Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  The Treaty of 1908 and the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty created a set of rules for surveyors in Minnesota. (Water wars between the US and Canada on the Saint Mary, Milk, Rainy, and Niagara Rivers and on Lake Michigan, where the Chicago diversion had lowered water levels by six inches, inspired the treaties.) American and Canadian boundary commissions were instructed to draw the line along waterways and not bisect land, wherever possible, to avoid claim disputes. Several islands found to be on the wrong side of the line were transferred from one country to the other, though owners were not always informed. George Warren’s family on the Canadian side of Lac La Croix mistakenly paid taxes for Warren Island to the US for fifty years.

  The east and west survey teams met in Lac La Croix in 1914, and teams were dispatched to install 1,300 permanent markers along the 426-mile line: bronze posts, wrought-iron monuments, and bronze disks. It was a good year for surveyors on America’s northern border. A few months before, Canadian and American commissioners informed their superiors that they had finished surveying the Alaska border, the border from the Pacific to the Rockies and a twenty-mile section of the line through Maine’s Passamaquoddy Bay.

  OUR PAPERS APPEARED TO BE in order, and Ted drove us to his resort on Sand Point Island. The Sand Point Lodge was just over the line in Canada. Ted’s father had started the place in the late 1970s. Ted and his wife visited his father once to help out and never left. “Until now,” Ted said. He had just sold the place to a longtime customer.

  Ted seemed like a man who had seen a lot of the same thing for a long time. He stroked his gray goatee when he spoke. There were three outboard engines in the resort’s front yard and two broken ones mounted on a rail. The lawn was mowed. A basketball net hung above an old snowmobile and two decomposing tractors. A sign in the lodge window read, “Camp Novelties Sold Here. Store Open: 7 AM to 5 PM. Enjoy Yourself.”

  An elderly guest sitting on the porch did not look like he was enjoying himself. Ted asked if he had heard from his wife.

  “No,” the man said.

  “Still in the emergency room?”

  “No way of knowing,” he said.

  “Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll take you out of here.”

  “I’m ready.”

  It was strange watching guests grow old, Ted told me later. The island stayed the same. The lake was the same. When Ted was young, the guest on the porch was spry and middle-aged. The man escaped to the northland every summer to fish, drink beer, and play horseshoes. He came alone, sat on the lodge deck after dinner, and stared at the sunset until it was gone. In some ways, Sand Point Lake represented his life more than his life at home did. Now his wife was gone, or almost gone, and each trip north could be the last.

  He found the man a ride back to Crane Lake, then shuffled behind the lodge to show us some Indian burial grounds. There were two mounds of dirt, fifty feet around and fifteen feet tall. They were made by Paleo-Indians thousands of years ago. When they were first discovered in the 1960s, there was a movement to leave remains in the ground. They have sat undisturbed ever since.

  Paul said there were a lot of amateur archaeologists in the area. In the old days, they used to dig up mounds looking for valuable artifacts. Now they pick up whatever washes onshore. “You’re not supposed to touch them, but everyone does,” he said. “Just about every camp you go to, if you ask nice enough or get the owner drunk, he’ll pull out his cigar box. They have spearheads, arrowheads, pottery.”

  Ted had three cigar boxes. They were filled with spearheads of different sizes and styles, a couple of soapstone pipes that French fur traders had used, a copper spear that Ted says must have come from Michigan. His prized possession had turned up six months before on a path he’d walked a few thousand times: a perfectly carved soapstone fox.

  The lodge itself was a northland relic. A bearskin hung from the varnished tongue-and-groove pine paneling. The coffee bar was also home to a VHF radio, 1980s Zenith television, RCA stereo, incoming mail basket, and a faded print of two loons swimming through morning mist. The ceiling was supported by thick beams that looked like they could hold up twenty feet of snow. Sometimes they did. The storms, frost, snow, rain, bugs, and fires in the Boundary Waters are too much for most structures to endure. The lodge reminded me of something a friend had said once: houses in the northland look like they are crouched low to the ground, ready for a fight. He was right about that.

