William Warren Bartlett was born in Presque Isle, Maine, on January 23, 1861. He lived there until 1867, when his family moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he resided for the rest of his life. He graduated from an Eau Claire high school in 1882, and in 1885 he attended the University of Wisconsin for a brief course in architecture. On August 1, 1890, Bartlett married Clara Towner and eventually they had five children: Ruth Margaret, Harry Owen, Gertrude Clara, Cora Louise, and Arthur William. Bartlett worked as a building contractor and in similar business ventures, and was also an avid collector of historical materials pertaining to Eau Claire and the Chippewa Valley area. His competence as a local historian was recognized throughout Wisconsin, and he was often asked to deliver speeches or write articles for local newspapers.
The 1929 publication of his book, History, Tradition and Adventure in the Chippewa Valley, represented the culmination of his many years of work collecting documents and interviews. In the book he pulled together many ideas and interviews that he had previously published as single articles in a variety of publications. The bulk of the book consists of edited reminiscences by early Chippewa Valley residents concerning significant cultural and economic developments in the area, including the Sioux-Chippewa Indian feud and subsequent treaty in 1825, fur trading in the Valley in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Old Abe, the Civil War eagle, which had become the unofficial Wisconsin mascot. Bartlett collected so much material on lumbering in the Chippewa Valley region that he apparently intended to publish a book on this topic; there is a lengthy, incomplete, unpublished manuscript in the collection.
Bartlett also served on the Eau Claire Public Library board for seventeen years in the early part of this century, and later became the president until 1932, when he resigned.
Bartlett died in Madison on March 31, 1933 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident; he was buried in Eau Claire.
