Lake Superior Profiles: People on the Big Lake

PROLOGUE

Shining Big-Sea-Water

Lake Superior is not as old as the hills. The hills around the lake date back 1 billion years, while Lake Superior dates back just 9,500 years—to the last thrust of a 2-million-year-old ice age, when glaciers advanced and retreated across much of North America. When the ice moved south from Canada for the last time, it gouged out a basin which, when the glaciers melted, left behind a lake that stretched from Canada to the lower Midwest, from the Dakotas to New York. Today’s promontories were little islands. This behemoth body of water drained and left behind today’s Great Lakes. Lake Superior, now the biggest, is actually today at its very smallest.

French explorers called Lake Superior and the other Great Lakes mers douces, or sweet seas. These five lakes contain one-fifth of the world’s freshwater. Lake Superior, 350 miles long and up to 160 miles wide, covers nearly 32,000 square miles. All of the other Great Lakes, topped off with three more Lake Eries, could fit into Superior. The lake is bigger than ten states, is as big as Austria, and could accommodate the Bahamas six times over.

The surface of Superior is 600 feet above sea level. The deepest point is 1,333 feet. The bottom of the lake is 700 feet below sea level and 418 feet below the level of Death Valley.

Two hundred rivers and streams dump into the lake, which has a small watershed for so large a body of water. The biggest inlet is the Nipigon River at the lake’s northernmost point; the only outlet is the St. Mary’s River at the lake’s easternmost point. On average, a drop of water entering the lake takes two hundred years to find its way out.

The salient geographical features of the lake are Isle Royale in the north, the Keweenaw Peninsula in the south, the Apostle Islands in the west, and Whitefish Point in the east.

Because of Lake Superior, the westernmost of the Great Lakes, the United States is the only country in the world with a major seaport (Duluth) twenty-three hundred miles inland. Six hundred thousand people live in the Lake Superior basin; the major cities are Duluth, Thunder Bay, Marquette, Munising, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The American Soo, as it is called, is the oldest city in Michigan and the thirdoldest in the United States.

This map, produced by Vincenzo Coronellis, a Franciscan monk and cartographer, dates to the 1680s.

Indians called Lake Superior Kitchi-gummi, a name of many spellings. Longfellow called it Gitche Gumee and Shining Big-Sea-Water. It is believed the Anishinabe arrived on the north shore of the lake between 1200 and 1500. Europeans came to the area in the early 1600s. Early French explorers called these waters lac superieur, uppermost lake. These pioneers were enticed by furs, lodes of iron and copper, expansive forests, and a fishery deemed inexhaustible. One of these fish, the lake trout, was decimated by overfishing and sea lamprey, an invasive, life-sucking predator that proved to be the spawn of Satan.

A more heavenly aspect is its bracing chill air; a day on the lake makes one logy. When I was a lad, there used to be a sign in the Keweenaw Peninsula: You are now breathing the purest, most vitalizing air on earth. It’s said the college fellows used to nail skunks to the sign. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a good yarn. The lake makes for many. As Longfellow wrote in Song of Hiawatha, You shall hear a tale of wonder.

1

PADDLE, PIPE, AND PORTAGE

Grand Portage, Minnesota

Natives called Lake Superior the water too far to see across. White explorers braved this water in birch-bark canoes, paddling while singing songs to bolster their spirits and pace themselves. They were called voyageurs, or travelers. Indians described them as men with hairy faces who have no women. In their heyday in the late 1700s and early 1800s, these hardbitten men supplied beaver pelts, called soft gold, to make top hats, capes, and muffs for the fancy crowd in Europe. It’s been said the voyageurs were mighty men taming mighty country. Some, called Montreal men, took trade goods from eastern Canada to Grand Portage, midway along the north shore of Superior. Others, known as north men, laden with furs, navigated the rivers and lakes from the Canadian interior, which was called le pays d’en haut, or upper country, to Grand Portage, a French name for great carrying place. It refers to a portage from Lake Superior up to the Pigeon River, which flows from the north but has rapids and waterfalls above the mouth, necessitating the voyageurs’ nine-mile trek overland. It was at Grand Portage that the two groups of canoers traded cargo and returned to where they had come from—one to the city, one to the bush—but not before indulging in a fleeting but grand time.