  We walked to the dock, and Paul congratulated Ted on selling the place. The lodge had been on the market for several years. Ted didn’t seem happy or sad that strangers were moving into his family home. After thirty-eight years cutting the lawn, repairing the roof, toting diesel, fixing outboards, solving guests’ problems, cooking, drinking, entertaining, building new cabins, repairing old ones, washing dirty sheets, and telling people where the fish are, he looked tired. He also looked like he wanted to get us on our way and led us back to the dock.

  9

  THE BOUNDARY WATERS WAS THE EDGE OF THE WORLD IN EARLY AMERICA. Étienne Brûlé and Jean Nicolet ended their missions across the northland at Lake Superior. La Salle’s journey on Le Griffon stopped at the border between Lakes Huron and Michigan. West of Thunder Bay, a wall of cliffs, waterfalls, rivers, swamps, and lakes form a natural barricade. There were no reliable maps of the area in the nineteenth century, and no way through. Except the route that voyageurs had been paddling for a hundred years.

  Voyageurs were the first truckers of inland America. The French Canadian canoe men carried goods to remote trading posts and brought furs back. They followed Brûlé’s path and extended it west through the Boundary Waters. They knew more about the American West at the time than anyone except western Indians. The millions of pounds of furs they carried financed British and French colonies. When delegates sat down to draw the US-Canada border at the Treaty of Paris, they charted it right along the voyageurs’ route, so that the fur trade in both countries could continue uninterrupted.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demand for fur was insatiable. Hats were not accessories back then. They were essential garb, like wearing pants or a shirt today. Hat sales in England in 1688 reached 3.3 million, plus 1.6 million “caps”—or about one hat per person. In 1700, 69,500 beaver hats, made from American furs, were exported from England. In 1760, that number grew to a half million. In all, between 1700 and 1770, England exported 21 million beaver felt hats.

  Voyageurs were expected to paddle fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most came from farms around Montréal and were accustomed to hard work. There were hundreds of portages on the route. One across Wisconsin was forty-five miles long. Voyageurs carried an average of two bales of furs—180 pounds total. The more bales they carried, the more money they made, so some loaded up four or five. A legendary freed slave named La Bonga carried seven bales for a half mile once. The average life span of a voyageur was thirty-two. The most common cause of death: strangulated hernia.

  The voyageurs’ uniform was a red wool cap, deerskin moccasins, leggings, and an Indian belt. At night they sang and danced and warded off swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies with smudge fires, until Indians showed them how to make bug repellent from bear grease and skunk urine. There was no time to hunt, so the men carried salt pork and a dried-pea concoction called rubaboo. They ate two meals a day and smoked a pipe every hour. Distance was often measured in pipes.

  The Frenchmen paddled halfway across America when most of the continent had yet to see a European footprint. Caravans could be as large as thirty canoes or as small as two. Voyageurs blessed each trip at a monument to Saint Ann, protector of travelers, set on the western tip of Montréal Island. They doffed their red caps when passing wooden crosses placed at rapids where fellow paddlers had died. They paddled the Saint Lawrence, Ottawa, and French Rivers—across Lake Nipissing, all of the Great Lakes, and the Boundary Waters. They chased furs farther west every year—from Rainy Lake to Lake Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains and the “Oregon River,” later christened
the Columbia, eventually forging the long-sought Northwest Passage to the Pacific.

  TED DROVE US ALONG the voyageurs’ route across Portage Bay and left us at the western end of Dawson Portage. The portage was an important crossing for settlers and military in the nineteenth century and is still used by the Zupancich family. The “Zups” had been welcoming travelers to the Boundary Waters for eighty years. From the northwestern corner of Lac La Croix, three generations of the family have guided guests on some of the best canoeing and fishing territory in the country.

  One of the Zups’ guides, Ed, drove us and the canoes over the portage in a 1980s Suburban. Ed said the four-mile drive would take about an hour. His estimate was precise. The Suburban hit four miles an hour and stayed there until we stopped. Ed took us to the Zups’ lodge for lunch, after which an Ojibwe man named Jim Eagle dropped us at Tiger Bay. It was almost dark when Jim left us on a rocky islet smack on the border. One of the bronze posts that the surveyors had placed—with “US” embossed on one side and “CANADA” on the other—jutted from a boulder.

