by futher judaizing and formally converting to rabbinical Judaism. Members of this final sect no doubt falsely believing it to be the older sect after the Destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, a very common misconception. This group moved to Chicago's Northwest side after awaiting the results of a litigation lawsuit over the divvying up of communal property and assets owned by the town's joint-stock company that the court system dragged out until 1888 where they asked to be subsumed into the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which had no idea what to do with tens of converts at the same time. With local help, they founded Temple Beth David (היכל בית דוד) and the brains behind the operation began experimenting with a way to write the Swedish language using the Hebrew script and incorporating Hebrew and Yiddish loanwords into the everyday speech in Swedish of members. Intermarriage with the Ashkenazi community in Chicago led to the dying out of this sect and their melding into bog-standard Germano-Judaism. Five years after the building of Temple Beth David, there was a schism of about 15% of the community who kept true to their Protestant heritage and applied the idea of Sola Scriptura to their newfound faith, decrying the Talmud as antibiblical and converting to Karaite (Torah-Only) Judaism. The Swedish Karaite community did not make it to the new millennium and the last full-descendant of the Swedish settlers of Biskopskulla died in the line of duty as a Chicago Fireman on 28 May, 2004. Fifty-eight people recorded their religion as Jewish and their household language as Swedish in Chicago on the 2020 Chicago Census, although 90% (32 people) marked that they were trilingual in Yiddish and English as well, the other 26 marking bilingualism in English and Swedish. Those Swedes that stayed in Biskopskulla recorded much higher rates of the Swedish language and monolingualism than their Jewish-convert kin up north in Chicago. The religious tracts produced by both Temple Beth David and the Swedish Karaite Synagogue of Chicago probably are the only publications in the world that are written in the Hebrew script shoehorned to fit the Swedish language other than perhaps unofficial missives for private use penned by the Jewish community in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Certainly the Jewish community in either city has written whole books in this manner.