The spirit of this rendezvous enlivens people yet. Each August, three hundred or so people travel to a campground at Minnesota’s Grand Portage National Monument, fifty miles west of Thunder Bay, where they participate in a four-day reenactment of the days of the voyageurs, creating personas, dressing in costume, and telling stories of the past.

On the first evening of the gathering, in the waning light, Rodney Brown, a wandering minstrel from Thunder Bay, sings of the past. He has dedicated an album to the voyageurs. Save for a yellow do-rag and cloth belt, Brown wears modern street clothes. In front of him, in a little meadow, perhaps a hundred people sit on the grass in the cool, still evening. Some men smoke little clay pipes; a few women knit. Behind Brown, there is a copse of tall white spruce. Black flies are pesky.

Our hearts long for drink and song, he sings.

One song is about William McGillivrary, for whom Fort William is named. For a time, McGillivrary ran the Northwest Company’s fur trade out of the north shore. McGillivrary had two wives: a white and a Cree. Brown’s favorite lyrics in his voyageur songs are about the Cree wife. They include her tombstone epitaph—Mother of the country, daughter of the land—to which he adds, We leave you poor, with beggar hands. Those words, Brown says, recall a bad time for the natives, who faced starvation when the fur industry dried up.

Gone, then, were the voyageurs—and the clerks, traders, and managers who were called company men—gone were all except the mixed breeds who were, and are, called the métis. These people opened up the region, this north shore of Lake Superior and beyond, all the country northwest of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay—an area, Brown says, that the voyageurs called the big lonely.

The first European to view these expansive waters was probably Etienne Brulé, who came to what was called New France in 1610, at age sixteen. He traveled up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec, which had been founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608. Champlain took the young Brulé under his wing and sent him to live among the Huron people, whom Champlain had befriended, to learn their way of life and how to survive in his new world. Brulé is variously described as a scout, pathfinder, and the very first coureur de bois, or woods runner.

Champlain reached Georgian Bay in 1615, his farthest foray west. It is believed that Brulé pushed on from there, traveled up the St. Mary’s River, and reached what is now Sault Ste. Marie between 1620 and 1622. Brulé was ahead of the crowd. Jean Nicolet didn’t discover Lake Michigan until 1634. Claude Allouez didn’t reach the west end of Lake Superior until 1666. The backdrop of this time in the New World was the continual squabbling and warring between the French and British, both with their Indian allies. When the British captured Quebec in 1629, Brulé switched his allegiance from the French to the British. One historical sketch says of Brulé and this ill-fated move, Despite his notable accomplishments, his death was unheroic and gruesome; for changing his loyalty from the French to the British, he was killed, quartered, boiled, and eaten by his blood brothers, the Bear Tribe of the Huron Indians.

Those who followed Brulé were mostly French, and they became the voyageurs. They pushed west, following the sun and the watercourses. To admirers, these men were brave and daring; to the English they were corrupt, and debased as savages. Whatever their character, they had tough hides as they sought furs and the Northwest Passage. Along the way, the French built more than a hundred forts and made what one observer calls a longstretched supply route.

The voyageurs took a lesson from the natives and navigated these waters by canoe. The birch-bark canoe was to the opening of the Great Lakes region as the horse was to the opening of the West. These birch-rind canoes were made by the Algonquin people of the Ottawa River valley and southern Ontario. Lightweight, they were like sailing on a dried leaf. It was said, They can sail them before the wind, but not else. One chronicler of the period likened them to a wretched fragile water lily.

