Three hundred and thirty years ago, give or take a year, on June 29, French visitors to the homelands of the Dakota people, traveled for the first time into the Minnesota River or Wakpa Mni Sota, as it was known to the Dakota. There were five Frenchmen in the group, one of them named Pierre-Charles Le Sueur, who had just come into the region of the Dakota. The Frenchmen named the river after the saint whose feast day was June 29: St. Pierre or St. Peter.
Pierre Le Sueur mentioned that entrance of the French in the Minnesota River many years later, in conversations with French map makers in Paris, while explaining the French name of the river. He said that the river was given the name because it was “discovered some time ago on St. Peter’s [St. Pierre] Day and because of the five of us at the time, a Jes[uit] & 4 adventurers, there were 3 named Peter [Pierre].” Le Sueur gave no year for this event except to say that he first came to the Dakota country in 1683.
Before this date, no Frenchmen had mentioned the Minnesota River. Even Father Louis Hennepin who traveled up the Mississippi River and the tributary Rum River all the way to Mille Lacs Lake in 1679 and 1680, failed to mention going by the mouth of the Minnesota River. This may be because of the location of the large island Wita Taåka, now known as Pike Island, concealed the mouth of the river. Hennepin and other Frenchmen may have thought the water flowing around the island was simply a backwater on the Mississippi.
The Minnesota River or Rivière St. Pierre, known to the Dakota as the Wakpa Mni Sota (or in Pierre Le Sueur’s transcription, the “Ouatebamenisouté”) is shown at left on Guillaume DeLisle’s 1702 map of the region.
As a result of the “discovery” by the French of a river well known to the Dakota and other Indigenous people, Nicolas Perrot led a ceremony on May 8, 1689, at the French fort of St. Antoine, on Lake Pepin, taking “possession,” in the name of Louis XIV, of the entire Upper Mississippi region, one of many applications of the European colonialist Doctrine of Discovery. The details of the claim include a kind of inventory of Dakota groups, under names not well known later, and suggestions about where these groups were located. The document stated that the French had visited and thereby claimed
Pierre Le Sueur’s explanation for the meaning of the French name for the Minnesota River clears up a historical mystery about the origins of the name. William H. Keating, a geologist who accompanied the expedition of Major Stephen H. Long in the region in 1823 (Narrative of an Expedition, 2:335-336) wrote: “It has been, we know not upon what authority, suggested that the French name of the river, St. Pierre, was a corruption of the Sans pierres (without stones) said to have been given to it, because no stones occur along it bank for a considerable distance from its mouth.”
Regardless of the merits of this description of the river’s geology, Pierre Le Sueur’s account shoots this theory out of the water. As the editor of Zebulon Pike’s journals, Elliott M. Coues states, it was “too good to be true” anyway, though Coues also argued against the idea that the river was named after the saint at all, suggesting other more famous 17th century Frenchmen named Pierre or St. Pierre. Warren Upham, in his work Minnesota Geographic Names (page 3), was closer to the truth when he said that the French name was given in honor of Pierre Le Sueur himself. It is clear that he was only partly right.
For more information on Pierre Le Sueur’s accounts of his time among the Dakota, see Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, published by MHS Press in 2012. The DeLisle map above is in the collections of the Library of Congress.
It’s easy to find the Mill City Museum. Just look beneath the Gold Medal Flour sign on the west side of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. As I approached, in 2005, the old limestone walls of the Washburn Crosby A mill containing the museum within their shell, I could feel the goose bumps starting. This was where it all began. On Wednesday night Sept. 23, 1903 close to 1,500 Washburn Crosby Co. Employees walked out, past a notice that “All employees of this mill leaving their positions are discharged and are no longer in the employ of the company.” Executive William Dunwoody vowed to “fight until the finish”. The company would never negotiate with a labor union. Minneapolis would never be the same.
As I crossed Second Street toward the museum entrance I could almost hear the pounding of the hammers erecting a huge stockade fence around the milling district as over a thousand pickets shouted “scab” and threw the occasional brick. It was immediately clear that Dunwoody and company president James Stroud Bell intended to end the evil presence of unions in the mills. In order to neutralize the surprisingly effective shutdown the company outfitted a vacant Pillsbury oatmeal mill to house and feed over eight hundred nonunion replacements that were smuggled through the picket lines in heavily guarded carriages. In a battle of attrition the under-funded union gradually crumbled. On October 8, 1903, an unnamed miller told the Minneapolis Tribune that the “backbone of the strike is broken, and there will be nothing more doing in the way of strikes for some time.” Although a few strikers would be rehired “the orators, organizers and agitators were not wanted.” This would be the policy in the mills for the next thirty three years. A faded Gold Medal Flour sign on the east side of St. Paul, photographed in 1981 by Bruce White
Ridiculous, you say? Not at all. On April 11, 1919 the National War Labor Board ruled that the Minneapolis mill companies had to bargain collectively with organized employees. Two weeks later Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby set up a new committee system. Employees would elect representatives to meet with company directors to discuss any issues involving their work. Employees were also sent an “Industrial Creed” that announced that “Labor and Capital are partners, not enemies.” The Minneapolis Labor Review recognized a company union immediately and expressed great surprise “that suddenly the great milling corporations are taking a deep interest in their welfare.”
Jean Spielman, organizer for Local 92 of the flour mill workers union, explained the nature of the deception to large labor rallies. The company committees would advise the company but had no power whatsoever. Faced with an educated and skeptical workforce, Washburn Crosby created The Eventually News (meaning that someday it would actually report the news?) to promote employee loyalty. In addition to sports and holidays, however, the paper reported on the joint conferences between executives and the committees. The paper was a dismal failure. In a July 1920 election only 321 Washburn-Crosby employees out of 1,400 voted for committee representatives. Pianos and tanning parlors had received a stony thumbs down.
The Gold Medal Flour sign above Mill City Museum in Minneapolis
John Crosby had had enough. The con job had failed, it was time for the dirty tricks department. The Marshall Service of Kansas City was hired to plant undercover detectives in each plant at a cost of $10,000 per year. The agents rapidly befriended union organizers and officers. Once inside Local 92 they relayed lists of union members to Pillsbury and Washburn Crosby. While the companies slowly found excuses to fire union members the fourteen agents discredited union leaders and encouraged conflict among various factions within the union. The coup de grace came in August of 1921 when one of the detectives was elected secretary of the union. The Marshall Service inquired if the mills wanted the union completely destroyed or wanted its agents to control it in a weakened state to forestall outside organizers. The millers enthusiastically endorsed the second option.
But these weren’t the only detectives in the flour mills. The Citizens Alliance, heavily funded by Pillsbury and Washburn-Crosby, started a Free Employment Bureau in 1919 to supply Minneapolis industries with nonunion workers. To get a job selected workers were required to report on union activities at their job sites. Very crude, according to Luther Boyce of the Northern Information Bureau. Boyce’s more “professional” agents had infiltrated the Industrial Workers of the World and sold his intelligence to the millers and to other industrial subscribers. There were also the forty six agents of the Committee of thirteen that were funded by the same companies and the…. You get the picture. Was one of the mill girls a spy? Perhaps a better question would be, would the mills allow any workers to cavort without keeping an eye on them? Very unlikely. Not exactly the happy family reported in The Eventually News or presented in the museum exhibit.
I stumbled slightly as a college-aged foreign exchange student bounced off my shoulder on his way around a cool looking piece of mill machinery. I’m a sucker for antique machines, particularly when the long belt drives are running. I followed him to two small antique roller mills standing placidly as if waiting for a power belt to engage. It’s hard to imagine such small machines revolutionizing an industry and feeding a nation. My eyes strayed toward the small kids frolicking in the water lab and there, down at knee level on a small display board was Jean Spielman! I couldn’t believe it. I had to crouch down to read the 1920 quote, “It is a sad commentary upon civilization that an industry flourishing to the extent as the flour milling industry is, that the workers are the most underpaid next to the steel industry. The twelve hour day is still a fact in many a flour mill in the U.S.” Below this industry spokesman William Edgar insisted that wages in the mills had “advanced steadily since the outbreak of war.”
A very short note beneath these quotes explained that the flour packers struck for higher wages in 1917 and soon afterwards most Minneapolis mill workers joined Local 92. And that’s all folks. That’s the one and only mention of a union in the Mill City Museum. Without any further discussion the museum visitor can only conclude that Washburn Crosby was forever more a union shop. Of course, one year later the union was a mere shell controlled by company spies. Upstairs the gift shop sells copies of MillCity, a book that was produced to complement the museum. Here we learn that “By 1921 the union was in tatters. . . .” Why did museum curators decide to eliminate this simple explanation? Jean Spielman and the members of his union knew what was going on in 1921, so why is this knowledge denied the museum visitor in 2005? Spielman wrote that “the stool pigeon is to be found everywhere a union is contemplated among the employees of a mill.” Washburn Crosby and the Citizens Alliance may have defeated Spielman but they certainly didn’t fool him.
