Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

by Greg Grandin

  IF JOHANSEN AND Tolksdorf were comical Kurtzes, they were pursued by their own Michiganian Marlow, John R. Rogge. An “old time lumberjack” and a “natural born mill man” from the Upper Peninsula, Rogge had been at Fordlandia since the first tree was felled in early 1928, having been sent by Henry Ford to join Blakeley’s advance team. Since he had survived with his reputation relatively intact both the opportunism of Blakeley and Villares and the ineptitude of Oxholm, Cowling, before he left the plantation, named Rogge assistant manager and told him to keep an eye on Oxholm.

  Rogge was in a staff meeting when Francisco, the marooned cook, showed up at the office with a tale straight out of a “dime novel.” It was night when Johansen and Tolksdorf put Francisco on shore, and he didn’t realize until morning that he was on an uninhabited island. To stay meant to starve, so he lashed some driftwood together and floated a full day downriver until he came upon the hut of a rubber gatherer, who gave him some food and shelter. He then bargained for a canoe, taking twenty-four days to reach the Ford plantation, “through dangerous rapids, tropical rains, and all of the hazards of travel on the Upper Tapajós.” After a short discussion among the staff, Rogge decided that the procurement of usable seeds was a top priority and that he would head an upriver expedition to search for the two wayward Ford agents.5

  Rogge was happy to go. Born on a Wisconsin farm in Langlade County, he was one of nine boys, three of whom moved to northern Michigan to look for work in the timber industry. He felt at ease in the Tapajós valley, which, like Michigan’s vast forests, was sparsely populated. If the Amazon was hot and humid, the eastern Great Lake plains of the Upper Peninsula were similarly swampy and moist and made miserable by horseflies and other insects during a good part of the summer. Rogge was also used to organizing life and work around the change of seasons: most of Upper Peninsular logging was done in the winter, when the cold hardened the roads and froze the swamps, allowing easier access into the forest. And he was no stranger to water transport: Like the Amazon, the remote Upper Peninsula was cut through with rivers, which before the arrival of the railroad served as the main arteries for loggers, who built camps on their shores.6

  John Rogge with young rubber tree.

  Rogge thought his “sleuthing of a Scotchman” and “a German” would allow him to escape the familiar routine of the work camp and leave behind the relatively unimpressive lower Tapajós for the real Amazon. Northern Wisconsin, where he grew up, is steeped in Native American culture and history. Yet by time the “American lumberjack,” as Rogge described himself, came of age in the early twentieth century, Great Lakes Indians like the Potawatomi, Menominee, and Ojibwa found themselves struggling to survive, victims of population decline, forced removal policies, and coerced assimilation. Rogge, therefore, hoped that his trip would provide an opportunity to encounter true Indians, of the kind that lived in the “real, untouched jungle.” He gathered a team together, including a few Brazilians who knew something about seeds, and outfitted a small steamboat—open to the weather except for a small thatched sleeping cabin—with a two months’ supply of food and equipment. As they set off from Fordlandia, Rogge and his men made the most of what anthropologist Hugh Raffles has called “hospitality trails,” routes long used by European and American explorers, scientists, and businessmen as they traveled around the Amazon. On these routes, native labor did the hauling, cooking, cleaning, and poling (when rapids prohibited the boat’s passage), and planters, merchants, town officials, and priests provided shelter and sustenance.7

  Rogge was impressed with the skill of his barefoot and naked-to-the-waist boatmen, who occasionally had to jump overboard to push his boat through fast-moving water. He was less enthusiastic about his cook, also barefoot and dressed in a “pair of pants and a jacket that were so greasy and dirty that they interfered with his every movement on account of their stiffness.” Rogge ordered him to put on clean clothes and to keep the cooking area neat and orderly, which he did, though he never learned to prepare eggs to the lumberjack’s taste.

  ROGGE LEFT FORDLANDIA in early December 1930, traveling during the last stretch of the rubber season, the six-month dry period when latex is tapped, smoked, and sent downriver. He passed riverboats and canoes taking balls of rubber to trading posts. He slept in the houses of local merchants and traders and negotiated with local tappers to allow his crew to string their hammocks around the trappers’ huts. All of this gave him a firsthand view of the river’s rubber economy.