The French used bigger canoes for large rivers and Lake Superior, and smaller ones to negotiate the many rapids and portages in central and western Canada. A bigger one, the canot de maître, or master canoe, was thirtyfour to forty feet long and had a crew of eight to fourteen. A smaller one, the canot du nord, or north canoe, was about twenty-five feet long and had a crew of four to six. The men who hired on to paddle these vessels were a colorful and stouthearted bunch. One contemporary, Daniel Harmon, wrote in 1819:

The Canadian Voyageurs possess lively and fickle dispositions, and they are rarely subject to depression of spirits, of long continuance, even when in circumstances the most adverse. Although what they consider good eating and drinking constitutes their chief good, yet, when necessity compels them to it, they submit to great privation and hardship, not only without complaining, but even with cheerfulness and gaiety. They are very talkative, and extremely thoughtless, and make many resolutions, which are almost as soon broken as formed. They never think of providing for future wants. . . . They are not brave; but when they apprehend little danger, they will often, as they say, play the man. They are very deceitful, are exceedingly smooth and polite, and are even gross flatterers to the face of a person, whom they will basely slander, behind his back. . . . A secret they cannot keep. They rarely feel gratitude, though they are often generous. They are obedient, but not faithful servants. By flattering their vanity, of which they have not a little, they may be persuaded to undertake the most difficult enterprises.

Their odyssey was indeed formidable—grueling days, and thank the Lord for nightfall. Their journeys were mainly between May and October when the waterways were free of ice. It was common for brigades of up to twenty canoes to venture forth together. The men worked fourteen to eighteen hours a day, covering sixty to eighty miles. On portages, they had to carry seventy- to ninety-pound pièces, or bundles, of supplies. They endured injury, death, and nature’s unfriendliness, including, according to one account, clouds of black flies and mosquitoes against which the best repellent was a mix of bear grease and skunk urine.

According to writer Eric Morse, The voyageur’s daily routine was a killing one. Up at two or three o’clock to the shout of Leve, leve, nos gens!— Up, up, we men!—they traveled twelve miles before breakfast, which was cooked overnight but not provided until eight o’clock. Lunch was limited to dried meat eaten on the run. Fairly regularly, Morse writes, a stop was made for a few minutes each hour to allow the men to smoke a pipe. This event was so important that distances came to be measured in pipes; three pipes might be fifteen to twenty miles, depending on wind and current. Such a break from routine and labor, Morse writes, was a motivating and enticing thought. Dinner, at eight or ten o’clock in the evening, typically was dried meat mixed with flour and water, creating a potage that the voyageurs called rubbaboo. After one last pipe, the voyageurs slept on the ground—on turf, moss, or beach, Morse says—with their heads under an overturned canoe and a tarp stretching from the canoe to protect them from the rain and dew. Johann Kohl, a chronicler of the period, describes these inconveniences as extremely unpoetical. He reports a common lamentation among the voyageurs: Au misère!

Their food had little variety, though it differed by region. At the outset of the journey in Quebec or Montreal, the voyageurs ate maize, dried peas, beans, and cured pork; at Sault Ste. Marie, there was wild rice, maple syrup, fish, venison, and corn; in central and western Canada, buffalo and pemmican. The corn was soaked in a mixture of wood ashes and water and boiled to a thick hominy that was sometimes spiced with bacon fat or bear grease. Not until they reached Grand Portage did the men eat sumptuously; then, according to Kohl, there were delicacies such as beaver tail, buffalo hump, bear paw, and moose nose.

In 1824, Edward Talbot wrote about the voyageurs and their lot: How the men who are employed in this difficult navigation exist, without ruining their constitutions, is a mystery which I am utterly unable to explain. Perhaps to their advantage, these men were believers in God. They prayed for safety and to be remembered. Some, of course, succumbed along the way. Where they were buried, crosses were set in place. Upon encountering one, it is said, the voyageurs tipped their heads and said a prayer.