It was time for my Flour Tower tour. I wound my way between a huge harvest table and several General Mills product displays. One featured the 1991 Twins World Series wheaties box. I wedged myself into the top corner of a huge freight elevator above a twitching, squirming bunch of school children. The wooden slat doors slapped together and the elevator started slowly rising. Each floor had been cleverly designed to represent a floor in a working mill. With a loud whirring noise the belts began to move, the machines came to life. A collective ooh escaped the from the kids. This was very cool.
We finally stopped at the seventh floor where the doors opened to reveal the mill manager’s office, recreated in great detail. Right down to the production schedule and engine schematics. The back window filled with panoramic views of the Minneapolis milling district as a sonorous voice told us “the mills stood at St. Anthony Falls in their corona of flour dust like blockhouses guarding the rapids of the river.” The screen dissolved into golden wheat fields as a pompous Chamber of Commerce voice asked, ”Where is a market to be found for all this flour? The answer is, the world is our market.” The jaunty westward ho sound of Copeland’s Rodeo played in the background.
A Gold Medal flour sign on the east side of St. Paul, photographed in 1981 by Bruce White
It was just like one of those old industrial propaganda films I used to watch in grade school. I’m embarrassed to say that I was the nerdy kid that knew how to thread the 16-mm projector so I saw a lot of these hideous things. Forty years later I discovered that many of them had been produced by the National Association of Manufacturers public relations department under the direction of Harry Bullis of General Mills. The same Harry Bullis who started his career working on The Eventually News. In both cases, the propaganda was intended to promote free enterprise and suppress unions and radical political movements.
On the way back down the elevator stopped at several different floors where mill equipment was whirring away. The voices of real workers told us about production quotas, returning servicemen taking women’s jobs, unsafe working conditions and finally the day the plant shut down with no warning. Real workers with real problems, this was good stuff. On the final floor the designers had simulated an engine fire that flashed and roared. After an extremely loud dust explosion the set went dark. Several small children in front of me sobbed in terror.
The flour tower deserves its various awards. The realism of the sets and the sincerity of the workers voices was riveting. But what did the workers do about all these problems? Did they join a union and negotiate for improvements? The curators never seem to grasp the concept of a working class. They found the workers, but they treat them all as individuals. Their only unity is their function in the complex machinery of the mill. They are never allowed to join together, to become a working class, to join a union. As I stepped off the elevator it hit me. It wasn’t just the newsreel, the entire museum was a sort of industrial propaganda stage set. With a little modern public relations thrown in.
How and why had the antiunion activities of the Citizens Alliance and the struggles of Minneapolis workers to organize unions been rejected by the museum curators? Fortunately in 2005, I was writing an article for a respectable local publication. Doors opened, before I knew it. I was getting a behind the scenes view of the flour tower and long interviews with head curator Kate Roberts and Minnesota Historical Society Director Nina Archabal, two very smart, smooth and enthusiastic supporters of the Mill City Museum. I was also given planning documents for various stages of museum development. In August of 2000 the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Center plan included a labor exhibit which included a hiring hall, a speakers corner and text on immigration, the Cooper’s Union and women workers—Unfortunately, no Citizens Alliance, and without them you can’t really tell the history of class struggle that created our unique Minnesota heritage. What happened to the labor exhibit? A round table discussion with selected scholars urged “the team to cut back the number of topics covered in the exhibits, and to focus interpretation on stories more directly related to the mill building.” The enlightened team now concentrated on the forces that fed Minneapolis’ emergence as the Mill City: Power, Production, Promotion and People. The four Ps. Caught in the strainer of this gibberish, labor was discarded.
I asked both Kate Roberts and Nina Archabal who decided not to have the Citizens Alliance in the museum and when it was decided. Kate couldn’t remember. It had been a long and very fluid process, and she couldn’t remember anyone ever talking about the Citizens Alliance. They, of course, knew all about the Citizens Alliance. MHS had financed a decade of research on the employers association and then published my own book A Union Against Unions. MHS Press promotional material says that the “Citizens Alliance in reality engaged in class warfare. It blacklisted union workers, ran a spy network to ferret out union activity, and, when necessary, raised a private army to crush its opposition with brute force.” In my conversation with her in 2005, Nina Archabal deflected the question, indicating that these were curatorial decisions. “The museum was Kate’s baby,” she said.
These were the people that had to know the answer, but they were suffering from collective amnesia. This was even better than Nixon or Bush in the logic department. How could you remember deciding something if you never even considered it? What did George W. Bush call this? Disassembling.
That day of my first visit to Mill City Museum, as I walked back through the museum I noticed a plaque with the Mill City Museum motto written on it. Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, what happened here continues to shape your world. Too True! The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance, forged in the 1903 mill strike, still exists in 2005. The organization was renamed Associated Industries of Minneapolis in 1937 and became Employers Association, Inc. in 1985.
How does this organization continue to shape our world? Through its labor relations membership services it still manages a war, albeit a more subtle war, against labor unions. In 1994 it led the court battle to protect the right of Minnesota businesses to replace union employees during a strike. This, of course, has led to the decertification of numerous unions. The 1939 Minnesota Labor Relations Law, written for Associated Industries by the lawyers of the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey and Whitney (which coincidentally has long done legal work for the Minnesota Historical Society), is still used to restrict union activities. The Taft Hartley Act, which was modeled after the Minnesota law, still suppresses the organization and spread of labor unions across the country.
And who belongs to Employers Association Inc.? As of 1997 the membership included General Mills, Dayton Hudson, Norwest Corp. In short, many of the companies that formed the Citizens Alliance in 1903, lost the Battle of Deputies Run in 1934 and rewrote U.S. Labor laws after the depression have now paid for a museum that just happens to totally ignore the legacy of class warfare that they created. And it gets even stranger. The primary fund raiser and, according to Nina Archabal, the inspiration for the entire museum was David Koch, President of the Minnesota Historical Society. Mr. Koch (who at least is not that David Koch, the well known funder of conservative causes) was formerly the CEO of Graco, an important donor and a member of Employers Association, Inc.
In the end, of course, responsibility is not the important issue. The Mill City Museum now exists beneath the Gold Medal Flour sign, inside the crumbling walls of the Washburn A Mill. But where are the men and women who struggled for economic justice while they built Minneapolis stone by stone? Many of them fought and bled on our streets in a desperate attempt to establish a decent life, a life beyond brutal servitude. Don’t they at least deserve to have their place in history? “Museums change,” Director Archabal told me, “new exhibits will be developed. If we discover that we’ve left something out we can go back and take another look at it.” The Working Class is waiting.
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Seven years after my first visit to Mill City Museum I went back to scour the mill city museum again searching for the working class. The museum exhibits have not changed. The new exhibits mentioned by Nina Archabal have not been developed. The Flour Tower extravaganza also remains unchanged. MHS curators presumably have yet to perceive any need for improving their award winning production.
However, to at least succeed in entertaining visitors in our oh-so-modern hyperactive world they added a frenetic wacky video by Minneapolis humorist and writer Kevin Kling, “Minneapolis in 19 Minutes Flat.” Determined to see everything I very reluctantly followed a large group of fidgeting children—squirming children are the mainstay of MHS museums and historic sites—into the theater. Apparently conceived of and made for either squirming children or adults with exceedingly short attention spans, the show careens through history with dizzying speed. Pop-up cut outs, Kling in an endless parade of period costumes, and the live shrieks of tethered children complete the disorienting experience. Although I’m a fan of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, I like my history slow, detailed, and serious.
As the 19th and 20th century flashed by I almost missed the best “bit.” Refocusing on the screen after a brief glare at the writhing grade-school child next to me, I was amazed to be watching a newsreel clip of the 1934 Teamsters strike. The voice-over mentioned the long years of struggle between the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and the union as National Guard troops scurried across the screen. The voice announced a union victory and then we were swept on to the next frantic event.
Perhaps in the world of museum speak this forty-second “bit” is considered an adequate presentation. This is, after all, an industrial museum and workers are well, just workers. They aren’t the founders of the city that are endlessly written about and glorified in history books and museums. In order to build great mills and buildings, however, the founders had to control what happened in the city. This is an important part of the Recipe for a MillCity. The founders of the city of Minneapolis spent vast amounts of time and money to control the laws, courts, police and to spy on and root out any threat to their domination of industry. They made Minneapolis into a city where the vast majority (workers) struggled to survive while the mill owners basked in a life of luxury. A city where employers profits necessitated the poverty of tens of thousands of hard working citizens. I’m afraid forty seconds doesn’t quite do justice to the complex history of industrial warfare in Minneapolis, a history that still has an impact on the lives of all working Americans.
Janet D. Spector, who died on September 13, 2011, worked in the 1980s with Dakota people to study the history of Little Rapids, a 19th-century Dakota village site on the Minnesota River. This work led to her pioneering book What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Spector’s work was pioneering not just for the topic—the historical village and the roles of the men and women who lived there—but also for the methods employed, the collaborative nature of the work itself and what it represented about the connected fields of anthropology and archaeology.
