The Land of Dreams (Minnesota Trilogy)

by Vidar Sundstøl

  He drove past Hovland, where many of the buildings were in various stages of disrepair. Pretty soon nobody will be living in Hovland anymore, he thought.

  In the summer of 1888 Ole Brunes and Nils Eliasen each built a small log cabin on either side of the Flute Reed River. Soon afterward their families came from Duluth to join them. A total of twelve people lived in those two cabins during the first winter. Twelve people, snowed in near the Great Lake, with Indians their only neighbors. A few years later they had a post office, school, church, boatbuilding business, and telephone exchange.

  What dreams those people must have had, thought Lance. People who with their own hands had built a local community from scratch, in the midst of the darkest forest. And soon there would be nobody left who remembered that anyone had ever lived here.

  The forest was taking on a more and more uniform appearance. Thin, wind-ravaged firs stood close together to create a vast darkness, the beginning of the real boreal forests that extend in a belt around the entire Northern Hemisphere, primarily through Russia and Canada, but with an offshoot stretching into the States on the northern shore of Lake Superior.

  After a while he crossed the bridge over Reservation River, and on the other side he passed the sign announcing that he now found himself on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation. Nothing looked any different on this side of the boundary. It was the same evergreen forest, the same bare, rocky beaches, just like on the rest of the North Shore. Between the huge expanse of the lake and the massive, dark forests people live out their lives as best they can along Highway 61. That’s what the world looks like between Duluth to the south and the Canadian border to the north. And this world continues on in exactly the same way after you cross the boundary into the Indian reservation. The same road, the same lake, the same woods. But Lance knew all too well what the conditions were like in this small community, and for that reason he always felt as if he was entering another world when he drove onto reservation land.

  He turned off from the main road and drove toward the village of Grand Portage, the location of the reservation’s administrative office, along with its tribal casino. He passed the school and the local grocery store, then headed down a narrow road toward the lake, past the home of Willy and Nancy Dupree. He had to remind himself that it was now just Willy’s house, since Nancy had been dead for almost two years. He would have liked to visit Willy, but he could never bring himself to stop there.

  At last he turned into a driveway in front of the ocher-colored house where his ex-wife had lived for the past three years; he parked between the propane tank and her old Toyota.

  Then he sat in the Jeep and waited for the front door to open. He still had the same feeling of failure every time he sat here like this. It didn’t help that three years had passed. Or that this was something countless other people did too. He was like so many others who sat like this, waiting outside a house they never entered. That fact actually made matters worse. Because it had been so easy for him to think that he would never be like those men who parked outside, usually on a Friday afternoon, and waited for the front door to open. But here he was again, just as he was every second Friday, the year round.

  At that moment the door opened, and there they stood, both of them. He was wearing his little backpack. She leaned down and kissed the boy on the cheek. As he ran down the stairs, she gave Lance a brief smile. But it was a smile offered with the necessary restraint.

  UNTIL HE TURNED THIRTY-SEVEN, Lance Hansen was more interested in the past than the future. Early on he realized that the most diverse events and relationships could be gleaned from the darkness of the past, to become part of the more or less complex web called “history.” This was something he discovered as a teenager, through his close friendship with Olga Soderberg, the founder of the Cook County Historical Society. The future, on the other hand, comprised a different sort of darkness and could not be studied the way the past could. Quite simply, the future did not hold a particularly strong appeal for him.

  He completed his training as a police officer at a young age. After that he first spent a couple of years working with the police force in Duluth. When the job with the U.S. Forest Service became available, he decided to apply, mostly because then he’d be able to move to Cook County. That was something that seemed natural to him, since it was the area where most of his ancestors had lived after emigrating from Norway. He viewed his own parents’ decision to live in Duluth as something of an aberration.

  He got the job, and after renting a house in Grand Marais for a couple of years, he bought a piece of land for a cheap price from his uncle Eddy. There he built a house on the top of the hill above Isak Hansen’s hardware store, where his paternal grandfather had settled when he arrived in the United States in 1929.

  But aside from these basic and very necessary things—finding a job and a place to live—he’d really had no relationship with the future. His life proceeded in the here and now, but his gaze was always looking back. The future was nothing more than days that came and went, one after the other.

  Only once did he ever fall seriously in love—with Debbie Ahonen from Finland. Debbie was a tall, slender blonde who was desired by many men. In the end a police officer won her, but unfortunately for Lance, he was not that policeman. Yet before that happened, Lance had enjoyed several months of happiness that surpassed everything he’d previously experienced. There was something cool and indifferent about Debbie’s facial features that made her irresistible. Being allowed to see that apparently distant young woman surrender gave Lance a sense of manhood that he’d never known before. After spending a night with Debbie, he walked differently; he noticed it himself. His gait became more like a swagger, as if he owned the ground under his feet. But then one day Debbie told him that she’d fallen in love. “Finally I’m in love too,” she said. And at that moment he realized his feelings had never been reciprocated.

  Debbie and her new policeman moved to California, but Lance met her one last time before she left. She said the thought of escaping Minnesota made her feel as giddy as a schoolgirl. Lance had never seen her like that before.

