From there it was a 20-minute drive to Dillman’s Bay Resort in Lac du Flambeau, where I checked into Cabin 5. Back in the 1930s Ollie Catfish owned the cabin, but on a plot across the lake. At some point after the raid, it was dragged across winter ice to its present site. Escaping the Little Bohemia raid, Nelson had somehow run 18 miles through forest and marsh at night to find it, and locals say he held Mr. Catfish hostage.

Competing bootleggers weren’t the only things Chicago’s rough crowd were fond of shooting. Capone and another gang leader, Joe Saltis, enjoyed hunting game in Wisconsin, as well as fishing and a bit of backwoods golf.

Saltis, not nearly the name these days that Capone is, only reached No. 9 on Chicago’s public enemies list, despite controlling the liquor trade on the city’s southwest side. In Winter, Wis., is the Barker Lake Lodge, a two-story log structure next to a golf course, both built by Saltis in the late 1920s. Today, the walls of the clubhouse are covered with old photos and articles about Saltis, who retired to the area around 1930.

David and Brenda Palmer, current owners of the lodge, showed me a bullet hole above the fireplace, and around the property, Mr. Palmer has dug up .45 shell casings  the caliber of a Tommy gun.

The night I stayed there, Mr. Palmer shared stories and newspaper clippings. He, in turn, occasionally receives visitors with stories of their own.

He once met the son of a man who rowed the boat when Capone visited Saltis to fish for sturgeon. The six- to eight-foot fish can live up to 100 years. “Capone could have caught a 10-year-old sturgeon,” he said, “thrown it back because it was too small, and today you could catch the same sturgeon Al Capone caught.”

There’s some evidence that no matter how heinous their actions elsewhere, the criminal element minded their manners in Wisconsin, perhaps tamed by the sense of solitude they found there. In all his years at Barker Lake, Mr. Palmer said, Saltis apparently had only one run-in with the local law  when he was fined for fishing too close to a dam.