As a feminist, Spector was interested in questions about the roles of women in communities and the ways in which the gendered roles of men and women are represented in the archaeological record. Before her time, anthropologists and archaeologists usually wrote about men and what was viewed as their primary roles in many societies. This began to change in the 1970s when cultural anthropologists and ethnohistorians who applied anthropological concepts to history, started to take the role of women more seriously. In the introduction to the influential 1983 book The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, Patricia Albers (a longtime friend and colleague of Janet Spector’s) wrote: “The side of Plains Indian life most often seen by the American public is the male half. It is the male-dominated universe of native diplomacy, warfare, and hunting that has captured the attention of national image-makers in Hollywood, New York, and Toronto.” The same was true in academic studies. Except for Sacagawea and a few others, women were “conspicuous by their absence in the historical literature on the Native Plains.”
Janet Spector, 1991, at White Bear lake, with a group of students, including archaeologist Randy Withrow in the background. Withrow was one of the students who worked with Spector on the Little Rapids project.
White academics did not write about women in part because they believed that women’s work was uninteresting. In historical accounts, women were viewed as “drudges” who did a lot of manual labor, but who had little power or influence over trade, diplomacy, religion, or countless other topics of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians. This view was, in fact, an illusion based on the inability of those academics to actually see women and what they did, and the projection of European-American values onto Native communities in the past and present. If, for example, women cut wood, made gardens, built houses, cooked meals, scraped hides, and carried heavy burdens, this was viewed by European men and later anthropologists as the sign of their subjection, their lack of power in these communities. Unseen was the role that women might play in community decisions or in ceremonies or in interactions with traders or diplomats.
In an essay in The Hidden Half, Alice Kehoe noted that the inability to see women’s experiences and contributions with clarity was due to the “shackles of tradition,” not the traditions of Native people, but the traditions of Europeans, including “the Victorian notion of Ladies’ frailty,” which survived in classical anthropology along with many other European folk notions about women. Spector herself contributed to The Hidden Half, writing a paper on “Male/ Female Task Differentiation Among the Hidatsa,” intended to further the development of an “archaeological approach to the study of gender.” If archaeologists could differentiate the tasks that men and women did among the Hidatsa and relate that to the tools they used, it would be possible to look for evidence of the varying activities of men and women when studying the archaeological evidence left in the ground. Spector, however pointed out that simplistic notions of a Native division of labor and the tools related to it could not substitute for grounded knowledge. In this case Spector’s work was aided by earlier anthropologists, including Gilbert Wilson, who had documented the role of women in Hidatsa society (see, for example Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden.).
Shortly after the publication of The Hidden Half, Spector and Margaret Conkey published a 1984 paper on “Archaeology and the Study of Gender,” which dealt more fully with a critique of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology at the time. This work can be viewed as the beginning of feminist archaeology, one which continues to inspire many archaeologists. (A Google search today for the phrase “Conkey and Spector” comes up with almost 5,000 hits.) By 1984 Spector had already spent four years studying the Little Rapids site. She had approached her work with the same gendered task-differentiation model described in the 1983 article on the Hidatsa. But she also realized that while she might be breaking new ground in terms of gender and archaeology, she was facing cultural issues: she was a non-Dakota person studying the Dakota. Spector’s feminist approach meant that she understood the problems created when a person of privilege studies a less privileged society.
For women in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, this understanding was inescapable, because of the power relationships in colleges and universities. In many disciplines women were rare, and it was difficult for them to gain respect of colleagues and administrators. In a 1994 interview (available in pdf form), Spector noted that after she was hired by the University of Minnesota Department of Anthropology in 1973, she began to hear from colleagues that she was an “affirmative action hire,” and that another archaeologist hired at the same time was “the real hire.” Because women were treated as though they were not entitled to the positions they obtained, they may not have developed the same sense of entitlement and privilege that male colleagues did. They understood the problematic nature of the very positions they held and the way those in such positions exerted their power in relation to the living people who were affected by their work. In fact, feminism was one of the intellectual movements that lead to a greater understanding of how academics exerted their power and a greater concern that this power be used carefully and with humility.
In this same period, in the United States, the position of the anthropologist and the archaeologist was being called into question in Native American communities, where many in the field had worked with few problems for generations. While it might be possible for the anthropologist to go to the other side of the world and enter non-western communities with the same sense of entitlement as they had in the past, this was less and less possible inside the United States. Archaeologists could not routinely excavate Native American burial sites as they had done in the past. Anthropologists working in the United States could not avoid questions about what they were doing in the communities where they worked and what would happen to the information collected, where it would end up, and who would control its use.
In What This Awl Means, Spector explained:
Those of us who produce knowledge about other people hold a powerful and privileged position. Male domination of the field of anthropology has produced distortions about women in many cultural settings and time periods. Similarly, Indian people have had little part in producing archaeological knowledge about their past, and archaeologists have surely produced and perpetuated similar distortions about Indian histories and cultures. I did not want to do this. I no longer wanted to investigate the archaeology of Indian people unless their perspectives and voices were incorporated into the work (What This Awl Means, 13).
Working with Native American sites and in Native American communities meant thinking through more carefully who you were, where you were coming from, and how you intended to interact with the people whose communities you were studying. And that process of thinking it through was as rich a part of your research as the ostensible topic of your work.
Spector got in touch with a professor of Indigenous Studies, Chris Cavender/ Mato Nunpa, who was descended, she later learned, from Mazomani, one of the leaders of the Little Rapids village up until the community left that site in the 1850s. After several meetings, Mato Nunpa and Spector developed plans to work together with students and other faculty in further excavation guided by Dakota people, during the summer of 1986. The resulting collaboration with Mato Nunpa, his relatives, and others and the knowledge and insights it provided is discussed in detail in What This Awl Means.
The book is not a long one, but it is satisfying and thought provoking. Much of Spector’s archaeological work was ethnographic. She studied archaeological sites to obtain a cultural understanding of people in the past. More than that, she sought to relate that past to the living culture of the descendants of the people she studied: The relationships Spector had with living Dakota people were not a means of accomplishing an archaeological study of a site, but were bound up in the project itself. Readers gain insights into a Dakota village at an important moment in time, shortly before their exile from Minnesota, and at the same time learn from the perspectives of the Dakota who returned to Minnesota from that exile. Few other books documenting Minnesota’s past combine so effectively archaeology and the living history of the people who lived at a place in the past. In fact, there are few archaeological works of any kind that show the same commitment to bringing alive the subjects of their research.
Unfortunately for the health and vitality of the fields of anthropology and archaeology, Spector stopped teaching in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Anthropology in the late 1980s. She then moved on to accomplish a great deal in the University’s Commission on Women. Its goal was, as Spector put it, “to develop a kind of system-wide, systematic plan of action to improve the climate for women” (see 1994 interview in pdf form), and Spector was given “carte blanche.” She later described the process of work as a form of ethnography:
I started with what I thought of as ethnographic interviews, starting with people I knew, and then expanding out. I asked people three questions. I said, “Tell me what you see as major obstacles and barriers for women—just in your experience.” This was both men and women, predominately women, but I did talk to men, department chairs, deans. I asked everybody to tell me anything successful that had happened to improve or make their climate better, anything, formal or informal. Then I asked everybody to tell me their vision of the transformed university.
From Spector’s work developed The Minnesota Plan Two, which outlined “a kind of framework for change” and lead to the establishment of a system-wide commission on women for the entire Minnesota university system. For these efforts, Spector will be remembered far beyond her work in anthropology and archaeology. More details on this aspect of her work are found in an obituary by Barbara Noble. There are other obituaries online, including one from her home town of Madison, Wisconsin.
I was fortunate to be a student of Spector’s starting in 1986, when I entered the graduate program in anthropology. Although I was not there to major in archaeology, she was my faculty adviser in the work I did on Ojibwe photographs. I was seeking to combine anthropology and history in ways that were not exactly comfortable for other anthropologists. She encouraged me in every way she could. She was the right person to be advising a student who was interested in looking at historical photographs and how they reflected the culture and history of Ojibwe people in Minnesota, who wanted to talk to Ojibwe people today about those photographs, and who wanted to make those interactions as much a part of my research as the historical context and content of the photographs. Perhaps because of her revolutionary perspective on academic privilege, or perhaps because she was also a loving person, she was not afraid to be a friend to her students, to share good food and to socialize (often in boats). I could not have found anyone better to guide me. I am certain that without her help I would never have completed my graduate work in 1993. She was a good friend and colleague in so many ways. Thank you, Janet.
There are people who are concerned that nothing will be done to tell the story of the white people in 1862. They seem to believe that what happened to white people that year has yet to be told and that this topic will be neglected once again when the 150th anniversary of those events is noted next year.
I am not sure I know why people are worried. For myself I am worried for entirely different reasons. Since 1862 the public story of the events of that year has been largely about the experiences and points of view of whites. As the winners of the battles of 1862 and the years that followed, white people wrote the history books in which they imprinted their points of view about 1862. And having exiled the Dakota people from the land which the Dakota had named, white people also imprinted their points of view in the Minnesota landscape on dozens, maybe hundreds, of historic markers and monuments in which the record of what happened to white people in 1862 was fixed again and again.
