by Matt Weiland
Ole died. His wife Lena went to the local paper to pay for an obituary notice. The ad manager, after offering his condolences, asked Lena what she’d like to say about Ole.
“Just put, ‘Ole died.’” said Lena.
“That’s it? Just ‘Ole died’? Surely, there must be something more you’d like to say about him. If it’s money you’re concerned about, I should tell you the first five words are free.”
Lena pondered this a moment and said, “OK, say, ‘Ole died. Boat for sale.’”
Like many of the mythologies of Minnesota, such jokes have a ring of truth about them. But from a distance, out here on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, it’s easier to see how much of it all is willfully simplified. Take our relationship with water, which on the face of it appears to be simple love and appreciation: “Land of 10,000 Lakes” is one of Minnesota’s nicknames. (There are really as many as 16,000 lakes, depending on how you define them, but—well, we don’t like to boast, you know.) Before the arrival of white settlers in the nineteenth century, the state was covered by a profusion of swamps, sloughs, and “prairie potholes,” lakes too small to be judged of any value. A legacy of the Wisconsin Glaciation of only 12,000 years ago, when a great ice sheet covered most of the state, these wetlands were a refuge for migratory birds, as well as insurance against flooding and runoff. They were also an impediment to the agrarian designs of early homesteaders, who set about draining them in a frenzy of dredging and ditch digging. By 1920, 79 miles of ditches and nearly 500 miles of underground tile drained close to 45,000 acres of land in the county where I grew up. By the 1960s, farmers had drained 11.7 million acres statewide—nearly a quarter of the state’s total land mass. In other words, water—which our state enshrines as something almost holy—had been the object of a relentless war.
The Minnesota of mythology is a rural, even pastoral place, where neighbors help neighbors and everyone’s fortunes are tied to the weather and the market price of corn and beans. In truth, rural Minnesota has been in decline for more than half a century—for almost half its meager existence. Founded along the tentacles of the railroad companies, who platted towns and named the streets before they had inhabitants, the small towns of rural Minnesota are a fading relic of a previous century. Sixty percent of the state’s population now lives in Minneapolis or St. Paul or their surrounding suburbs. More than 100 acres of farmland, on average, are consumed every day by suburban sprawl. The days of thriving little villages, each with its own ethnicity—Danes in Tyler, Germans in Sanborn, Belgians in Ghent, Icelanders in Minneota—are over, and with them has gone some of the charm and weirdness of the old Minnesota.
We cling to one myth above all, though—the myth that we possess an elusive quality called “Minnesota Nice,” which sounds like it was coined by the state tourism board. It can be read as a shorter way of saying, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” I’ve always found that attitude severely limiting—too often a recipe not for Minnesota Nice but for Minnesota Passive-Aggressive. Shame, it seems to me, forms the foundation of Minnesota Nice, and shame internalized can come out looking awfully warped. Our shame originates in poverty, in the squalid conditions our Northern European ancestors fled in search of a life with dignity. Many of them made good on that chance in Minnesota in the face of locusts, prairie fires, bad weather, isolation, and a hundred other challenges we can no longer imagine. To speak ill of them—to speak ill of anyone—is to mock their dignity, the thing they earned to our lasting benefit. They arrived in the New World wanting to be left the hell alone to do their work. In return for that courtesy they’d leave you alone too.
I grew up on a farm in southwest Minnesota, near Currie, a town which then had about 350 people and now, according to the most recent census, has just 225. It seemed to me that any history worth knowing was within my reach. My great-grandfather, descendant of French-Canadian Catholics, lived just down the road, and I would often ask him to tell me about the time he saw the first motorcar coming over the hill from the town of Dovray, home of the summer celebration “Uff-Da Days.” Pioneer cabins were preserved at Lake Shetek, within a ten-minute drive of our farm, and although there were plaques and monuments that made mention of certain bloody incidents from the past, no great emphasis was placed on them. History, for me, began in 1887, when my great-great-grandfather Dositheus Gervais first came to the Des Moines River country.
The original homestead lay a mile to the west of my bedroom. Its two yard lights twinkled after dark low on the horizon. My great-grandfather lived all his life there. He saw both that very first motorcar and the last train to come barreling out of the East. My grandmother and her siblings retrieved corncobs from the pigpens to burn in the stove and warm the house during the Depression. I came of age in the bosom of traditions that felt somehow eternal. We held late-summer pig roasts. We were regulars at 4-H club meetings. Church attendance was non-negotiable, as was respect for all manner of Jell-O salad cuisine.
In truth, that way of life, which felt timeless to my child’s mind, was barely more than a century old, and its establishment required a great deal of butchery. All through the early half of the nineteenth century, settlers came in droves to Minnesota, pushing the native Dakota from their ancestral hunting grounds. One treaty followed on another, opening land to the newly arriving settlers. By the 1850s the remaining Dakota—those who’d survived the white man’s whiskey, whooping cough, and cholera—were confined to a twenty-mile-wide reservation along the Minnesota River. In 1850 there were 6,000 whites in the entire Minnesota Territory. By 1856 there were 200,000. The buffalo were dwindling, near extinction. Game of all kinds was increasingly sparse. The Dakota relied, in large measure, on annual payments from the government, payments ratified by Congress to pay for the ceded treaty land. Sometimes these payments didn’t arrive. When they did, they often went straight to unscrupulous traders who held the Dakota in permanent debt.