  It took him almost a year to get over his broken heart. But the realization that she had never loved him, and the memory of that moment when she said as much to his face, had caused such a deep wound that he never entirely recovered. Even today, more than twenty years later, he could still feel a trace of the sting in his heart.

  After Debbie Ahonen departed, Lance carried on his life much as he’d done before their brief relationship had started. The only difference was that he became even more actively involved with local history and genealogy, and he took on more overtime hours.

  Basically he wanted to have as little free time as possible. Free time just made him more aware of how lonely he was. Because even though he had relatives on the North Shore and in Duluth, he was still very much alone. Besides, when he was working he didn’t think as often about the hurtful words Debbie had said.

  That was Lance Hansen’s life for twelve years, a life in which the future held no meaning, existing only as the days that came and went.

  But just before he turned thirty-seven, everything changed.

  IN 1854 THE CHIPPEWA INDIANS, many of whom prefer to call themselves “Ojibwe” or “Anishinaabe,” ceded the area of land that today makes up the northeastern part of Minnesota. All they had left were six small reservations. But at the same time, they retained extensive rights to hunt, trap, and fish outside reservation land. This led to conflicts between the Ojibwe and the white immigrants, who steadily increased in number as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In the twentieth century the conflicts increased. It was never a matter of violent clashes, but rather a long series of disagreements and individual legal cases having to do with the hunting of moose, the trapping of marten, and the commercial fishing for freshwater herring along the shores of Lake Superior.

  At the end of the 1980s, as a resul
t of the mutual wishes of both parties for a more codified relationship, the Tri-Band Authority was established. Its name was later changed to the 1854 Treaty Authority, which represents the Grand Portage and Bois Forte bands in the territory ceded under the Treaty of 1854. Its purpose is to manage, in an intertribal manner, the Ojibwe rights to hunt, trap, and fish beyond the boundaries of the reservations.

  As a police officer with the U.S. Forest Service, Lance Hansen had often dealt with the 1854 Treaty Authority, and he regularly attended the meetings with its representatives. At one such meeting, shortly before his thirty-seventh birthday, a lecture was going to be held about the old clan system of the Ojibwe, and Lance thought it sounded very interesting.

  When he arrived, he was immediately introduced to the speaker, Mary Dupree, almost twelve years younger than him and a teacher from Grand Portage. Her father, Willy Dupree, was a member of the Cook County Historical Society. He wasn’t particularly active, but Lance had met him several times, and he liked him.

  Now it turned out that he liked his daughter even more. The feeling was mutual, and they soon began going out together, often to the Gunflint Tavern in Grand Marais. Lance would drink mineral water with dinner while Mary had a glass of wine. Then he would drive her home to Grand Portage, where she lived on the second floor of her parents’ home.

  She was a slight, not very tall young woman—the exact opposite of Lance in terms of physical build. She wore her black hair cut short in a boyish style, and Lance never tired of looking at her sensitive face, which was so full of expression and yet so calm at the same time. She also had the most beautifully slender neck that he’d ever seen. Lance wanted nothing more than to spend all his time with her.

  So they frequently had dinner at the Gunflint Tavern, and sometimes at the Angry Trout restaurant. On such evenings, after driving Mary back to her parents’ house in Grand Portage and saying good night in the car, Lance would notice a strange feeling come over him as he drove south along the lake. It was in the spring and summer that the beginning phase of their relationship unfolded. The evenings were long and bright, the lake and the sky merging in a hallucinatory way so that it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began. The humidity from that enormous expanse of water filled the air with a delicate mist, and in the mist floated shades of yellow, pink, and blue, like watercolors, all of them illuminated by the evening sun hovering low in the sky. After the sun sank below the horizon, the colors darkened to violet and black.

  Being a man in love, Lance found the landscape more beautiful than ever as he looked at the lake, the dark forest, the road gently winding along the shore, and the vast expanse of sky above it all. And as he drove, aware of the lake in a way he’d never noticed before, a feeling intermittently came over him that he’d been here much longer than the thirty-seven years that had passed since he was born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth. He actually did think of his own history as beginning in 1888, when Knut Olson arrived in the area. But that was all in his imagination, a consciously chosen way of perceiving himself in relation to his surroundings. This feeling, on the other hand, was something that suddenly flooded over him, a sense of being tied to this landscape with bonds that stretched so far back in time that his personal history lost all importance. His family’s history too. As if something inside him recognized this landscape, especially the lake, in an entirely different way than he’d ever acknowledged before. A sense of belonging, aside from everything that had to do with the wave of immigration, the Norwegians who had scratched out a permanent settlement on this shore, his ancestors.

  Later on this feeling would desert him, as if it had never existed at all, but during that first spring and summer, when his relationship with Mary was in its earliest phase and their shared opportunities hadn’t yet begun to dwindle, Lance Hansen was present on Lake Superior in a way that he’d never experienced. When he drove south along Highway 61 on evenings like that, he felt the lake wasn’t just outside the car window, it was also inside him. Not exactly in his thoughts, but rather behind his thoughts, or underneath them—something slower and more lasting that resembled a soundless monologue and was perhaps one of the most important things that made up the man who was Lance Hansen. The lake had managed to seep inside him, as if Mary Dupree had unleashed an invisible spring tide.