  Paul showed us a pile of rocks in the middle of the island and said it used to be an Indian lookout. “It’s one of the last pre–Civil War ruins left in the Midwest,” he said. “The lookout would have put a thatch roof over it. It’s in the middle of the trading route, where an Indian scout could see a voyageur coming and signal to prepare the furs.”

  Paul inspected the stones for a few minutes, and then we paddled into Tiger Bay. It was dead quiet. Water extended for miles in every direction. The horizon was a line of trees, and as the sun fell behind it, I wondered how we were going to find a campsite in the dark.

  Paul and Sue paddled with long, steady strokes. Their favorite campsite was taken, so we beached on a wooded island and shuttled gear to a campsite on the point. By the time I got my tent set up, Paul had made a fire and was boiling water in a pot. The site was set on a granite bluff overlooking Tiger Bay. It came with a cast-iron grill that was set over the fire pit and a Dutch oven. It was the most stunning campsite I had ever seen. I asked Paul how many of them there were in the Boundary Waters. “Around two thousand,” he said.

  Nymphs hatched on the surface of the water as the last light left the treetops. Sue set up their tent, while Paul methodically arranged camp the way he had hundreds of times before: start fire, organize bags, find utensils, cook food. We drank Riesling that night and ate Slovakian pastries that Paul’s neighbor had given him. It was fun listening to him tell stories. He pronounced hummus like “hoo-mus” and called kebab “kay-bob.” “Did you know Teddy Roosevelt snuck out of the White House twice a month to sleep in the park and swim naked in the Potomac?” he asked.

  Paul had sneaked out of a hotel room once and ended up in one of Teddy Roosevelt’s other haunts. It was 2011. Paul had just been honored at New York City’s Explorers Club. A man in Ireland found a time capsule that Paul and Will Steger had left at the North Pole, and the National Geographic Society threw a gala to celebrate the recovery. (The magazine had offered $10,000 to anyone who found it.) The time capsule was placed in a display case at the end of the ceremony. After a few drinks, Paul stuffed the capsule into his jacket as a prank and sneaked out. When he saw the thing in his hotel room the next morning, he called the organizer, met her at the club, and returned it.

  Sue and the Iceman had the beginnings of a cold, and they both went to bed early. I stayed up and watched the Path of Souls march overhead and disappear into the shadowy canopy on the opposite shore. The fire crackled, and the lake moved through shades of blue and gray. A reflection of a shooting star blazed across the water. A steep rise called Warrior Hill lifted off the opposite shore. Ojibwe warriors had once tested their strength before battle by running up it.

  The sky was reconstructed with constellations I’d never noticed: bear, moose, wolf, canoes. Ojibwe shamans interpret and communicate with spirits in heaven and on Earth. Evil spirits live beneath the surface of the water and land. Nanabush is a messenger to humans. He gave the Ojibwe dogs and fire. The Great Mother watches over the Earth. Each of the four winds has a god. Thunderbirds create storms. Windigos walk south during harsh winters, eat people, and transform humans into cannibals. The Great Horned Serpent lives underwater and drags paddlers from their canoes.

  The Ojibwe believe that there have been three worlds since the beginning of time. In the first, animals and monsters were masters, and humans existed in a ghostly, transient state. In the second, the monsters died and people inhabited the Earth. The god of the west wind impregnated a mortal woman during this time, and Nanabush was born. Humans and animals spoke to one another, and Nanabush introduced hunting, fishing, and arrowheads. In the final era, in which we live today, humans and animals can no longer communicate. Shamans are the only conduit.

  A YEAR AFTER THE 1964 Wilderness Act passed, President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter turned twenty-one years old. Lynda Bird Johnson was an aspiring journalist and environmentalist. She wanted to disappear into the woods and booked a trip to the Boundary Waters. The area had been a keystone of the Wilderness Act, introduced to the US Senate by Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey. The legislation did more than preserve land. It changed the shape of America and created a mechanism to conserve millions of acres of backcountry—much of that in the northland.

