The position of the boulders posed a problem for Holand’s theory. If they were truly mooring stones, they would have been much lower than several feet above the lake level where they were found. In his 1940 account, Holand presents a letter from a county surveyor who determined that the lake level had once been approximately nine feet higher, before it was drained. He also measured the stone holes to be at a level of approximately nine feet. But this leads him to recognize a problem: the “skerries” would have been covered in water and therefore not visible to Knutson and his men in 1362. The answer to this conundrum is simple, says Holand: it is evident that these “skerries” were once much higher. Shifting ice on the lake had eroded them by several feet over the years.
Holand spared no opportunity to bend the evidence to fit his theory and his experiences at Lake Cormorant were embellished and often altered with each retelling. The 1920 article mentioned only one other person accompanying him on his visit in October 1919. In his 1940 account, his first visit to the lake was in the summer of 1919 and he returned the following autumn with “several other men.”45 In his autobiography, written in 1957, the numbers swelled substantially. He claimed to have been accompanied to the site by forty men after he spoke to a congregation located near the lake: “When reported that the place of massacre of these explorers 600 years ago was only a few miles from the church, a large number of men asked me to show them this historic spot.”46 In the face of growing criticism of his theories during the 1940s and 1950s, Holand often felt compelled to multiply the number of witnesses to his discoveries.47 In 1948, his perennial critic, Johannes Holvik, publicized a testimonial from a local farmer, who said he had chiseled one of the boulders that Holand claimed was a Norse mooring stone.48
There are other examples of Holand’s attempt to twist the facts. In his writings after 1920, he fails to divulge that the shore of Lake Cormorant was not the first location where he was certain that the Norsemen had been killed. Writing in 1910, he had first declared that the site was on the southwestern shore of Pelican Lake just over twenty miles northwest from where the Kensington Rune Stone had been unearthed on Ohman’s farm. In a 1909 newspaper article, a Lutheran minister traveling with Holand shared his certitude and waxed eloquent about how the two rocky islets visible from shore had for centuries “stood as sentinels to a very sad story.”49 However, the Pelican Lake location later proved incompatible to how Holand mapped the Norsemen’s larger sojourn through North America. The rune stone inscription indicates that the expedition had left ten men by the sea fourteen days’ journey from where it was located. The sea, for Holand, is Hudson Bay, located, by his measurement, 1,120 miles to the north. Dividing that number by fourteen days, Holand determines the length of a day’s journey to be eighty miles. As a later critic of Holand would point out, the claim that eighty miles was a standard measurement of Nordic travel was an inaccurate “manipulation” of another scholar’s claim.50
Despite the inconsistencies of his claims about Lake Cormorant, Holand’s promotional efforts inspired rune stone enthusiasts to descend upon the site in search of Viking graves. During the 1950s, an Iowa man, John Colby, and his three teenage sons, armed with a metal detector and a Geiger counter, embarked on a summer-long search for Viking relics and graves.51 It appears that Colby family expedition was unsuccessful, because a decade later officials from Alexandria’s Runestone Museum sponsored another search for Viking graves at Lake Cormorant. The working theory for this expedition was that the Norsemen would have sunk the bodies of their ten dead comrades to the bottom of the lake in a Viking ship filled with heavy stones in order “to prevent the Indians from getting to the bodies of their friends.” Viking enthusiast Marion Dahm led several scuba divers on a three-hour search scouring the lake bottom. The only items they were able to retrieve were “fishing gear, parts of motors, modern anchors, one golf ball, a pair of lawn clippers, and a pirate flag with skull and cross bones drawn in white.”52 With the exception of a short residential street named “Viking Bay Road,” there are no markers to indicate that a Viking massacre occurred at Lake Cormorant. Although Holand was unsuccessful in erecting a physical memorial at the site where he thought that the Knutson expedition met its demise, he was successful in producing an imaginary sacred space around which Minnesotans oriented themselves to establish order out of chaotic memories of frontier conquest.53
