The Land of Dreams (Minnesota Trilogy)

by Vidar Sundstøl

  Grand Portage was of major importance, and not only because the route from Lake Superior to the hunting grounds started there. But the distance from these hunting grounds to the city of Montreal was so great that no one could make it there and back before the ice, which had released its hold on the lakes and rivers, began once more to set in. Which meant that it was easy enough to paddle the distance one way. But to maintain continuity in the fur trade, the men also needed to make it back to the hunting grounds before winter, and that proved impossible. They were able to cover half the distance, from Montreal to Grand Portage, and then back to Montreal. Or they could make their way to Grand Portage from the hunting grounds in the northwest and then return.

  In other words, the operation had to be handled in two parts, and Grand Portage, the big Ojibwe portage area halfway along the route, became its hub.

  The men who had spent the winter deep in the wilderness, where they had traded their European goods for furs the Indians brought them, would load up their canoes as soon as the ice melted and start paddling with their precious cargo through the lakes and rivers. It took weeks for them to reach the place where the portage began, across from the huge waterfall on the Pigeon River. There they would leave their canoes and cargo—under the watchful eye of guards, of course—and walk the nine miles down to the trading post to meet up with colleagues who had already arrived from their own winter quarters.

  At the trading post they would also meet the players in the other half of the operation—the men who brought the European goods from Montreal. Every summer a constant stream of thirty-six-foot canoes, which could carry up to four tons and were usually paddled by ten men, would arrive. They brought with them rifles, woolen blankets, glass beads, tobacco, whiskey, cooking pots, axes, knives, and cotton fabric to Grand Portage. All of these wares would then be transported onward by canoe to the wilderness by the same men who had paddled their cargoes of furs to the meeting place, after the goods had been carried up those nine miles. The European goods were the currency they possessed to trade with the Indians during the coming winter. The second group, those who had brought the goods from Montreal, then took over the large loads of furs and paddled with them back to the trading houses in the city on the St. Lawrence River.

  But first they spent two weeks in August conducting business, drinking, and brawling. This annual event, the so-called rendezvous, was the very engine driving the whole system.

  As the fur trade continued to expand, and especially after 1763, when France had to surrender all of its North American possessions to England and the British interests formed the North West Company, the presence of white people became more and more permanent.

  The North West Company constructed a large building that was called the Great Hall, which hosted splendid parties for the company’s owners, who increasingly came to Grand Portage. Their voyageurs would bring them in canoes loaded with all sorts of luxury items the gentlemen needed in order to spend several weeks in the wild. Eventually they also held their annual board meetings there.

  The Great Hall stood behind a protective palisade made of sharp-tipped poles sixteen feet high, and in the evening the sounds of Celtic music could be heard, produced by fiddles, flutes, and bagpipes. The North West Company was owned in part by Scottish businessmen. There, surrounded by the vast American wilderness, they ate steaks and drank imported wine and liquor while they discussed the price of furs in London and Moscow, as well as the fashions of Paris.

  Outside the Great Hall, beyond the sixteen-foot-high palisade, was the territory of les voyageurs. That was the name given to the men who traveled by canoe on one of the halves of the route—both those who paddled from Montreal and back to the city, and those who spent the winter in the forests. But the two groups always kept a certain distance between them. Each had its own camp. Those who stayed the winter had more contact with the Indians than the other whites, and they spoke their own dialect, which was a blend of French and various Indian languages. Most were pro forma Catholics, but it was a type of Catholicism that was heavily influenced by the Indians’ spiritual world, in which dreams played a central role. The Ojibwe, for instance, made dream catchers that were meant to capture bad dreams before they made their way to the sleeper. French fur traders were presumably the first white men to see these magical objects. Many of them also practiced Indian medicine. And they often defied the rigid racial segregation that was prevalent at the time. Many had Indian wives and children waiting for them in the wilderness of the northwest. This group was dubbed les gens du nord—the men of the north.

  The other group, those who paddled their canoes on the route between Montreal and Grand Portage, were called les mangeurs de lard, or the pork eaters, because they were always eating salt pork. The pork eaters were the ones who carried all the goods those nine miles up to where the men from the north had beached their canoes. The goods were packed in parcels weighing ninety pounds each, and most of the men would carry two of these parcels each time they walked that precipitous nine-mile portage. They carried everything by using leather straps that were fastened around their heads. This was something they had learned from the Indian women, who used this method for carrying all of their families’ belongings from one encampment to the next. After carrying the goods up the slope, the men had to carry equally heavy loads of furs back down to the trading post. Most of these mangeurs de lard were poor farmers from villages outside Montreal. For them the trip to Grand Portage and back brought much-needed extra income to a way of life in which hunger was never far away.

  The two groups—les gens du nord and les mangeurs de lard—never trusted one another. They often fought and maligned each other, but they were all so-called voyageurs, the canoe-paddling adventurers of the fur trade, with their own songs and stories told around the campfires. The voyageur culture continued to be French Indian, even after France lost all its possessions in North America and the North West Company took over the fur trade. In 1798, when the company was at the height of its power, it employed 50 bookkeepers, 71 interpreters, 35 guides, and 1,120 voyageurs. And nearly all of its activities were centered on the Ojibwe Kitchi Onigaming, or Grand Portage.