In 1862, with the Civil War already becoming a drain on the national treasury, the annuity payment was late in coming by months. The Dakota, many of them starving, pleaded with the agency traders to release food stores and keep them alive on credit. The traders refused. One said, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”
What resulted was called, depending on your point of view, the Sioux Uprising, the Sioux Outbreak, the Dakota War, or the Dakota Conflict. The one thing you can’t call it is Minnesota Nice. It began on Sunday, August 17, 1862—the same day the annuity payment finally left St. Paul on a wagon train, two kegs of gold coins worth $71,000.
The fighting went on for six weeks. At least 500 soldiers and white settlers were killed, though perhaps many more. The scale of the Dakota dead has never been accurately counted, although nearly two thousand were imprisoned over that winter near what would one day become the Mall of America, in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. Typical, perhaps, of our unsentimental nature that we would one day build a shrine to commerce on the site of what was once a concentration camp.
Eventually those who survived the camp were shipped out to Nebraska and South Dakota. Meanwhile, more than 300 Dakota prisoners were convicted of murder and rape by military tribunals and sentenced to death by hanging. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the trial transcripts and commuted all but thirty-nine of the death sentences. One of the thirty-nine was spared at the last minute. The remaining thirty-eight Dakota men constitute the largest mass execution on a single day in American history. The WPA Guide to Minnesota, in its entry on Mankato, records the scene in that town on the day after Christmas, 1862:
The day of execution was bitterly cold. Large throngs of people, among them many armed men, milled through the streets. Every vantage point for the hanging had been appropriated hours before. Two thousand Minnesota troops had been moved to the scene to prevent disorder, but no violence was attempted.
Thirty-eight Indians were hanged simultaneously from a single gallows. They asked t
hat the chains, by which they were bound in pairs, be removed so they might walk to the platform in a single file. This was done, and, singing an Indian war song, each placed the rope around his own neck and continued singing while the cap was adjusted over his eyes. At the appointed time, W. H. Dooley, whose entire family had been massacred at Lake Shetek, cut the 2-inch scaffolding rope, and the entire number dropped to their death.
With this multiple hanging, the largest legal wholesale execution that has ever taken place in the United States, came the end of Indian worries to the residents of Mankato. A granite marker commemorating the hanging stands on the site of the execution, on the northwest corner of Front and Main Sts.
Mankato is southwestern Minnesota’s leading metropolis. …
One can’t help but admire that smooth transition from the largest mass execution in American history to the boosterism of Mankato’s bright and shining status as “southwestern Minnesota’s leading metropolis,” with nothing but a granite monument between. If you can’t say something nice …
A few years ago I went back home to see how my father’s cousins were faring as small farmers in the twenty-first century. They were the fourth generation to plow the glacial till of southwestern Minnesota. My father’s own stab at farming, beginning in 1973 on a quarter section of rented land, lasted eleven years, until the bank told him: Enough. Yet his cousins had survived—thrived, even—and I wondered how and why.
A number of possible explanations presented themselves. They’d inherited land outright, whereas my father had been forced to rent. Skyrocketing interest rates, coupled with a dip in commodity prices, had squeezed out the marginal operators. My father had borrowed money at the wrong time, and with a complete lack of collateral. When the loan officers came calling, he had nothing to offer in sacrifice to their demand that he pay up or get out.
My father’s first cousins eked through the lean years, aided by the generation ahead of them, my father’s uncles, who’d built enough goodwill and capital to help their sons stave off repossession. Not so my father. His link to farming came through his mother, not his father, so he started with nothing. A maternal lineage, rather than a paternal one, had doomed him from the start, as perhaps it would have any serf or sharecropper anywhere the world over.
What was shocking were the rewards my father’s cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol’ Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father’s first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005—and that on top of whatever they’d earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They’d saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeomen, and now they’d come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America’s overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies—the perfect feedback loop of government welfare.
Of course I couldn’t say that to them. They preferred the old story, in which they remained the true heirs of Ole Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth—the great novel of pioneering on the northern plains—and I was still, almost against my will, Minnesota Nice.
Now, on those rare occasions when I’m home again, I’m invariably seized by the itch to drive. Out the window endless fields of corn and soybeans scroll by, the rigid, right-angled geometry of Midwestern grain farming, here and there pockmarked by strange little remnant sloughs and swamps and lakes ringed with cattails and reeds. The horizon is treeless but for the occasional wind row of ash and elm planted in the Dust Bowl years, to stop the soil from blowing away entirely. Half the wind rows mark working farms. The other half stand watch over houses and buildings the color of ash in their abandonment, machinery rusting in the weeds. There are other Minnesotas, of course—the wilderness of the northern Boundary Waters, where travel is limited to foot and canoe; the Mississippi River country of the east, where bluffs rise hundreds of feet above the river’s breadth—but this is my Minnesota, manufactured from an old American dream and haunted now by failure.