Save Us from Evil! Prayerful Vigilance against Savagery Past and Present
Writing in 1916, rune stone enthusiast and Douglas County historian Constant Larson wondered why the Kensington artifact had been found in Olof Ohman’s field with the inscription facedown. Larson theorized that the Norsemen would have originally positioned the stone in an upright position like a gravestone. Because of the beveled cut of the stone, Larson reasoned, gravity would have eventually pulled the stone backward so that the inscribed surface would have been faceup. Therefore, at some point in history, he deduced, somebody pushed the stone over to face the ground. Larson concluded that this was done by the Indians who carried out the massacre because they feared its power, seeing it as a “retributive, threatening reminder of their pale-face victims.”54 If Larson interpreted the rune stone as having the power to threaten savages of the fourteenth century, he and other white Minnesotans believed it had the power to do the same in more recent times. For twentieth-century rune stone enthusiasts like Larson, and quite possibly the inscription’s author(s) in the nineteenth century, the Kensington stone symbolized protection against vulnerability and evoked notions of immortality.55
Despite the mass expulsion of Dakota people from Minnesota in 1863, Minnesotans experienced periodic episodes of panic that Indians would once again rise up in mass revolt. One such episode occurred not far from where the Kensington Rune Stone was unearthed. Local historian Helen Joos Cichy gives an account of what she calls “the final Indian scare of 1876.” According to Cichy, “a party of Chippewa Indian men” from a nearby reservation stopped at a saloon on the way back from a trip to purchase horses. After indulging in too much alcohol, they began to “help themselves to whatever appealed to them.” Their horses ended up trampling the garden and the wheat field of a local farmer. Cichy said that the custom of the day among white settlers was not to resist Indians for fear of escalating violence, but “the news of an Indian raid spread as fast as a prairie fire on a hot autumn day. Each retelling improved it until it was full-fledged massacre.”56 She noted that rumors about “the Great Custer Massacre” had likely fueled the panic. Many farm families gathered their possessions and fled to the town of Alexandria in hope of finding protection.
One of the last military conflicts between an Indian tribe and the U.S. government occurred in Minnesota during the same year that the Kensington Rune Stone was unearthed from Ohman’s field. Just months before Minnesota troops would struggle to suppress an insurrection in their newly acquired empire in the Philippines, they battled Ojibwe Indians in northern Minnesota.57 Tensions on the Leech Lake reservation in the 1890s were high because tribal members resented logging companies who were illegally harvesting timber from their land.58 In late September 1898, two Ojibwe men were arrested by U.S. marshals and held as witnesses for a bootlegging trial. One of them was a tribal elder named Bagone-giizhig or Hole-in-the-Day. As an outspoken critic of U.S. Indian policies, Hole-in-the-Day had been arrested before and falsely accused of bootlegging. He was determined to avoid arrest and called on onlookers to help him. After a short skirmish, the two captives fled the custody of the marshals and took refuge in a cabin across the lake.
After an unsuccessful attempt to get Hole-in-the-Day and his men to surrender, local authorities requested reinforcements from Fort Snelling. On the morning of October 5, several marshals and seventy-seven soldiers of the Third Regiment boarded steamboats to cross the lake to Hole-in-the-Day’s cabin on Sugar Point. Upon arrival, they could not find him and prepared for a lunch break in a lakeside clearing. Reports differ on what happened next, but one of the soldiers discharg
ed his gun. This led to a volley of gunfire from armed Indians in the nearby woods. In the end, six U.S. soldiers were killed, including the commanding officer.