Milford Monument, one of many in Minnesota, inscribed with the names of white settlers killed in 1862.
Here is a list of monuments still standing in Brown County Minnesota, which relate to the experiences of whites in 1862 (included in a pdf from the Brown County Historical Society):
Milford Monument. This beautiful granite monument includes a carved statue, cross and tablets inscribed with names of Milford settlers killed during the Dakota Conflict in 1862. County Road 29, 7 miles west of New Ulm.
Ravine Ambush Marker. A Civil War recruiting party was ambushed here at the outbreak of the Dakota Conflict on August 18,1862. Four men lost their lives. County Road 29, 6 1/2 miles west of New Ulm, on north side of road. D
Fort Hanska (Commonly called Fort Hill). Fort Hanska was a log stockade structure built at this location after the Dakota Conflict of 1862. A marker at Lake Hanska County Park tells the archaeological and historic story of this area. A depression marks the spot where a dugout sheltered pioneers from the War and from the weather. Open daylight hours. County Road 11, 3 1/2 miles southwest of Hanska.
John Armstrong Marker. Marks the site where John Armstrong was killed on September 7, 1862, during the Dakota Conflict. Located 1 1/2 miles northeast of Hanska on Hwy 257 north of Linden Lake.
Defenders Monument. This dramatic monument was erected in 1891 by the State of Minnesota to honor the memory of the defenders who aided New Ulm during the Dakota Conflict of 1862. The frieze was created by New Ulm artist Anton Gag. Center and State Street.
Roebbecke Mill Site. A windmill erected on this site in 1859 was used as a defense outpost and was destroyed by fire by the LeSueur Tigers in the second battle of New Ulm during the Dakota Conflict of 1862.
Leavenworth Rescue Expedition Marker. Plaque commemorating the 11 men killed while rescuing settlers from the Leavenworth area during the Dakota Conflict of 1862 is at Garden and 5th North streets.
Dakota Hotel Site. New Ulm’s famous Dakota Hotel was built on this site in 1858. During the Dakota Conflict it served as a hospital and refuge for women and children. The hotel closed in 1971 and was demolished in 1972. A plaque now commemorates its history. 111 North Minnesota Street.
During the same period when many of these monuments and plaques were erected, history textbooks provided the text and sub-text for them. T. H. Kirk, Conductor of the Winona Normal School, wrote in detail about 1862 in a history of Minnesota, “for citizens and general readers,” published in 1887. The author wrote of the “passions,” albeit ones motivated by “heartless traders, and no less fraudulent government traders,” and even some “avaricious settlers,” which caused the Dakota “like the waves of an angry flood” to sweep “down the Minnesota valley.” After taking the story through the execution of the 38 Dakota in December 1862, the author concluded:
Who that did not see shall fitly depict the sufferings of those August and September days, the fortitude of mothers bereft of their children, the self sacrifice of kindred for kindred, and the heroic courage of citizen and soldier in desperate siege and on weary marches by night and day? Alas for Minnesota! The Star of the North, which had so lately and proudly arisen, suddenly waned and lingered wavering on the clouded horizon of future events.
Nothing in these fulsome words was meant to apply to the Dakota, any Dakota at all. There was nothing at all in the book about the exile of the entire Dakota people from Minnesota, their suffering, nor of the subsequent military campaigns on the plains, not just against the Dakota, but against many other tribes which the United States managed to turn into enemies in the process. Thirty years of war against the people of the Plains was missing from the narrative perhaps because it took place outside the borders of the state.
Narratives like this have been common for many generations in Minnesota. Only occasionally has a white author considered that the Dakota were worthy of sympathy or that it was mistake to punish the entire nation for all that happened in 1862. Even when an author tried to write clearly and sympathetically about the Dakota and their experience of 1862, the message did not stick. It was not until several generations had passed that certain among the white could propose the possibility that the traditional white points of view might be narrow and harsh. Clara Searle Painter and Anne Brezler, in Minnesota Grows Up, a geography textbook published in 1936, wrote:
There are people still living in Minnesota whose families were killed in the Sioux Uprising. They are very bitter against the Indians. Today we are safe and secure from Indian attacks in our homes. We are no longer afraid of the Indians. We are beginning to think of them, not as enemies, but as people. They have good points and bad points, just like the rest of us.
The fact that it took so many years to reach even this feeble point of view is significant, but the book did not discuss how it was that the entire Dakota people were exiled from their homeland. And the statement did nothing to change popular views about the Dakota. At the time of Minnesota Statehood Centennial of 1958, a souvenir booklet (“Minnesota Centennial Train, 1858, 1958”) designed to “reflect the total personality of our State,” included the following summary of 1862:
The sullen brooding of the Sioux Indians fans into a flame that brings them thundering down from the hills against the white pioneers. Follows the relentless massacres of helpless settlers in the Minnesota valley. Fort Ridgely and New Ulm. From behind the cabin, shack and wagon, the besieged settlers defend their families until the yelling hordes sweep over them, goaded by myriad causes–hunger, non-payment and bitterness.
The grudging acknowledgment that there might have been causes to what occurred in 1862 is marred by the tone and the words, as if bitterness might be an aspect of personality rather than the result of actual historical events in which whites created the causes for the events that occurred.
Such points of view die hard and have yet to be replaced by a truly balanced history. Yet now that feeble attempts have been made to tell the Dakota story, representing Dakota points of view, there are whites who long for the older predominant history, in which the Dakota were a savage people and who did a great injustice to white people.
A monument erected in 1878 at the Ness Lutheran Cemetery, marking the graves of the five white settlers killed at Acton in Meeker County, Minnesota, in what was said to be the beginning of what used to be called "The Sioux Uprising of 1862."
It will be illuminating to see what happens and what is said in 2012. I have no doubt that the story of the white people will be told again, though I wonder if that narrative will vary in tone or emphasis from the story told for the last 150 years. I also know that the Dakota story will be told in more detail than in the past. But I wonder whether whites will finally hear that story with respect and without complaint.
Mary Black Rogers, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian from Minnesota who studied the culture and history of Ojibwe and Métis communities in Canada and the United States, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on January 27, 2011.
The daughter of Fred R. Bartholomew and Stella LaVallee Bartholomew, Mary Rose Bartholomew was born on May 6, 1922, in Minneapolis, where she grew up. In the 1940s she married a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot from Texas named Alan J. Black, from whom she was later divorced. After World War II she contracted tuberculosis, which she survived after the removal of part of one lung. In 1950 she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where she received a BA in 1954 and a MA in 1958, both in Anthropology, with a focus on Native Americans. She wrote her MA thesis on “The Value System of the Winnebago Indians.”
Mary Black Rogers at Weagomow Lake, Ontario, in 1975
In 1960 she enrolled in graduate program in Anthropology at Stanford University, where she was a student of anthropologists Joseph H. Greenberg, George D. Spindler, and Paul Kay. Four years later she started her fieldwork among the Red Lake Ojibwe at Ponemah, Minnesota. In 1967 she completed her dissertation, “An Ethnoscience Investigation of Ojibwa Ontology and World View,” (authored under the name Mary B. Black) a study of the Ojibwe language and the way in which Ojibwe speakers classified the natural and human worlds, as reflected in their rich language. She described the way in which the Ojibwe saw the world around them as animate, including trees, plants, rocks, and other natural features that other cultures saw as mute, lifeless, and inanimate.
The Ojibwe elders Mary came to know at Red Lake were Native speakers, for whom English was a second language. Learning Ojibwe, viewing the elders as her teachers, she developed a special relationship with Red Lake spiritual leader Dan Raincloud, Sr. In an essay about Raincloud published in 1989, Mary wrote with gratitude of what she learned from him:
Dan always operated from the true center of “his Indian way,” whether dealing with his own people or outsiders. His distinctiveness emanated from the very centrality of the role he sustained, central to what remained of the traditional culture. This was the essence of the complex identity he imparted.
Mary also wrote about Dan Raincloud’s knowledge and about his sense of humor. She said that Raincloud had initially given her an Ojibwe nickname that he said meant “I wonder why.” It was a reflection not only of her anthropological calling, but also of the curiosity that many others who knew her saw also.
Mary was inspired by the previous work of the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, who had learned through his studies that the Ojbwa on the Berens River in Manitoba made no distinction between “natural” and “supernatural.” Ojibwe people believed, he wrote, that they obtained many of their abilities from powerful non-human beings, or spirits. Black-Rogers noted that her research at Red Lake strongly supported this idea. She wrote that the people there did not separate “special” or “magical” powers from “those which are requisite for everyday living.” Instead they included within everyday skills, “the abilities for which they must depend on non-human beings.” She wrote: “There seems to be a continuous spectrum of powers, going down to the most mundane, which are receivable from some non-human source and which are not inherent in human beings.” Such abilities might include the success at hunting, or designing and making beadwork for which a human beings needed to show gratitude for their success. At the other end of the spectrum would be things completely beyond “natural human abilities.” Both ends of the spectrum involved “supernatural” involvement; the difference was merely one of degree.