Washington Irving wrote of the voyageurs in 1836, They are dexterous boatmen, vigorous and adroit with the oar and paddle, and will row from morning unto night without a murmur. The steersman often sings an old traditional French song . . . in which they all join, keeping time with their oars; if at any time they flag in spirits or relax in exertion, it is but necessary to strike up a song of the kind to put them all in fresh spirits and activity.

Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time . . .

Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,

The rapids are near and the daylight’s past.

Voyageurs who sang and paddled and smoked their way from Montreal to Grand Portage were called pork eaters, after the French appetite for that meat. They also were called engagés, laborers or hired hands. These men returned to Montreal. The north men who lived in the Canadian wilderness were called hivernants, or winterers. A pork eater became a north man only after a winter in the backcountry and a rite of passage, described this way: The newcomer was sprinkled with water from the first north-flowing stream, and made to promise never to kiss another man’s wife without his permission. This ended with the drinking of rum and a boistering barrage of back-slappings.

Whether pork eater or north man, there were three kinds of laborers in each canoe: the avant, or bowman, in front, acted as guide; the gouvernail, or steersman, in the stern, directed the craft; and the milieu, or the paddlers, were stationed in the middle. As well, there were the express men, they of the highest stature, who carried important people or messages at twice the pace of a supply canoe.

The cargo capacity of the lake canoes was up to eight thousand pounds, half that for the smaller canoes going into the interior. Each voyageur’s supplies were limited to thirty to forty pounds—basically, tobacco, a blanket, and clothing, including a good set of clothes to play the dandy in Grand Portage. It is said that God turns a blind eye to all soldiers for an hour before battle. Perhaps he turned a blind eye to all voyageurs at the rendezvous at Grand Portage, where, after eight weeks of toil and isolation and more than two thousand miles of wilderness, the men took to rum and women. Their women were called temporary wives or fair Partners.

Alexander Ross, one man who was a part of this commerce, wrote:

I have now been 42 years in this country, for 24 of them, I was a canoe man; I required but little sleep, but sometimes got less than I needed. No portage was too long for me, all portages were alike. My end of the canoe never touched the ground ’til I saw the end of the portage trail. Fifty songs a day were like nothing to me. I could carry, paddle, walk, and sing with any man I ever saw. During that period, I saved the lives of 10 Bourgeois [members of the upper class], and was always their favorite, because when others stopped to carry at a bad step, and lost time, I pushed on—over rapids, over cascades, over chutes; all were the same to me. No water or weather ever stopped my paddle or my song. I had 12 wives in the country; and was once possessed of 50 horses, and 6 running dogs, trimmed in the finest style. I was then like a Bourgeois, rich and happy; no Bourgeois had better dressed wives than I; no Indian Chief finer horses; no white man better-harnessed or swifter dogs. I beat all Indians at the race, and no white man ever passed me in the chase. I wanted for nothing; I spent all my earnings in the enjoyment of pleasure. 200 livres, twice told, have passed through my hands; although now I have not a spare shirt to my back, nor a coin with which to purchase one. Yet, were I young again, I should glory in commencing the same career again, I would willingly spend another half-century in the same fields of enjoyment. There is no life so happy as a voyageur’s life; none so independent; no place where a man enjoys so much freedom as in Indian country. Huzza! Huzza! pour le pays sauvage [for the savage country].

Rboss wrote this remembrance in 1850. He was the last of a breed. In 1802, the rendezvous was relocated from Grand Portage to Fort William, at what is now Thunder Bay. The 1820s sounded the death knell for the entire operation. The beaver simply ran out; and anyway, silk hats had replaced beaver hats as the fashion in Europe. So the fur trade ended—yet it still tugs at the imaginations of the reenactors, who are quite serious about their masquerade.