In white communities throughout the region, “hysteria mounted” and many feared a widespread Indian uprising. Newspaper headlines from towns as far as sixty miles away warned of imminent attacks and even the front page of the New York Times carried the sensational and inaccurate headlines “Rumored Massacre of One Hundred Soldiers” and “Fierce Fight with Bear Lake Savages in Minnesota.”59 Residents of Bemidji barricaded themselves in the courthouse and many communities formed citizen militias. A regiment of 214 men and a Gatling gun were dispatched to the Leech Lake town of Walker. By mid-October the commissioner of Indian affairs negotiated a truce with the Ojibwe leaders and it became clear that they were not intending to mount an insurrection.60
As the preceding events indicate, many rural, white Minnesotans were still fearful of Indians and saw them as a threat as late as the turn of the century. Even in Alexandria, more than a hundred miles away from the nearest reservation, a newspaper headline from 1900 declared “No Indian Uprising” after a “raucous powwow” near the Canadian border was determined not to be a preparation for war.61 It is not surprising that most Minnesotans understood the nebulous runic inscription to describe an Indian massacre. Even the circumstances of the Leech Lake incident resembled the events of Holand’s imagined Viking massacre at Lake Cormorant. Both serve as reminders of human mortality. However, despite the fear of death, commemorating white sacrifices, both in the distant past and in the more recent past, functions as a form of symbolic immortality.62 The Kensington Rune Stone helped to temper the death anxiety by offering hope that sacrificial deaths will be remembered.
Even if flesh-and-blood Indians posed a decreasing physical threat to the larger white society, retelling and even reenacting the rune stone story, or other stories of Indian violence, became ways to vicariously participate in past battles and still come out alive. As noted earlier, late-nineteenth-century Minnesotans consumed several forms of media that centered on the violence of the Dakota War. However, fascination with the history of conflict with the region’s first residents persisted well into the twentieth century. Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West show, which dramatized battles between Indians and pioneer settlers, was wildly popular at the turn of the century. The dime novel Indian Jim: A Tale of the Minnesota Massacre, first printed in 1864, was rereleased in 1908. The scalp and skull of the Dakota leader Little Crow were publicly displayed at the Minnesota Historical Society until 1915. Holand’s narrative about primordial Viking martyrs can be understood as another spectacle of violence that satiated a contemporary desire for vicarious heroism.
Scapegoat Skrælings
Social scientists have shown that when humans are reminded of their own mortality, they tend to be more aggressive toward people who are different from them.63 In the early twentieth century, the skrælings in Holand’s history emerged as a scapegoat on which to project contemporary social anxieties and frustrations. In his book History of Douglas and Grant Counties, local historian Constant Larson used the motif of primeval Indian savagery to blame nineteenth-century Indians for western Minnesota’s lack of growth and prosperity in the early twentieth century.64
Larson’s historical account, written in 1916, asserts that Douglas County had two beginnings: the first in 1858 with the arrival of the Kinkaid brothers, and the second after the first settlement was abandoned because of the “Sioux Outbreak of 1862.”65 William and Alexander Kinkaid first came to the area in 1858 and built a cabin on the shore of Lake Agnes. By 1860, the population of white settlers numbered 187 and roads and farms were appearing throughout the county.66 Larson waxed eloquent about the first settlers’ hopes for the continued development of the “Park Region.” The area promised to become “one of the most desirable points of settlement in the western part of the state . . . all seemed well with Douglas County, with a bright future—full of promise, when the dread event occurred.”67
When the news arrived in the isolated outpost of Alexandria in August 1862 that the “Indians had declared war,” most residents abandoned their homesteads in panic, leaving behind all of their belongings. They escaped on foot or by oxcart to military stockades far to the east.68 Upon hearing that two pioneers had been found dead in Douglas County, the settlers became so fearful that they refused to return to their farms until the U.S. Army built a stockade in Alexandria later that autumn.69 Even then, only a few chose to come back; many never returned. In Larson’s words, the “Sioux Outbreak” had proved “a setback for all of western Minnesota.” The “Indian massacre” had “interrupted the course of empire in Douglas County.” Larson laments that it was not until 1874 that all of the tillable land had finally been claimed. It was only then, he said, that “the white man came into undisputed possession of this fair region and no longer stood in terror of the relentless fury of the savages.”70
Fort Alexandria was built to protect area settlers in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862. This painting from 1962 is by Ada Johnson and is now in the Runestone Museum in Alexandria. Photograph by the author.