In later years, Mary applied her understandings of the way the Ojibwe at Red Lake viewed the world to analyzing the history and culture of the Ojibwe people in the past, as it was recorded in historical documents. Her influential 1985 paper, later published as “Varieties of ‘Starving’: Semantics and Survival in the Subarctic Fur Trade,” showed how an understanding of Ojibwe semantics could explain the way Ojibwe people interacted with fur traders, in complex exchanges. English words such as “starvation” or “starving”—when used by traders to describe the condition of Indian people who came to their trading posts—had much more complex Ojibwe nuances than apparent to people today or even to traders in the past.
After completing her graduate studies, Mary was hired by the anthropologist Edward S. Rogers, curator of ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, to work with him in a study of the history and culture of the Weagamow Lake (or Round Lake) Ojibwa-Cree First Nation in northern Ontario, near the Manitoba border. Subsequently she married Rogers. In their work together at Weagamow Lake, Ed and Mary developed a close relationship with the community. Mary was adopted by the elder Mamie Quequish to replace a child who had died fifty years before. Ed and Mary left Weagamow Lake for Burlington, Ontario, in 1975, but continued to have contact with the community. After his death in 1988, Edward Rogers was buried at Weagamow Lake with the permission of the community. His gravestone described him as a “Weagamow Friend.” Mary returned to the community for the burial and again in 1991 and 1994. She also received visits from community members in Burlington.
Mary Black Rogers, in 1991, with Mamie Quequish, the woman at Weagamow Lake who had adopted her 1969
After her 1991 visit she wrote in a letter to friends,
In late September, another visit to my husband’s grave was very rewarding. By bush plane north from Sioux Lookout to Weagamow Lake, Ontario, in whose cemetery he was honored to be buried in 1988, by the northern Ojibwa/ Cree people we had known for so long. It was joyful to see so many old friends and adopted family. This year it coincided with their annual feast which culminates a week of hunting and cooking in the old ways. These ways have not disappeared altogether, but the youngest echelon of Weagomow people had never seen it full-blown. This was for me a time of mourning, and also of renewal. I was happy to be able to take the trip, though it was a bit more tiring than I recall from the past.
Like her husband, Mary was interested not only the current culture but in the history of Weagamow community, many of whose members had descended from a man known as Ojicak, or Crane, in the 18th century. As a result, the community was mentioned in records of the Hudson Bay Company and governmental agencies as “The Cranes.” Mary continued to do research on “The Cranes,” in the years after returning from Weagamow, presenting her findings in articles and at conferences. In the 1980s Mary became interested in studying the history of the people of mixed European-Native marriages, sometimes called Métis. Her interest stemmed not only from her anthropological work but also from her own ancestry. Her mother Stella LaVallee was the granddaughter of Antoine Pepin, a trader and blacksmith who lived in the Coldwater Spring area near Fort Snelling in the 1830s, later moving to Little Canada, north of St. Paul.
For Mary, studying the history of people like Antoine Pepin was a “Roots” project, a link between her own family history and the broader sweep of events. Though they had long careers in the fur trade that took them across the Great Lakes and northwestern Canada, they founded local communities in Minnesota and Canada and were intermediaries socially and culturally in the fur trade and in settlement times, She saw the potential in telling a broad history through the “life histories” of particular families, which she believed would demonstrate the broad patterns in the development of the Métis people. In her later years Mary engaged in extensive research on Métis communities, presenting her ideas in conference papers and in an extensive correspondence with colleagues and Métis descendants. Her letters were as full of detail as her notes and papers, reporting her lastest finds and her newest ideas. Though she never completed her study of Pepin and other Métis, her ongoing work in showing how the large picture of Métis history could be told through individual and family histories has inspired many others to undertake such research.
My own initial knowledge of the work of Mary Black Rogers came from reading her thoughtful foreword to a published collection of Ojibwe stories entitled Clothed in Fur: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View, which included annotation about the Ojibwe culture contained in the stories. In her foreword she wrote about how story-telling among the Ojibwe was a method for teaching young people about the culture. She herself had learned Ojibwe culture from hearing such stories, when doing her fieldwork. She remembered how impatient she had been in hearing such stories, with the “strange happenings and seemingly irrelevant connections and unexplained motivations” contained in them. Yet she noted that when Ojibwe children were told such stories they were not as impatient. They could deal with the unknown because there was much they did not understand about life in general. Mary wrote:
I have observed children enjoying a story immensely even when large portions remain beyond their understanding. They apparently can accept those parts, like so much in their daily experience, rest upon knowledge yet to be attained, contain clues to a future unraveling of the mystery of life—the still largely mysterious life of the adults around them.
Mary compared the reactions of children to acceptance many people have in reading mystery stories, which contain puzzles but also of the promise of an understanding to be reached in the end. She concluded:
The readers of this book will receive some outside help in western-culture style, since the authors have generously provided explanatory keys to the Ojibwa doors to life. But please, dear reader, don’t cheat and look at the ethnographic sections first. Be like the child of the culture, or at least like the ethnographer—trust that the meaning is there; proceed as thought the only way to find it is the hard way—by living, and wondering.
When I read these words they were inspirational, but I did not understand the extent to which they came from a complex, nuanced mind, one capable of extremely detailed analysis of culture and history. In 1984 my friend John Fierst and I both had research to do at the Hudson Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg, where Ed and Mary were working on The Cranes, the people of Weagamow Lake. They seemed as eager to know about our research as they were in telling us about theirs. We had several good meals with them, (at Ed’s expense, I think) and had a delightful time. Because Mary was working on her Roots research, relating to Minnesota history, I often saw her and corresponded with her in the following years.
Like many others, I soon became the recipient of long, richly detailed letters, full of information, ideas, and an amazing energy that came from someone who in person gave the misleading impression of being frail. After Ed’s death she started to spend part of the year in Minneapolis for research at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. She and I often went to lunch at It’s Greek to Me, or any other Greek restaurant that might happen to be nearby. The last time I saw her was in 2007, when she came to the launch party for my book and we had lunch at Christo’s. Now I wish that I could talk with her again, but reading her articles, her rich letters, I feel again the inspiration of her energy, her knowledge, and her understanding. Even though she is gone, our conversations with Mary and her ideas will continue.
Those interested in reading some of Mary’s many published essays and articles should know that during her professional career her work was published under several names. Her first work was published under the name Mary Bartholomew Black or Mary B. Black. Later on, after her marriage to Edward Rogers her name was usually given as Mary Black-Rogers or Mary Black Rogers, without the hyphen. Eventually I hope to put together a more complete bibliography. For now, most of her essay on her adoption at Weagamow Lake can be read online at Google books.
In honor of the recent snowstorm of December 11, 2010, the 12-11-10 Blizzard, which hit a good part of southern Minnesota, here’s an article I wrote in 1986, on the history of Minnesota’s blizzards and how they were viewed by the people who lived through them. The article makes the point that weather is one of the characteristics of Minnesota that has helped to create a regional culture in this place.
Blizzard Tales: When the weather outside is frightful, Minnesotans go for a walk
By Bruce White Minnesota Monthly, December 1986.
My neighbor shovels snow like there is no tomorrow. This is the same guy who vacuums his lawn in the summer. When the first flakes begin to fall, he is out there with his broom and shovel, grooming the driveway. He continues his ministrations on an hourly basis throughout the storm. You have to hand it to him, though: When it stops snowing, he is finished shoveling, unlike the rest of us.
I first became aware of his snow-shoveling habits several years ago, during the famed pre-Thanksgiving Day storm of 1983. That was the day I went out—while the snow was still coming down thick and fast—to shovel the sidewalk and locked myself out of the house. My neighbor was happy to lend me the screwdriver with which I tried to pry open a storm window. I smashed the thing when it wouldn’t give.
I don’t know what it was that made me go outside that afternoon at the height of the first bad storm of the winter rather than waiting until it was over. Usually I let my wife shovel the walk. It may have been simple driveway envy. Most likely, though, it was for the same reason that my wife and I drove from Duluth to the Twin Cities during a blizzard a year later. I blame it on the Minnesota snow ethic. When a snowstorm is in full swing, you go outside. When faced with a blizzard, you drive into it.
Minnesota’s snow ethic is part of our cultural heritage. For more than 150 years, citizens of the state have been telling about the storms they survived. They carefully noted the bad-weather details in their county histories, right along with the first settler, the first white child, and what used to be called the “Sioux Uprising of 1862.”