  As in other areas of the Amazon, rubber trees were not planted but rather grew wild along the 1,235-mile Tapajós, particularly in its upper headwaters and floodplains. Making his way to these thick, rubber-rich groves, Rogge found that the sloping banks framing the river’s wide lower reaches gave way to forbidding jungle overhang. Within a few days upriver of Fordlandia, the jungle became dense and the Tapajós narrowed to a gap, flanked by limestone cliffs and dotted with tree-filled islands. The river then climbed over a series of white-water torrents and falls that only low-draft boats, light enough to be poled, pulled, or dragged overland, could travel. For the first couple of decades after the 1835 Cabanagem Revolt, when the rubber trade took off, these obstacles had discouraged commercial exploitation. A Frenchman who made this trip in the early 1850s described “roaring and terrible” rapids that “cross and recross and dash to atoms all they bear against black rocks” guarding the “deep solitudes” of the upper Tapajós. Yet by the 1870s, the diminishing yield of Hevea around the mouth of the Amazon, combined with increasing world demand, prompted merchants and traders to push farther and farther into the valley, avoiding the rapids and falls by building portage paths through the jungle. In the early twentieth century, most of the upper Tapajós latex trade was dominated by one man, Raymundo Pereira Brazil, whose family had migrated to the region from the state of Minas Gerais. At the height of the boom, Brazil owned two thousand rubber estradas, or trails. He controlled the river’s workforce through debt bondage and monopolized trade and transportation routes.8

  Brazil’s bankruptcy in 1918, following the collapse of latex prices, left a power vacuum on the upper Tapajós. Although abuses of workers continued, river residents were now in a position to better their lot by playing the remaining traders, merchants, and trail owners off one another. At the same time, the decline of the rubber trade forced many tappers, including no doubt Rogge’s boatmen, to broaden their survival strategies, supplementing their tapping by gathering nuts, planting, fishing, supplying riverboats with wood for their boilers, and hiring out as crews on steamboats.

  Even with this diversification, the misery Rogge witnessed was intense. At every hut he passed, he saw poverty and disease, including chronic malaria and hookworm. Through a Portuguese interpreter he brought with him on the trip, Rogge heard the same kind of stories of abuse and exploitation LaRue told Henry Ford a few years earlier. Tappers complained about the low price of rubber and said that if they could save enough money for their passage they would leave their rubber trails and look for work in Brazil’s industrializing south.

  * * *

  ROGGE SET OFF in search of the real Amazon, yet no matter how far he traveled his thoughts continually returned to America.

  It took Rogge a few weeks to reach the trading post at Barra, the last reported location of Johansen and Tolksdorf, just below where the Tapajós breaks off into a number of lesser tributaries. The trip had been tedious, often taking hours to go just a quarter mile, with Rogge’s crew straining muscles to pole the thatch-roofed boat through currents, navigating around rocks, trees, and shallows. At a number of places, small cataracts forced the party to disembark and walk, and bearers hoisted the vessel above the cascade with a makeshift pulley. The more the boat slowed and the narrower the river became, the thicker the swarms of bugs. “From the rising to the setting of the sun,” another voyager along these waters had written, “clouds of stinging insects blind the traveler, and render him frantic by the torments they cause.” Rogge, too, began to compla
in of what seemed like an inexhaustible variety of mosquitoes, flies, gnats, and midges, most so small that netting provided little protection. Exhausted and sick from two weeks of quinine and his skin inflamed by bug bites, the lumberjack welcomed the hospitality of Barra’s principal citizen, José Sotero Barreto, a well-off rubber trader whom Theodore Roosevelt met on his journey over a decade earlier and described as a “gentleman of high standing.” Barreto gave Rogge room and board and did everything he could to make the Ford agent comfortable.9

  As he recuperated, Rogge enjoyed the pleasures of the manor, built high off the ground, with a broad veranda and glass windows. It was, he thought, the “best looking place” he had seen since leaving Fordlandia. Revived by a steady flow of tea, milk, and “plenty of chicken soup,” he attended the nightly dances Barreto held in his parlor. During its golden years, the regional rubber aristocracy had been famous for its love of all things European, particularly Italian marble and Italian opera. But the bust dulled the old continent’s appeal, and as the rubber lords looked north to America’s booming car industry for salvation they also began to appreciate America’s equally booming popular culture. The British explorer Charles Luxmoore, traveling up the Tapajós in early 1928 in search of the lost Colonel Percy Fawcett, reported arriving at the small village of Villa Nova to find people doing the Charleston.* And on offer every night on Barreto’s Victrola were, among other American standards, “My Ohio Home” and “Ramona,” both recorded just the year before. To the recovering Rogge, the 78s “sounded rather good hundreds of miles from home.”10