The 2007 reenactment is made up of 133 encampments—a setting of white canvas tents and lean-tos. To the north are green hills that spill down to Grand Portage Bay, half a mile long, with an island, a few acres in size, a quarter mile offshore. Soft, halfhearted waves lap at the narrow, boulderstrewn shoreline. A bulky young man stands facing the water and plays bagpipes. His audience is a few seagulls and a little dark-haired girl who sits on a big rock. Wood smoke from many campfires scents the cool evening air. All about are the artifacts of the fur trade: a birch-bark canoe, wooden kegs, flintlock rifles, fire-blackened pots and kettles, a wooden yoke for carrying pails, and colorful wool blankets. Piles of firewood are there for the taking. People mill about, all in period dress, the men in white shirts with no buttons, breechcloths, moccasins, and leather leggings, and the women in long dresses. A good many men sport dashing beards, mustaches, and sideburns. There is all manner of head cover: chukes (from the French toque, for hat), berets, dorags, squat stovepipe beaver hats (the point of this whole business, after all), and cocked hats, or tricornes, which one man describes as the most useless hat ever invented in the world. When you walk through the woods, it’s like having a cowboy hat with treble hooks. It catches on everything.

Karl Koster has organized this annual reenactment since 1998. He’s in deep, a friend says of his involvement. On this night he wears a faded red shirt, black neck scarf, burgundy sash, moccasins, and a white do-rag. He also carries a walkie-talkie, one of the few deviations from the traditional at this gathering (although I do run into a woman who hides a rubber spatula). Koster keeps events on schedule, makes sure all campfires are out by one thirty in the morning, and makes himself useful.

Trade goods that the Montreal men carried included firearms, ammunition, metal tools, cloth, beads, twine, salt, and liquor. Koster says the furs (70 percent were beaver) that the north men brought to Grand Portage were gathered by Indians with nets, spears, snares, and clubs through holes in the ice. In contrast, he says, In the Rocky Mountains, there were a handful of guys with traps. He adds, The Lake Superior fur trade, in all aspects, really blows away that Rocky Mountain fur trade. There was so much more—from here to the Pacific, here to the Arctic.

Grand Portage, Koster explains, is a small, little spot on the map, but for a lot of people here, this was the center of the world. He describes the area as a chunk of land between two watercourses—on one side Lake Superior and on to the Atlantic Ocean; on the other side the Pigeon River and on to the Pacific Ocean. So if you think about it, Koster says, that’s what this portage does—gives you the route to go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the center of the continent. This is where you go east and west, right here.

The Great Lakes fur trade opened up not only the Lake Superior region but also the Canadian west and northwest. Looking for the Northwest Passage, Sir Alex McKenzie, head of the Northwest Company, journeyed west out of Grand Portage, took a right turn, and reached the Arctic Ocean in 1789. Four years later, he stuck to a westward route and reached the Bella Coola River, which dumps into the Pacific Ocean, eleven years before Lewis and Clark made it to that country.

Grand Portage, then, was a stepping-off point for a huge enterprise that Koster loves to talk about. Just outside of his canvas lean-to, a deer hindquarter and a buffalo roast, impaled with a spit, hang over an open fire. Visitors sit on bales of hay or canvas bundles of the same size. The bundles, wrapped with rope, represent the packs that the voyageurs carried over portages and sat on when they paddled their canoes, which had no seats. One is a cooler covered up to look like a bundle.

Koster, who is in his late forties, admits, I’m too old and too fat to be a voyageur. He works for the National Park Service from May to October and is a freelance historian and consultant specializing in the fur trade. There are more than forty reenactments about the fur trade a year in Minnesota and Wisconsin alone. Grand Portage is one of the bigger and more popular ones. Grand Portage was the exact site where a real rendezvous took place, Koster says. That’s what makes this one so special. He says the reenactment of the Grand Portage rendezvous began at least as far back as the 1970s. It took over everything and became a profession, he says. It’s a strange life—dressing funny and doing old stuff. He adds, The kids just absolutely love it.

Koster smokes a small, traditional pipe, made of kaolin, that he bought from a man who specializes in making them. On this day, Koster wears blueand-white-striped stockings, a finger-woven wool garter,