Blizzard scene in front of State Theater, Hibbing, during the famed Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. Photographer: Al Heitman Photograph Collection, 11/11/1940, Minnesota Historical Society location no. QC2.61ca r1
These blizzard accounts all seem to describe the same storm because the worst storms, the ones that people remembered the longest, came suddenly on the heels of warm weather. One Waseca County resident gave this description of the January 7,1873, storm: “I was over at Morristown that morning. The forenoon was mild. As the day wore on, the increasing moisture made us think that the back bone of winter was broken. About 3 o’clock p.m., Sam Stevenson and I started for Waseca. Dark clouds began to gather in the west, and about the time we reached Blooming Grove, the wind was blowing a gale, producing a change in the atmosphere that chilled the marrow in one’s bones. The air was filled with blinding snow, so that you couldn’t see the horsewhip in your hand. The sun seemed to withdraw its light, and the earth seemed to tremble beneath the terrific, howling blast. I felt as though I were tied down and a thousand imps were shoveling snow into my ears and mouth.” The writer reached home “nearer dead than alive.”
The Lyon County storm of October 15, 1880, was similar. As one county history put it, the blizzard came “before the farmers had fairly started their fall work, while the grass was yet green and the insect world active.” The day began with a thunderstorm. In the evening the rain turned to snow. Two days later “the streets of Marshall, Tracy, and Minneota were packed full, the banks in many places on the north side rising almost level with the second story windows.”
The Armistice Day blizzard of 1940 is imprinted deeply on the memory of recent generations. In many ways it was the classic Minnesota blizzard. It began on the morning of November 11 as a rainstorm. Without warning, the rain turned to snow. The temperature was 40 degrees early in the morning, but it dropped steadily, and by midnight it was near zero. The abrupt change in the weather caught many people outside without proper clothing or supplies. Many were trapped in cars on the highways. Scores of people, including 20 duck hunters, died in the storm.
These blizzards claimed many unlucky victims who were taken by surprise and died because they were not prepared. But the most tragic blizzard stories are the ones about people who had a choice, who were in a safe place but decided to take their chances, ignoring all warnings. Samuel Kile died in the 1880 storm. “He was with a threshing crew at Tom Brown’s place north of Minneota,” according to the Lyon County history. “On the morning of the sixteenth he and others started for the barn to do the chores, and on the way to the barn Kile’s hat was blown off. Despite the protests of the other men, he started in pursuit of the hat in the raging blizzard. That was the last seen of the man alive. In the first part of November the body was found embedded in a snow drift, sixty rods northwest of the barn; his hat was found one and one-half miles southeast from the place.”
A history of the town of Clitherall recorded the story of a victim of an 1867 blizzard who set out from Alexandria for his home on a warm February morning. The first night he reached the town of Millerville. “The next morning the people he stayed with could see signs of a storm brewing and advised him to wait a day or two there, saying it would cost him nothing. But it was warm and he was so anxious to get home that not heeding their repeated warnings he left Millerville.” It was not until a thaw a few weeks later that his friends found his body in a snowdrift a few miles from his home.
A number of accounts in William H. Hull’s remarkable compendium of reminiscences of the Armistice Day blizzard, All Hell Broke Loose, told of the rashness of Minnesotans in that famous storm. Al Kuehl was safe and sound at his cabin on Leech Lake. “It was snowing hard on Shingabee Bay but among the pine trees, the cozy cabin and fireplace, I was so comfortable I found the intensity of the storm hard to accept. Something told me to head for home, which was at Inver Grove, 15 miles south of the Twin Cities.” He got as far as Rice, where he spent two days in a railroad section house.
Conrad Stai was teaching near Bemidji. School was let out because of the storm, and all the students were sent home around noon. Stai remembered: “After lunch I felt that a hike in a blizzard would be fun, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Blizzards were familiar to me since as a child I had walked or skied from school near Pinewood to our rural home. I had done this many times through adverse weather and had no fear.” After losing his way and staggering blindly along a country road, Stai found refuge at the home of some friends.
Reactions to the storm varied. Most people who felt the brunt of it believed themselves lucky to have survived. Yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, the danger involved, many Armistice Day survivors expressed the attitude of one man who laughed with pleasure as he drove through the drifted Minneapolis streets proclaiming, “This is a great adventure!” His view was probably not shared by many poultry farmers. There is little enjoyment in losing your entire investment in Thanksgiving turkeys.
Many people who lived through the storm did not realize the danger they faced until later—in some cases, not until they heard about all those who died. William B. Smartwood’s account of a trek through the storm concluded: “This had been the most adventurous, though exhausting trip of my life and it was some time afterwards before I fully realized our danger during that 1940 blizzard.”
One way or another, the Armistice Day blizzard left its mark on Minnesotans. Memories of the storm have remained a topic of conversation and reminiscence ever since. Henrietta Mortenson of St. Paul went back to her job the second day after the blizzard “to find a party-like atmosphere. Everyone was trading stories of where they had spent their time during the storm.” Many years later, my grandmother attended a quilting party where the women took turns telling where they were and what they did during the blizzard. Whenever anyone mentioned the Armistice Day blizzard to Georgia Enfield Schultz of Bloomington, she saw a vivid image of her father coming inside from the snow, completely covered with ice. “It has stayed with me all these years—Dad walking out of his overcoat. It stood there, all by itself, frozen in place.”
James P. Shannon spent the afternoon of the storm driving commuters home from the end of the South St. Paul streetcar line, receiving generous, unsolicited tips. Later he drove to his father’s cattle farm in St. Paul Park to get the stock fed and under cover, a job that took until late in the evening. In his family’s folklore the time was referred to as “the night Dad and Jim saved the cattle, worried Mother almost to death, and got Jim’s car paid for.”
What is it that makes people go out in a storm? And what makes blizzards the subject of such nostalgia? People don’t run after their hats in storms merely out of perversity. Often they set out in a storm because, as one Armistice Day survivor said, “Things didn’t seem too bad.” Or they have cattle to take care of or feel they just “have to get back home” if the weather is threatening. But I think people behave this way in blizzards and tell these stories simply because they share some beliefs about the weather.
In these latitudes, the ability to withstand weather is a cultural marker, if not a cherished moral value. Ojibwe people living here in the 19th century survived during winter as much because of their attitude as their clothing. Missionary Joseph A. Gilfillan told of a poorly clad Ojibwa child who woke in the middle of a cold winter night in his family’s bark-walled home. “My little son, are you cold?” his mother asked him. “Yes, I am almost cold,” the child answered.
Early white settlers of the region were often just as matter-of-fact about the weather. A fur trader named Charles Oakes was traveling on snowshoes to get supplies for his hungry, snowbound family. Before he got very far, his feet froze. Friends found him and carried him home. It was evident that he would lose his feet. “He asked for an awl, punctured his feet full of holes and had the men pour them full of brandy. This, while it was excruciatingly painful, both at the time and afterwards, saved him his feet.”
Despite such difficulties, early Minnesotans were proud of the awesome and dramatic qualities of their weather. They believed that their climate played a vital role in producing a great civilization. J. Wesley Bond, whose book Minnesota and Its Resources was published in 1852 to encourage immigration to Minnesota Territory, insisted that after living in Minnesota for two years, “I can safely say that the atmosphere is more pure, pleasant and healthful than that of any other i have ever breathed on the continent of North or South America. This is particularly the case in the winter, the most buoyant, elastic and vigorous portion of the year.” A few years later another Minnesota booster, J. A. Wheelock, announced that Minnesota’s cold, dry winters were invigorating and stimulated intellectual life and “moral growth” of the people here. He wrote that the “atmosphere of Minnesota, even in its coldest state, is a robe of Arctic furs, which holds in and stimulates the resilient fires of vital heat within the body, imparting a sense of elastic vigor and redundant animation.”
Attitudes of this kind persist. When you drive into a gas station in Isabella on a day when the temperature is in the single negative digits and the man pumping the gas is naked to the waist, you know that there are still a few Minnesotans who display redundant animation. Word seems to be finally getting out to the rest of the country. The 1985 Rand-McNally Places Rated Almanac ranked the Twin Cities 320th out of 329 contenders in the climate category but noted that the cities had “changeable weather that many find stimulating and invigorating.”
Nothing is more invigorating than a good blizzard. In an editorial printed shortly after the Armistice Day blizzard, the Minneapolis Star-Journal boasted, “It takes an old-fashioned blizzard to bring out the unbeatable spirit of Minnesotans. We’ve praised the spirit of Londoners (during the Blitz) but Minnesotans can ‘take it’ too. A fig for your balmy climate, conducive to the lassitude of which we of the Northwest are forever free!”
Going out in the worst weather imaginable is an elemental adventure. It tests your ability to deal with adversity, which explains why many otherwise sane Minnesotans are compelled to go outdoors at the height of the storm. Even if they have no pressing need to go somewhere, they start their cars using every possible means and head out onto the snow-clogged streets and highways. Armed with sand, kitty litter, chains, shovels, jumper cables, starter fluid, and other devices and concoctions that might come in handy, they rock and gun their way through the drifts.