Just off old Highway 30, I come upon what remains of my first and truest home in the world. A lone silo and quonset hut stand just south of the highway, gray and forlorn against the bright blue sky. I pull into the lane and park the car next to a field of waist-high corn. The house and garage, the grove of trees, the granary, the chicken coop, the hayloft and pumphouse and corn crib—all are gone, burned to ash and plowed into the earth for a few more acres of tillable land.
I wander the quarter section a while, but the sheer geometric monotony imposed by a cornfield on the playground of my childhood blocks my access to the past. Only later, as I return via the back roads to my parents’ house, a rooster’s tail of gravel dust rising behind the car, do I begin to see it whole again. I remember that just east of the house, in a bare patch of earth next to the grove, my brother and I had practiced farming in miniature from the age of five. We gathered seeds spilled from the planter, or snuck handfuls from the bags stacked in the granary, and then we dug little rows in the dirt. We tucked the seeds in the furrow and covered them with a thin layer of soil. Within days we had little corn plants poking toward the sunlight. For a month or so we sprayed our little field with the garden hose, imitating summer storms; with our tractors we tilled between the rows to keep the weeds at bay. I see us again in our childhood naïveté, practicing for the agricultural artistry of adulthood, practicing for a future that, for reasons beyond our control, would not be ours.
And then, before I get carried away in sentimentality, I tell myself it was a piece of luck, that failure. It set me free to make a failure of myself in other ways. Without that original failure perhaps I’d still be there, picking rocks in springtime, wheeling back and forth through the corn in a giant combine on a few hundred acres of someone else’s land, playing out the final chapter in the old dream as I listened to Garrison Keillor on the radio and daydreamed about the ways I could spend my government check.
MISSISSIPPI
CAPITAL Jackson
ENTERED UNION 1817 (20th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From an Indian word meaning “Father of Waters”
NICKNAME Magnolia State
MOTTO Virtute et armis (“By valor and arms”)
RESIDENTS Mississippian
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 4
STATE BIRD mockingbird
STATE FLOWER flower or bloom of the magnolia or evergreen magnolia
STATE TREE magnolia
STATE SONG “Go, Mississippi”
LAND AREA 46,907 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Leake Co., 9 mi. WNW of Carthage POPULATION 2,921,088
WHITE 61.4%
BLACK 36.3%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.4%
ASIAN 0.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 1.4%
UNDER 18 27.3%
65 AND OVER 12.1%
MEDIAN AGE 33.8
MISSISSIPPI
Barry Hannah
For me, Mississippi has been a sweet experience of surpassing natural beauty and smart, gentle, talented gals and pals. At one time I thought I’d never return to my home state or town, Clinton, because of the horrors inflicted on black folks when I was growing up and worsening during my college years at a small Baptist college I was forced into by my mother, a loving but ultragodly w
oman. She had dedicated her life to the Lord after, as she told it, she prayed to God and asked Him to spare her from fatal asthma. He did, in Clinton, Mississippi, just after World War II. My father was driving the family to Arizona to save her from Pascagoula, where both of my parents worked during the war years at Ingalls Shipyard, a dredged harbor that has launched many nuclear submarines. It’s got palm trees and sea, but it’s deadly for breathing problems.
Now, whatdayaknow, at age sixty-five I have deadly breathing problems myself, but caused by cigarettes and aggravated, I think, by chemotherapy. I have Non-Hodgkins lymphoma and will die of it in seven years or so if I respond to treatment. Disease is boring and for me, crammed with wrath, I have to fight every day. My lung condition has improved by constant chewing of Nicorette gum and having several near smokeless days. I feel better than I have in years. My wrath came almost wholly from being unable to visit and fish our glorious inland seas, Sardis, Endi, and Granada reservoirs, close at hand. I’ve accumulated enough fishing equipment to last several families a decade of fishing, some of it dating back to when my children were young and we had deep sport together.
Seven years ago, after almost dying of pneumonia—low immunity from chemo—completely sober and off everything but Tylenol, I had a deep dream of the physical Christ while I was in the hospital. He had the lean strong body of a workingman and in a wheaten robe was holding out his arms to me. In this dream I said, “I’ve not paid enough attention to you.” He was silent, but I awoke in front of my wife Susan, weeping and saying over and over, “I’ve seen Christ and your father, who was a saint!” This was exactly what that dream gave me and I’ve repeated it ad absurdum in writing and speech, because it was a dream realer than a dream, and I did not lie. I was astounded. Mozart was playing on a little jambox Susan had brought from home. It put me at home and gave me courage, although I was weak as a kitten and afflicted by intense pain all over, having lost thirty-five pounds in two weeks.