  Lynda paddled and portaged to an island in Tiger Bay—about two hundred yards from where we camped—in August of 1965. Her entourage included eleven canoes, twelve Secret Service agents, a few portable toilets, and a staff of cooks and help. The Forest Service prepared the lakes for her arrival by cleaning and widening portage trails, spraying the island with insecticide, and staging a float plane in the bay to bring in fresh supplies.

  Lynda’s arrival looks chilly in black-and-white photos of the trip. She is wearing a flannel shirt, a wool zip jacket, and a handkerchief wrapped around her head. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman stands beside her with a camera around his neck. In one photo, Lynda drags her hand playfully through a stream while two men paddle the canoe.

  Lynda had banned the press from the outing, but four reporters followed anyway. They canoed to and camped on the same island we were on, Paul said over breakfast the next morning. “They weren’t leaving until they got the scoop,” he said. “They gabbed with the Secret Service, said they only wanted a few minutes of her time. A couple of days later the reporters floated a bottle of bourbon to the agents. Lynda had also banned alcohol, but the Secret Service took the bribe and convinced her to do the interview. She spent an hour with the reporters. They ran the story on the front page, calling her the Greta Garbo of the North.”

  Paul told me the story over coffee. It was 7:30 a.m., and he and Sue had already packed their tent and loaded the canoe. Deep, blue water surrounded the point. Sunlight filtered through the trees. We sipped from our mugs and watched the smoldering fire. By the time I finished breakfast, Paul and Sue were ready to go.

  We launched at nine o’clock and followed the border south and east to Bottle Lake. It is impossible to see where you are from three feet above water level. Everything looks like shoreline. Paul headed for a tiny slot in the southeast corner of Lac La Croix that looked like a swamp. He lunged gracefully forward, digging his paddle deep into the water and pulling it back with his entire upper body. His pace was close to that of the voyageurs, who were expected to paddle fifty-five strokes a minute. Their day typically began at two in the morning, with a break at eight to eat breakfast. Lunch was typically dried buffalo meat mixed with fat—a concoction called pemmican. The day ended when the sun went down.

  It was a relief, for a moment, to get out of the canoe at the first portage. Sue showed me how to load a portage pack, a backpack the size of a large ottoman. She then swung the canoe upside down on top of her shoulders. The motion was like putting on a sweater, except the sweater was a sixteen-foot Kevlar hull.

  Pale corydalis and harebell grew near the shore of Iron Lake. Sphagnum, leatherleaf, and Labrador tea spread across the s
wampy sections of the hike. There was a small gravel beach on one side of the portage, a flat rock for launching canoes on the other. We paddled hard for an hour through Iron Lake, then stopped at Rebecca Falls to have a snack and rest.

  Paul and Sue’s colds were getting worse, and they took a nap. Then we paddled another forty minutes to Curtain Falls and hiked an epic thirty-minute portage uphill to Crooked Lake. I tried to match Paul’s stride and pace. Even with him under the weather, I couldn’t keep up. It was hard to imagine how the voyageurs hauled hundreds of pounds of pelts over portages—plus supplies like guns, ammo, flour, and kegs of liquor.

  Paul and Sue were lying in the sun when I got to the top of the falls. Flat, silver water gathered at the edge of Crooked Lake and spilled two hundred vertical feet over rocks and cliffs. The water was crystal clear near the shore. It was hot and muggy, and I stripped down to my underwear and swam. Paul had a filter for gathering water, but out in the middle of the lakes, he said, you can just drink it.

  That afternoon, we crossed the border into Canada and paddled for hours past granite promontories and tiny islets. The scenery sliding past was like a never-ending film: bluffs, white beaches, beaver dams, eagles, fireweed, hawkweed, bastard toadflax, and little-leaf pussytoes.

  That afternoon we dropped our gear at a campsite, then portaged into Argo Lake to find a cave that Paul had heard about. Someone had told him there was evidence that Paleo-Indians had lived there. We paddled for a couple of hours in a long loop, but all we saw were swooping hawks and an osprey standing watch in her nest. It was almost dark by the time we got back to the site.