Perhaps more important, they are psychologically prepared to deal with the immensity of winter, something that would cause acute depression and sheer panic in Californians. William E. Gladitsch decided to go duck hunting the morning of Armistice Day, 1940. The ducks were flying, and the weather was good. The storm came up while he was out on the lake, and he spent most of the day huddled in the bottom of his boat, waiting for the wind to die down so he could get back to shore. He attributed his survival to having the right gear stowed in his duck boat. But he also recalled that “when I realized I was in trouble, I remembered what my dad said to me once when I was about to do something dumb without considering the consequences. It was ‘Willie, I hope your ma didn’t raise any idiots.’ ”
In many ways, the experience of a blizzard is akin to what the pioneers went through when they settled in the wilderness, battling stumps, grasshoppers, drought, and nature in general. In other parts of the country, civilization may seem firmly established, but in Minnesota, the blizzards make you wonder if anything was ever really settled. It is up to those who decide to go for a spin when the wind is raging to re-establish civilization, as they escape from the mundane discontents of the very thing they are asserting.
At the same time, blizzards create a sense of community in the survivors. People help each other in ways that decorum might otherwise prevent. My mother, who was not married until January 1,1941, recently confessed to me that my father spent the night of November 11, 1940, on the floor of her apartment with his back to the radiator rather than driving through the storm to his place on the other side of St. Paul. Many other blizzard survivors tell of people sharing beds, cars, streetcars, and snow caves with complete strangers.
Even those who do not spend the blizzard together physically are united later by the memory of the storm. This weather-induced sense of community has helped transform Minnesota from a state marked off by an arbitrary set of political boundaries into a state of mind, a way of thinking and acting. Blizzards have contributed to turning Minnesotans, whatever their ancestral background, into a cohesive cultural group with shared values and interests.
In the last few years Minnesotans may have drifted from their hearty traditions. No longer content to thaw out the turf at Met Stadium with flame throwers for the opening of baseball season or to watch football games during blizzards, Minnesotans now lounge about inside the Metrodome. To further fuel their flight from weather, they build skyways and shopping malls to insulate themselves from all that is invigorating. Will Minnesotans lose their ability to take everything the northwest winds can dish out? Will moral degradation follow?
One promising sign is that no matter what Minnesotans do, the weather intrudes. Sure, they built the Dome. But then what happened? Along came a snowstorm to squash it. And what happened the night Walter Mondale was nominated for president? WCCO TV’s Dave Moore went on at 10 o’clock to say: “On a night when Minnesota’s native son is in San Francisco to be nominated for president, it is the weather which is the top story on the evening’s news.” That night it was tornadoes. The theater of seasons strikes again.
On the other hand, if TV stations don’t make weather their top story, they hear about it. Former Minneapolis Star and Tribune TV critic Nick Coleman took WCCO to task for not making the September 24,1985, snowfall the lead story on that night’s news broadcast. He said WCCO was not as in tune with Minnesotans as the other stations. Clearly this is the function of news in Minnesota: to remind people what they may have forgotten —that we have rigorous weather here.
This is why, almost every year during the first week of November, a small, faithful band of TV reporters and camera operators descends on the photograph collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. These newspeople are working on ritual stories on the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940. They come to view and film some of the most precious icons of Minnesota weather mythology: pictures taken by Minneapolis Star-Journal photographers showing automobiles lying in deep drifts of snow and frozen hunters stretched out in the underbrush near Red Wing.
The stories might seem annoyingly repetitive to outsiders, but the Armistice Day blizzard may be the most important story TV stations do all year. No more telling reminder of what it really means to be a Minnesotan could be found. And it doesn’t hurt to warn people at the beginning of the winter that you never know what might happen. It may be warm today, but remember 1940? When you go out for a drive in the storm, be sure to put some extra blankets in the car. And canned goods, matches, flares, chocolate bars, jigs and line for ice fishing, and maybe some extra socks. And for God’s sake put a rope around your waist when you head out to the barn!
The Ten Worst Blizzards in Minnesota History [as of December 1986]
What is it that makes a snowstorm bad? Sheer volume of snow? Size of drifts? Wind speed? For scientists, measures may suffice, but these criteria do not take into account the effects of storms on people.
To determine the impact of a storm you must also consider when it arrives, what events it disrupts, and who it hits. Meteorologist Bruce Watson, for example, says the Great Blizzard of February 13 through 15,1866, “from the standpoint of combined cold, wind, and snow . . . can be considered the worst ever in the 19th and 20th centuries” until “the storm of the century” in 1975. But Watson also points out that the 1866 blizzard began at night when most people were in bed and hit hardest between Fort Ridgely and Big Stone Lake, a sparsely populated region.
The state’s worst blizzards can’t be defined by mere statistics. A more reliable gauge is Minnesota’s local and county histories: Written by people who lived through many snowstorms, these books; provide the ultimate criterion—the authority of memory. Which snowstorms are most frequently remembered and recorded in these products of Minnesota’s collective consciousness? The following list is based on a statewide sampling of Minnesota county histories.
1871. January 7. The first blizzard experienced by large numbers of newly arrived Minnesota immigrants made a big impression. The three-day storm followed a period of above-freezing weather and many people were outdoors on their way to town when the storm hit- Many were trapped by its sudden arrival, and their bodies were not discovered until spring.
1880. October 15. This blizzard also ended a period of warm weather, dropping 15 inches of snow in some places and causing deep drifts all over. It arrived suddenly during pleasant fall weather, not in midwinter like the 1873 storm, and marked the beginning of one of the worst winters that Minnesota settlers had experienced. The 1912 history of Lyon County reports: “One of the dates from which to me is reckoned in Lyon County is the winter of 1880-81—the season of Siberian frigidity.”
1888. January 12. In southwestern Minnesota this blizzard was ushered in by a drop in temperature from 18 degrees above zero to 25 below in one hour. The so-called Great Blizzard of 1888 occurred a few months later on March 11 in the northeastern states. Weather, like other things, seems to travel slowly from the Midwest.
1892. March 9. Two storms one from the northwest and the other from the south, combined to produce winds up to 58 miles per hour. The blizzard hit northeastern Minnesota particularly hard. Residents of Duluth claimed it was the worst snowstorm they had ever seen. It stopped all activity for three days and left hard-packed drifts as high as 10 feet in the streets. People who were trapped in their offices in downtown Duluth escaped from second-story windows after the storm.
1922. February 22. In southern Minnesota there were heavy thunderstorms. Northeastern Minnesota got snow and 50-mile-per-hour winds. Residents of Clover Township, Pine County, remembered the blizzard for many years. It certainly made an impact on Dorothy Grace, who grew up to write a poem about it:
I’ve heard stories of many snowstorms,
Seen others during my years:
But, to me. this particular one,
Ranks higher than all of its peers.
1923. February 11 This storm produced 40-mile-per-hour winds and a temperature of 20 below zero. A St. Paul newspaper reported winds that plucked cigars from people’s mouths and sent loose car bumpers blowing down the middle of the empty streets. A history of Douglas County calls it one of Minnesota’s severest blizzards.
1940. November 11 and 12. Like the storm of 1873, the Armistice Day blizzard became a watchword for a generation of Minnesotans. At the time of this storm, few were alive who remembered the 1873 storm, which perhaps explains its notoriety.
1941. March 15 and 16. For northwestern Minnesota residents this storm was far worse than the famed Armistice Day blizzard. It arrived on a day when temperatures were in the 30’s. The storm traveled across Minnesota from the Red River Valley during daylight hours, stranding many people and killing more than 30. A Norman County farm woman wrote a long poem about the storm that began:
The day had been nice, also the day before.
It was March Fifteenth, 1941,
That awful nightmare for everyone.
The day had been nice, also the day before.
And no sign of what was in store.
1965. March 17. Throughout the state, from Marshall to Duluth, snow accumulated at the rate of an inch an hour All told, the St. Patrick’s Day blizzard brought 10 to 15 inches of snow and drifts up to 25 feet high. One innovation, the snowmobile, allowed food and fuel to be brought to stranded storm victims.
1975. January 10 through 12. This heavy rainstorm and subsequent blizzard with high winds and snow was immediately dubbed “the storm of the century.” It has already been recorded in many county histories published during the last 10 years, indicating that it will be remembered for a long time to come. A history of Pipestone County draws this lesson from the storm: “Winters had been mild for several years and many people became careless. As a result, many were stranded in cars, some suffering frostbite. There were deaths throughout the region.”
Because this article was written in 1986, an important storm, the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 is not included. And maybe now you should add the 12-11-10 Blizzard and a few other storms to this list.
Todd Mahon, Executive director of the Anoka County Historical Society, writes that he is looking for a historian to do a study of suburbanization in Anoka and Hennepin Counties in Minnesota. The work is to be funded by a a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, through the Minnesota Historical Society. Here’s how the grant application explained the topic of study and below that is the job announcement:
The phenomenon of suburbanization has had a huge impact on the lives of Minnesotans. The populations shifts away from the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul and from rural areas to suburban communities of the Twin Cities metro area has changed the state’s political makeup, its natural environment, its infrastructure, its education system, and much more. Anoka and Hennepin Counties share a unique history that lends itself to telling the local and national story of nineteenth and twentieth century suburbanization in the United States. Columbia Heights was among Minneapolis’s first streetcar suburbs when Thomas Lowery brought his streetcar line up Central Avenue into Columbia Heights, where he owned and developed real estate. The two counties share one of the largest school districts in the state, and the transportation corridor of the Mississippi River—a transportation corridor that has been reemphasized with the opening of the Northstar Commuter Railroad in 2009.