  At the end of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo—that other tale of upriver obsession—the title character, played by Klaus Kinski, stands on the deck of his decrepit riverboat as the turntable plays tenor Enrico Caruso singing “O Paradiso.” The scene is meant to invoke civilization’s fragile beauty in the face of what the Brazilian writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro described as the Amazon’s “overpowering sensation of the absolute.” But it’s also meant to convey a deep resonance, a harmony, between that enormity and the opera’s emotional baroque. Despite the foreign provenance of the aria, the image is inescapably embedded in the Amazon.

  Here, though, the music that Rogge listened to was purely nostalgic, not so much grounding him in the jungle as transporting him back home, or more precisely back to an America that was fast disappearing. In contrast to the sexualized, insinuating wooing of Rudy Vallee that reached Mulrooney and his wife in Fordlandia, the lyrics that helped restore Rogge’s spirits conveyed a restless discomfort with the artificiality of modern times. “I want to wake up in the mornin’ and hear the birdies say good morning, the way they always say good mornin’ in my Ohio home. . . . I want to wander in the moonlight and meet my sweetie in the moonlight.” Such wanderlust waltzes or ballads, often set in the American West (and just as often penned by European immigrants, as was the case of Gus Kahn’s “My Ohio Home”) provided an antidote to the urbane, topsy-turvy world of aggressive women and pleading men that populated Jazz Age crooning. They harkened back to an earlier era of proper courtship, before the coming of the electronic technologies that allowed soft-voiced effetes like Vallee—no “old time lumberjack” he—to become sex objects, reaching directly into homes, bedrooms, and, starting in 1933, Ford cars.11

  “Ramona” wakened similar longings for authenticity. The song was based on the wildly popular 1884 Helen Hunt Jackson novel of the same name that transformed Native Americans into objects of nostalgia and Southern California into a major tourist destination, as generations of fans continue to this day to search out the places Jackson used as settings. Filmed three times by 1928, Ramona, which draws from Jackson’s experience as a government agent investigating abuses against Native Americans, is an indictment of Anglo racism. Its title character represents Old California’s vanishing Mission Indian culture, a victim of white depredation brought by the Gold Rush, by “Americans pouring in, at all points, to reap the advantages of their new possessions” and driving the Indians off their land “as if they were dogs.” As in the novel, the song yearns for a pastoral idyll, always just out of reach beyond the next valley or, if Rogge stretched his imagination, river bend:

  I wander out yonder o’er the hills

  Where the mountains high, seem to kiss the sky

  Someone’s up yonder o’er the hills

  Waiting patiently, waiting just for me.

  . . . . . . .

  Ramona, when the day is done you’ll hear my call

  Ramona, we’ll meet beside the waterfall

  I dread the dawn

  When I awake to find you gone

  Ramona, I need you, my own.

  Such melancholy provided a particularly apt sound track for Rogge’s travels in search of “real Indians,” the ones who had long ago retreated deeper into the jungle, in flight from the kind of violence Ramona dramatizes as having had decimated Native Americans in Southern California and, for that matter, in Wisconsin and Michigan. A “sad legacy,” Jackson wrote, “indissolubly linked with memories which had in them nothing but bitterness, shame, and sorrow from first to last.”12

  AS HE CONVALESCED in Barra, Rogge gathered evidence confirming Johansen and Tolksdorf’s Ford-financed drinking and whoring. He learned that the two men had headed up the Cururu River to its Hevea-heavy floodplain. There, they had set up a work camp, hired about forty Mundurucú Indians, and started clearing the forest undergrowth in order to gather rubber seeds. Though not fully recovered, Rogge was resolved to finish his assignment. “I had yet,” he told himself, “to see the first time that I was given a job that I couldn’t handle.” So he continued on their trail. The Cururu is tighter than the Tapajós, with a mesh of thick tangled creepers obscuring its banks. After a month of December rains, the forest was covered with water, and as the river narrowed, flies and mosquitoes grew denser and the sound of croaking frogs louder—Rio Cururu means River of Frogs, from the Tupi name for the poisonous and loquacious giant cane toads found throughout the region. It took Rogge about a full day to get to the Catholic mission, established by German Franciscans in 1912 in the wake of the boom. Still not feeling well, Rogge rested a few more days, dusting off his childhood German and enjoying heart-shaped Christmas pastry, or Kuchen, made by the nuns.