  ON HER FATHER’S SIDE she was descended from Chief Espagnol, who is mentioned in a few written sources from the first half of the eighteenth century. So Lance liked to think of her as a “chieftain’s daughter,” even though he knew that was sheer nonsense. Willy was anything but a chieftain. He was the former postmaster of Grand Portage, now retired and a fanatical bingo player. Yet there was something about the way Mary talked and moved that gave her a certain dignity, Lance thought.

  At the time when Espagnol, who supposedly also had Spanish blood, was chief of the Grand Portage area, the Ojibwe had already had contact with the whites for more than 150 years. As early as the 1660s, Frenchmen were making their first forays along the shores of Lake Superior. They came from Montreal, the primitive capital in the French king’s sparsely populated North American colony. A small town on the great St. Lawrence River. They knew almost nothing about what lay beyond Lake Erie, but they’d heard rumors from the Indians about a water so vast that it had no end. Some Frenchmen thought this meant it must be an ocean. At that time they were searching for a waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the interior of North America.

  The first daredevils returned without having found the Pacific, but their canoes were fully loaded with valuable furs they’d bought from the Indians along the shores of the newly discovered lake. What they had hoped would be the Pacific Ocean turned out to be what the Indians called “Kitchi-Gami,” or the “big water.” Soon the Frenchmen would start calling it “Lac Supérieur.”

  The fur trade was enormously profitable. It involved acquiring pelts by giving the Indians in exchange woolen blankets, rifles, gunpowder, axes and knives made of metal, cooking pots, cloth, tobacco, alcohol, and other things the indigenous inhabitants soon felt they could not do without. It was so profitable that strict regulations were instituted. The Frenchmen considered the entire region surrounding the North American Great Lakes to be in the Crown’s possession, and it was decided that whoever wished to buy so much as an ermine pelt from the Indians must first purchase a license from the French king. These licenses were expensive, and they also required holders to pay a tax to the king of France on any eventual profits. So it wasn’t surprising that a number of men headed west without obtaining a license. They were risking long years of imprisonment, but the opportunities for making a killing were tremendous. If only they could manage to avoid getting caught, there was always a greedy merchant in Montreal who was more than willing to buy their wares, since his own earnings would be even greater once he exported the furs to Europe. There they would be used to make expensive hats and cloaks for the aristocracy.

  Many of the illegal fur traders ended up staying in the wilderness. Some stayed because a lengthy prison sentence was the only thing awaiting them back home. Others simply discovered that they preferred the world of the Indians to the life they had left behind. One important reason for this was presumably the fact that many of these illegal fur traders came from impoverished circumstances in the feudal society of France. Among the Indians, with their more egalitarian culture, these Frenchmen were often welcomed.

  In the earliest stage of the fur trading, between 1670 and 1730, close to a thousand such Frenchmen or French Canadians were living among the Indians in the forests along Lake Superior. They married Indian women and had children with them. It’s a fact that many of them renounced Christianity and instead embraced the Indians’ religion. Some of them became medicine men and dealt in matters that would have gotten them burned at the stake if they had returned to the outposts of European civilization on the St. Lawrence River.

  Yet most of the men who carried on fur trading did so
legally, and the number of traders increased rapidly during the 1700s, in keeping with the rise in profit that could be accumulated after each expedition.

  But there were those who continued to search for a waterway from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. For instance, a certain Pierre de La Vérendrye. In 1729 he saw something he’d long dreamed of—a map made by the Indians, showing a waterway leading west from Lake Superior. La Vérendrye believed this had to be the route to the Pacific that he’d long been searching for. The reason no white man had yet discovered this route was that the river, our present-day Pigeon River, plunges down toward Lake Superior via several huge waterfalls. In addition, the terrain is largely so inaccessible that it would never occur to anyone to try to make their way west by means of that particular river—the Nantouagan, as the Indians called it. That was true until La Vérendrye had a glimpse of the map an Indian had drawn on a large piece of birch bark. After that he was initiated into the secret that up to that time had existed like a hidden key to the vast new trapping areas in the northwest. The secret was a nine-mile-long route overland, from a position on the lake to Fort Charlotte on the Pigeon River, upstream from its highest waterfall. This was the longest of the countless routes used by the Ojibwe to carry their canoes overland. That was why they called it Kitchi Onigaming, the great portage, or in French, le grand portage.

  La Vérendrye never found the route to the Pacific Ocean, but his discovery opened up enormous areas for trade. Soon the trading houses in Montreal started sending their men west via Grand Portage, and the most legendary epoch in the history of the fur trade had begun. Deep within the trackless American wilderness, Grand Portage was from 1730 until 1802 the center and hub of an economic system that extended all the way to cities such as London, Paris, and Moscow.