"Interior view of the living room in one of the new homes in the Thompson Park housing development near Northdale Boulevard and Foley Road in Coon Rapids"5/23/1955; Minnesota Historical Society Photo, Photographer: Norton & Peel Photograph Collection, Location no. Norton & Peel 230772 Negative no. NP230772
The 21st century finds both counties at a crossroads in their suburban development. Each has only one township remaining (Linwood and Hassan), and Anoka County has seen two other townships incorporate in just the last four years. Hassan has recently started its own historical society over the threat of annexation by Rogers. Hennepin County is seeing its first ring suburbs, like Richfield, Bloomington, and St. Louis Park, face redevelopment issues, while up in Anoka County, Ramsey and Nowthen (Anoka County’s newest incorporated city), are facing land use decisions and other pains of suburban growth like the extension of city municipal services and law enforcement. Policy makers across the two counties are in need of resources to inform their decisions that will impact the planned growth of these communities.
In addition to their shared histories, the impact of suburbanization has been felt, and continues to be felt, but it has only recently been the focus of a serious academic study. The suburbanization has occurred and it is now time to examine it through an historians lens. Both counties have nationally recognized historical societies, but neither have tackled this subject in depth. A report on their shared history will be a benefit for policy makers, academics, and more. The final product will also include tangible programming ideas with realistic road maps to produce these programs and bring the history of suburbanization to the greater public and encourage them to think about and discuss their community, what it is, how it became that, and what they want it to be in the future.
Contract Historian Position
The Anoka County Historical Society (ACHS) and Hennepin History Museum (HHM) seek applicants for a part-time, independent contract position to complete a history of the suburban development of Anoka and Hennepin Counties. This position exists through a grant from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. The Contract Historian will compile an extensive, written history using primary and secondary sources, administer an oral history program, and create a resource guide for others interested in researching the suburban development of the two counties. Other duties will include working with ACHS and HHM staff to hire two interns that will assist with the project, and work with high school students from the Breck School on a phase to be determined by the contract historian and the students’ advisors (possibilities include researching community incorporation dates and changing municipal boundaries, etc.). The final draft must be completed by May 15, 2011. Funding for the grant provides for 973 hours for the contract historian at an hourly rate of $20.00. The successful candidate must have a Bachelors Degree in History or a related field and demonstrate skills commensurate with this type of project.
The project is contingent upon a request from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Applicant Instructions
Candidates for this position are required to deliver:
1) Letter of Application
2) Resume
3) Two Letters of Reference
4) Two writing samples (excerpts from larger works will be accepted.)
Please provide copies as materials will not be returned.
To:
Suburban Development Contract Historian Position
Anoka County Historical Society
2135 Third Avenue North
Anoka, MN 55303
Call Todd Mahon, ACHS Executive Director, for more information.
Phone # (763) 421-0600 x104, or via e-mail at [email protected].
The application deadline is July 23, 2010.
The selection of applicants for interviews will be based on the above materials.
Anoka Shopping Center, Anoka. Photograph Collection ca. 1955; Minnesota Historical Society photo, Location no. MA6.9 AN3.1 r5 Negative no. 6046-A
Former director of the Minnesota Historical Society Russell W. Fridley died on June 17, 2010. He was director of the Historical Society for thirty years, during a dynamic and formative period of the institution’s history. He had a true commitment to history in all its forms. He believed that popular and scholarly history were compatible and that neither would diminish the other. For Russell Fridley history was a big tent and all kinds of history could exist there. No history of any kind diminished any other kind of history. But he was a supporter of detailed, well-researched, and well-documented history. He supported new ideas when they came along. When someone came to him with a new idea, he was always encouraging. “Why don’t you work on that?” he would ask. That did not always mean that he could find money to support your particular project, uncertainties being what they were. But he was unfailingly curious about what you were doing, what you were researching. When you told him, probably in too much detail, he would respond with a pleasant, humorous, or encouraging comment. He was good with the legislature, in getting money for the historical society, and good with his staff, in getting productive work out of them. He did not believe that Vikings carved the Kensington Runestone, but even supporters of the Runestone liked Russell Fridley. They would invite him to come debate with them. The worst that anyone would say about him was that he was too affable, a fact which would make suspicious people more suspicious. Russell Fridley’s commitment to the work of history in all its forms is greatly missed.
Russell Fridley in 1982, photo by Stan Waldhauser, courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society
Robin Johnson of Alexandria, Minnesota, says in a recent letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “until Minnesota adults stop thinking of their state’s history and culture as being the almost sole province of children, the complex arguments [about the history of Historic Fort Snelling] will never make an appearance inside the forts, museums or zoos.”
Johnson’s letter to the Star Tribune is part of a continuing a debate about the Historic Fort Snelling and the way it is being interpreted by the Minnesota Historical Society, fostered by the efforts of Waziyatawin and others to call for the tearing down Fort Snelling physically and symbolically. Nick Coleman wrote a column on June 7, entitled Minnesota’s Cradle and Stain, raising questions about whether the Minnesota Historical Society is adequately dealing with the whole negative history of the fort for Dakota people. This week Michael Fox, Deputy Director of the Minnesota Historical Society responded with a column A Full History at Fort Snelling, stating:
While many who come to the fort engage with the reenactment of life on a frontier military post in 1820s, the total visitor experience there today is broader, richer and far more complex. We invite Coleman and all Minnesotans to visit and judge for themselves. View the orientation film in the visitor center that describes the history of this significant place, including the presence of Dakota people at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. Sit with kids in the schoolhouse and ask the interpreter about all aspects of the story of the fort. Read the interpretive panels on the 1862 internment camp located below in what is now Fort Snelling State Park, and on the execution of Shakopee and Medicine Bottle outside the fort in 1865. Take one of the special tours we offer on particular eras of fort history, including World War II, the Civil War and the U.S.-Dakota War. Additional interpretation will be available at the site later this summer via your cell phone.
The letter from Robin Johnson of Alexandria takes on the basic problem of how history is presented not only at Fort Snelling, but at other places in the state. The letter is headlined Stop treating state history like entertainment for all ages.
I read with interest Nick Coleman’s assertion that the whole, controversial history of Fort Snelling be told to visitors instead of the edited versions we’re given now (“Fort Snelling: State’s cradle — and stain,” June 6). My reaction: Fat chance of that happening. Historian Bruce White was right when he told Coleman the Minnesota Historical Society “wants to tell a safe, happy story to kids.” Unlike Europe, Britain and elsewhere where you can see a small but visible percentage of contemplative, childless adults visiting cathedrals and historic sites for their personal education and interest, America treats is cultural places like glorified amusement parks. Minnesota children are trotted out to Fort Snelling and the State Capitol at the age of 10, too young to fully understand much beyond the loud cannons or care beyond, “When do we eat?” Most don’t come back until they are distracted, harried parents, or they never come back at all. I don’t really blame the museums, zoos and historical sites for turning themselves into Disneylands. Their economic struggles have been going on for a lot longer than the past two years, and when 98 percent of your audience is under 12 you’re forced to serve up the sterilized pabulum adults feel is appropriate for tender ears. But until Minnesota adults stop thinking of their state’s history and culture as being the almost sole province of children, the complex arguments will never make an appearance inside the forts, museums or zoos. ROBIN JOHNSON, ALEXANDRIA
Here’s an email from Martha Fast Horse who has a Sunday morning radio show on KQRS radio in the Twin Cities, concerning continuing problems with the famous Shock Jock Tom Barnard who calls KQRS his home.
KQRS apologized and said they would makes changes, but that was a lie…
Tom Barnard and his crew have been harassing me on-air since I began recording my radio show at KQRS 2 1/2 years ago. Two weeks ago I sent Tom a letter and cc’d the president and program manager asking him to stop the racist, highly inappropriate, vulgar, and offensive remarks effective immediately. There was communication, I gave it a chance, and nothing has changed. Tom is a bully of the airwaves! And even if I lose my radio show, I can no longer remain silent while they continue to perpetrate their hate mongering, racist practices against people of color and myself.
Two weeks ago what prompted me to bring this issue forward was Tom saying, “I am tired of these indigenous people claiming to have rights to the land, There was a war and you got your ass handed to you, so shut the hell up!” Waziyatawin and I talked about it on the radio show that will air on Sunday morning 6/6/10.
I called the studio and informed them that I would be coming to there on Monday to address the issue with Marc Kalman the president. His assistant said she is shocked and surprised that I would even say and do such a thing, and she would get back to me about a time on Monday. I will keep you posted… With the racist history at KQRS, I am surprised why anyone at KQ would be shocked and surprised. It is completely beyond me.