  Here then was as close as Rogge would get to the “real, untouched jungle” and the “Indians that were reported to be living there.” The lumberjack observed the Mundurucú with a keen ethnographic eye. They lived mostly naked, he noted, tattooing their bodies from “head to foot with the juice of some berry and a thorn.” Each had three ear piercings, filled with “wooden plugs.” Women also pierced their lower lips, and mothers nursed their babies until they were three years old. Children married as early as nine years of age, and it was the “squaw” who did all the “heavy carrying” while the male followed behind with “his hammock, bow and arrow.” Ford once observed that people don’t “stay put,” and neither did the Mundurucú, who moved closer to the river during the dry season and inland during the wet. Those not settled in the mission lived in small, itinerant groups of ten to fifty, “scattered throughout the forest in large palm huts,” under which they entombed their dead. When there was no more room for further burials, they abandoned the hut and established a new community elsewhere. Yet “untouched” the Mundurucú were not.

  Portuguese troops had defeated the contentious Tupí-speaking Mundurucú a century and a half earlier, in 1784 in a battle that helped open up the Tapajós valley to Europeans, not just because it ended over a century of raids on colonial settlements along the river but because the defeated Mundurucú offered their services as mercenaries to pacify other uncooperative indigenous groups, including those who joined the 1835 Cabanagem Revolt. “And God requite the Mundurucu,” wrote George Washington Sears, in his “Tupi Lament” commemorating the rebellion, “for on their heads shall rest the guilt of Indian blood by Indians spilt.” This alliance with government forces, along with a reputation for “unalloyed, u
ntempered savagery,” as Robert Murphy, an anthropologist who worked in the region in the 1950s, put it, helped the Mundurucú survive the ravages of the rubber boom—unlike those starving refugees on the banks of the Xingu that Fordlandia managers considered, and then rejected, as a source of labor. Yet their numbers did decline rapidly over the course of the nineteenth century, by as much as 75 percent, leading to the abandonment of warfare as a way of life and an increasing dependence on the Franciscans for survival (though well into the 1950s, according to Murphy, “war was the favorite topic” of conversation among Mundurucú men, who traded stories of military strategy “as if it were yesterday”). By Rogge’s visit, only a few thousand lived along the Cururu and in the inland savanna, along with a couple of hundred more around the Catholic settlement.13

  The Franciscans’ objective, like Fordlandia’s, was a civilizational one. The mission supplied clothing to its charges and set up separate schools for boys and girls. It also encouraged the establishment of permanent villages—urging what had been nomadic families to live in settled homes with individual garden plots—inoculated children with the latest vaccines, and promoted sanitation and hygiene. The homes directly under the Franciscans’ care, Rogge noticed, “were very clean.” Yet unlike Ford, the priests and nuns went about their evangelism with “some degree of tact and restraint,” at least according to Murphy. It was not the kind of rash assault Ford hoped to launch on the preindustrial relations and sentiments of the people who lived in the Amazon but rather a slow subversion that transformed the ideas and social bonds that held them together as a people.14

  Mundurucú mission children, with German nuns.

  The Mundurucú Rogge saw were nominally Catholic and accepted the authority of the mission as an institution. Yet Christian rituals and theology remained subsidiary to indigenous practices and beliefs. Priests baptized and confirmed Mundurucú children and established a proper Christian burial ground. Those Mundurucú, however, who lived outside the mission’s jurisdiction ignored the admonitions of the missionaries and continued to inter their dead under the floor of the communal hut. The Franciscans urged their wards to take public Catholic wedding vows, and Rogge said the priests refused to perform marriage ceremonies unless the girl was at least fourteen and the boy sixteen years old. This was fine with the Mundurucú, who thought the public ceremony “embarrassing and shame-provoking” and made “every effort to avoid it.”