Larson makes a clear delineation between white victim and Indian aggressor. Of the Indians, he said, “The fiends of hell could not invent more fearful atrocities than were perpetrated by the savages upon their victims.” The only ones spared were the “young and comely women, to minister to the brutal lusts of their captors.” For rhetorical effect, he goes on to make an exaggerated claim that eight hundred whites were killed in a period of thirty-six hours.71 Regarding the legal outcome for the Sioux, Larson insisted that each of the condemned received a “fair and impartial hearing.” According to him, President Lincoln was wrong to give in to the pressures of “sentimental persons in the East.”72
Just prior to Larson’s chapters on early white settlement and the “Sioux Outbreak” is the chapter “The Kensington Rune Stone: An Ancient Tragedy,” which opens as follows:
If the conclusions of eminent archeologists be correct, the one outstanding, paramount fact in the history of Douglas County is that one hundred and thirty years before the voyage of Columbus to America, white men—Europeans—had trod the soil of that section of Minnesota now comprised within the boundaries of Douglas County and left here a record of their travels and of their perilous adventures and the death of ten of their number at the hands of savages.73
Larson refers to the rune stone as both a gravestone and a monument to commemorate the dead Norsemen, and arguing for its authenticity is clearly a high priority for him.74 At fifty pages, this chapter is the longest of his book History of Douglas and Grant Counties. He offers a detailed account of the discovery of the stone, an analysis of the inscription, an assessment of the geological evidences, and a defense of the integrity of Ohman and his neighbors. Although his defense of the rune stone relies heavily on Holand’s writings, it is clear that he has invested a significant amount of effort in analyzing his own sources, nearly sixty of which he cites in an annotated bibliography at the conclusion of the chapter. In Larson’s mind, there is a direct correlation between the “ancient tragedy” as witnessed in the rune stone inscription and the modern tragedy of “The Sioux Outbreak of 1862”: Indians were responsible for both. The terms “massacre” and “massacred” are used multiple times to describe both the death of the Norsemen and also the white settlers in 1862. In both cases, the terms “savage” or “savages” describe the Indian perpetrators.
Given the anxieties about the decline of masculinity in the post-pioneer age, Larson’s emphasis on the savagery of the skrælings is likely a strategy to magnify the prowess of his fourteenth-century forefathers, and hence his fellow Scandinavian Americans in the early twentieth century. However, his strategic use of the Kensington Rune Stone story in relaying the recent history of his community should be recognized as an example of a scapegoat mechanism, evoking René Girard’s classic theory of religion and violence. In Girard’s “mime
tic model,” individuals and groups imitate one another in their desire for objects. When multiple groups or individuals are competing for the same thing or things, competitive violence can result and escalate to an endless cycle of attack and revenge. Societal conflict rises to such a point that it becomes intolerable. For Girard, this crisis is only resolved through a religious ritual where a scapegoat is identified and sacrificed for the good of the society. According to Girard, this sacrifice has the ability to safely purge violence from the society so that social stability can be restored. The sacrifice has the result of bringing peace, even if temporary. Social groups will develop religious rituals systems that reenact the sacrifice in order prevent further violence.75 Historian Jon Pahl summarizes this process: “For the ‘illegitimate’ violence of unchecked rivalry, attack and vengeance, religion substitutes a ‘legitimate’ violence, as enacted in the practices of ritual and encoded in the discourse of myth.”76
Girard’s theory is often seen as applying only to the analysis of premodern tribal societies, but it is also relevant to large, modern societies.77 The public execution at Mankato in 1862 can be thought of in terms of a Girardian ritual of sacrifice carried out by the U.S. government. The intention of the executions was to channel the lust for revenge through the mechanisms of the state. However, neither the execution nor the forced exile of Dakota people could adequately purge the collective anger of Minnesotan settlers. White residents used the Kensington Rune Stone story to channel their residual rage. Each retelling of the story of the Knutson expedition becomes a way to ritually commemorate the sacrifice of white pioneers of the nineteenth century and excoriate those who killed them. This scapegoat mechanism would have an enduring afterlife. As later chapters will show, western Minnesotans continued to invoke the notion of a primordial Viking massacre at the hands of savage Indians to face a variety of social and religious threats in the twentieth century.78
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