  Because of the American Revolution and the subsequent war, the British finally had to leave this lucrative hub. They set up a new post, Fort William, about forty miles north of the border between Canada and the United States, at the place where Thunder Bay is located today. Not until 1803 did the North West Company finally leave Grand Portage for good, after having accumulated a spectacular profit over a period of several decades.

  But the fur trade was dying out. This was partially because of the new fashions in Europe, but even more because the beaver (Castor canadensis), which had always been the most important catch for trappers, had been practically eradicated. And it hadn’t taken more than a century to achieve. The last remaining beaver populations lived so far to the west that it was no longer profitable to trap and transport them.

  And what about the Indians? Some family members had lived near Kitchi Onigaming long before the Frenchmen arrived, and of course they wouldn’t leave their old lands just because the white man’s trading operations collapsed. They had their winter encampments in the forests, where they hunted moose and other game. In the spring, when the sap rose, they moved to their traditional sugar bush, where they tapped maple trees for sap to make syrup. Summer was the time for fishing, and they spent their days on the lake.

  But their world had changed, nevertheless. The Ojibwe had become dependent on things they couldn’t produce themselves, and this meant a fundamental change in their way of thinking and living.

  And besides, the white people never left Grand Portage entirely. At least one trader always lived there, a man who ran a primitive trading post. During a transition period in the 1830s, the wealthy capitalist John Jacob Astor injected money into a fishing project on Lake Superior’s northern shore, and a fish-processing plant was built on the remains of the Great Hal
l. For a while more than a hundred Ojibwe were employed in this large fishing operation, but in 1837 a financial crash put a halt to the project.

  And yet Astor’s investments seemed like a portent of what was soon to come. Gone was the fur trade’s motley assemblage of mixed-race interpreters, bookkeepers whose hands were black with ink, medicine men who had grown up in Marseille, voyageurs with wives and children waiting for them in birchbark tepees near a river that didn’t exist on any map. Gone were the voyageurs’ romantic songs and the Celtic strains from the Great Hall. Gone were the dairy cows, the pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and the crates of Portuguese wine. Gone were the European Crowns’ colorful flags and banners, the uniforms and drums, and cries of “God Save the King!”

  Instead, something entirely different was approaching. Something that would redefine the land itself. The time of treaties was approaching. Legal provisos, signatures, and maps. Rivers and mountains and valleys were given new names. The flowers too. And the birds and fish. Everything had a new name, and the names were written down in books. And the world as it actually existed was erased and conjured into a dark spirit world.

  What was approaching was the modern nation of the United States.

  In 1854, after being subjected to increasing pressure for several years, the Ojibwe—or the Chippewa, as the whites called them—yielded to the demands of the U.S. government and ceded the entire region that today comprises the northeastern corner of Minnesota. All the tribe had left were six small reservations, annual payments of $19,000 for twenty years, plus a one-time bonus, to be paid in various goods.

  The agreement was duly signed by the government representatives, Messieurs Gilbert, Harriman, and Smith, while the Ojibwe envoys had to make do with setting an “X” next to their names, since they did not know how to write.

  They were men with names like Little Marten, Black Cloud, Otter, Eagle, Little Reindeer, Old Man, Youth, Lone Man, Northern Feather, Bear’s Heart, Clear Sky, White Thunderer, and He Who Carries the Voice.

  They exist in the memories of posterity by virtue of the names that were preserved on a piece of paper—the same paper that put an end to their world. Only their names are there. The men themselves disappeared, sometimes into a world of alcoholic dreams. A world of their children sent to boarding schools, and secondhand clothing from white homes; the forced planting of cabbage, mining work, ridges that resembled dead porcupines after they’d been logged, top hats, prison cells, and huge steam locomotives that carried logs and iron ore through the forests.

  The Ojibwe were subjected to a campaign whose goal was to wipe out even the smallest sign of Indian culture and to turn them all into civilized Christians. It meant schools in which the language was English, and the pupils were forbidden to speak Ojibwe. Black-clad Catholic priests arrived in boats from the other side of the lake; a church was built. It meant agriculture. Orchards. It meant square houses with tarpaper roofs. Few Ojibwe would live in birchbark dwellings any longer. The government representatives even drew up a town plan according to the European model, with straight streets and a small town square. The ugly, primitive houses were then built, following this plan, which can perhaps be traced even today in the street layout in the center of Grand Portage.

  This assimilation campaign sought to force the Ojibwe tribe and its way of life to its knees in a matter of a couple of decades.

  Then came the immigrants. At first it was solitary men who arrived, dreaming of gold and silver. But starting in 1880 a steady stream of Scandinavians poured in. Norwegian fishermen began fishing commercially, on a scale the Ojibwe had never before seen. The Swede Charles Nelson opened a hotel at the mouth of the Poplar River and christened the entire place Lutsen, to commemorate the death of the heroic King Gustaf II Adolf at the battle of Lützen in Germany.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the virgin forests of northeastern Minnesota were rapidly disappearing. Then came the roads. In the mid-1920s the first road for automobiles was constructed from Duluth to Thunder Bay in Canada. And the cars came jolting along. The population increased, more tourists arrived. Airports were built. More white streaks appeared in the great sky above Lake Superior, stretching from one horizon to the other.

  And one day at the end of the twentieth century, the policeman named Lance Hansen, descendant of Norwegian immigrants, drove along the lake with a strong feeling that he’d been there much longer than the thirty-seven years that had passed since he was born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth. He even had a sense that he’d been there long before his ancestors arrived as immigrants. And he knew this was all because of the young Ojibwe woman from Grand Portage.

  They were married the following summer in Zoar Lutheran Church in Tofte. The wedding celebration was held in the Tofte town hall. It was one of the last times Lance saw his father feeling healthy. A few months later he found out he was suffering from brain cancer. But on that evening he stood behind the building talking to the bride’s father, the gray-haired Ojibwe named Willy Dupree, retired postmaster of Grand Portage. Both men had been drinking moderately, and there they stood, talking and laughing, and it looked as if they had always known each other.

  10

  THE DAY AFTER Lecuyer and Nyland held the press conference, Lance Hansen and his son went to the Great Lakes Aquarium in Duluth. Lance had been wanting to take Jimmy there for a long time, but until now he hadn’t thought the boy was old enough to get much out of it.

  It was another hot and cloudless day. As soon as they walked in the door, the first thing Jimmy wanted was more ice cream. Lance went over to the stand, the whole time keeping an eye on his son, who was standing a few yards away, leaning against the big pillars that supported the glass roof of the aquarium. It was the boy’s second ice cream of the day, even though it was only a little past noon. Lance was determined not to be one of those weekend fathers who try to compensate for their absence by stuffing the child with ice cream and sodas and animated movies. But the heat outside was nearly tropical, and the boy probably needed something to help him cool off. Besides, he’d brought Jimmy here to the aquarium, which was anything but an attempt to coddle him. This was a place for learning!

  Holding the ice cream in one hand and gripping his father’s hand with the other, Jimmy began looking around. The aquarium’s three huge fish tanks occupied the central portion of the building. They were rather like elevator shafts made of glass, except that instead of containing elevators and people, they were filled with water and fish. This meant that the midsection of the building was open all the way up to the glass roof high overhead. Surrounding these tanks were exhibition areas on two levels, with wide stairs leading upward. From the floor above, people were leaning over the railings to look down at the crowds on the ground floor, including Lance and Jimmy.

  “Wow, otters!” cried Jimmy, tugging on his father’s hand. He’d caught sight of the otter exhibit, an artificial cove behind a wall of glass, fifteen to eighteen feet wide and twice as much in height, with water that was constantly trickling and running down the slope to the small but deep pool below. A couple of otters were floating on their backs in the water. Another was lying on a ledge jutting out from the slope and seemed to be asleep. When they got closer, they could see that the slumbering otter had stuffed his paw in his mouth, as if sucking on a pacifier.

  As they stood there, looking at the sleeping otter and the other two in the water, a fourth animal suddenly peeked out from a hole partway up the incline.

  “Look, Dad!” said Jimmy.

  At that moment the otter came out to slide on its belly down the slippery wet slope, landing in the pool with a big splash. Jimmy shrieked with glee as he involuntarily took a step back so as not to get drenched, although of course the water got only as far as the glass wall in front of them.

  Lance put his hand on his son’s shoulder. Jimmy looked up at his father. The boy’s face under the Minnesota Vikings cap displayed such undisguised joy that Lance felt
an urge to lift him up and hug him tight.

  Jimmy shrugged off his father’s hand and pounded on the glass. “No, don’t do that,” Lance told him.

  “I just want to wave good-bye to them before we leave,” said Jimmy.

  “That’s okay, but don’t hit the glass. You might scare them.”

  “But I want them to see that I’m waving,” Jimmy said, now a bit uncertain.

  “Oh, they see you, all right. Don’t worry about that.”

  “No, they don’t,” said Jimmy, pointing.

  Lance saw that he was right. The otters weren’t the least bit interested in the people on the other side of the glass wall.

  “Well, they won’t know what you mean when you wave to them,” he said. “They have their own otter language.”

  “Really?” Now Jimmy was interested. “They can talk?”

  “Uh-huh. They make otter sounds. And they make otter signals with their paws. But they don’t understand human signals. For instance, they wouldn’t know what to make of it if you wave.”

  “So what do they think it means?”

  “I don’t really know. Maybe it means ‘I’ve got to pee’ in otter language.”

  Jimmy sputtered with laughter.

  “Tell me again how you say otter in Ojibwe,” said Lance. “Nigig,” relied his son promptly without even pausing to think. “You’re so smart. Are they teaching you the language in school now?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Do you like it?”

  The boy shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “Do you like school?”

  Jimmy gave his father an exasperated look.