An Environmental History of Oldenburg Point

An Environmental History of Oldenburg Point Joe Malkovich History 460 Professor Cronon November 28, 2005 Few children from small towns in northern Minnesota grow up without a potent sense of place, and I am no exception. I grew up loving the land. In one of my seminal adolescent memories, my sixteen-year-old self perches on the swinging bridge over the St. Louis River in Jay Cooke State Park. It is early spring—April, probably, as thick slabs of ice still grip the shore—and seething currents of frigid snowmelt surge beneath me. The waters, tea-stained with tannins seeping from the extensive thawing wetlands to the north, rush toward the river’s mouth at Lake Superior. There they will wait hundreds of years before continuing their journey to the Atlantic. A spring snow flurry swirls about me, and as I look beyond the jutting rocks and roaring falls into the thick forest of hardwoods, spruce, and pine, I can palpably sense the ancient Canadian Shield emerging beneath my feet and expanding far into the north. In my mind, this swathe of rugged land and dynamic water in southeast Carlton County seems to embody completely the wild nature of northern Minnesota. In fact, Jay Cooke State Park lies near several transitions that characterize the regional environment. The gradational boundary between deciduous and coniferous forests passes through central Minnesota a short distance to the south. Likewise, just to the south sedimentary rocks disappear from the surface and more ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks are exposed to the north. The park also is located near important hydrologic divides. The St. Louis River, which empties into Lake Superior, drains the westernmost watershed in the Great Lakes basin. Yet rain falling twenty miles west or south of Jay Cooke flows down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. And to the north, precipitation enters the extensive system of glacial lakes and juvenile streams at the southern edge of the Hudson Bay watershed. In my formative experience on the swinging bridge, I remember feeling fascinated by the park’s physiography. I still am. But that is not why I love the land. I love Jay Cooke State Park because I have gone there every year of my life with people I love. So perhaps I should say I grew up loving the environment’s function rather than the landscape’s simple existence. Over time my perceptions of the ostensibly inhuman environment have become suffused with human emotional significance, so that meaning imbued in the park’s landscape stems from the important role it has played in my life. I cannot remember a time when I did not know the park, and as I have grown my conception of its physical landscape and the meanings I have ascribed to it have changed. Several park facilities and trails have been locales for family outings since before my birth. Other trails are hiking routes, ski areas, and places to run. The woods, streams, and rocks functioned as science classrooms. Pools in the St. Louis were swimming holes in summers during my adolescence. The swinging bridge area is a hangout spot, a romantic getaway, a 1 place for meditation. Finally, the park in its entirety will always be a fascinating place to go exploring. Yet, in a sense, only one idea underlies all my disparate uses of the park: Jay Cooke is a place I go “to be in nature.” Regardless of the specific activities humans engage in there, it is the appeal of wild nature in the park that draws more than 220,000 visitors each year.1 But Jay Cooke State Park is not a place to experience wilderness. The land is preserved due to its aesthetic value and the dramatic power displayed by the St. Louis River. But it is not wild in the sense of a pristine land unsullied by human activities. Rather, the park is clearly a place modified for a specific human use—recreation. Yet modern alterations to facilitate leisure activities only comprise the topmost layer of human writing on the park’s palimpsest landscape, and traces of the area’s diverse land-use history remain etched upon the earth. Many of these vestiges converge at one location within the park. So it is there, at Oldenburg Point, that I will interpret historic human activities and attempt to convey a more holistic understanding of the land. When one enters Oldenburg Point’s packed gravel parking lot, neatly bordered with trapezoidal concrete barriers, a splash of lush meadow opens to the north. Orderly rows of white spruce trees flank the thick lawn of hardy introduced grasses and white clover, and numerous pellets of dry and decaying dung testify that this prime grazing habitat does not go unnoticed by the park’s abundant deer population. In fact, the whitetail deer that frequent this forest edge seldom respond to—let alone flee from—the sights and sounds of thousands of automobiles that come to Oldenburg Point each year. The deer have no need to flee. Park regulations proscribe hunting, and ranger-led wildlife viewing excursions encourage deer to regard humans as innocuous spectators. And the deer are apt performers. Indeed, a grazing whitetail gracefully framed against the dense forest composes a beautiful picture. But should that deer unknowingly stray beyond park boundaries during November, its conditioned quiescence might spell its demise. A deer’s transformation from hair-trigger wariness to placid complacence symbolizes a dramatic human ecological transformation. The deer of Jay Cooke State Park are living documents that attest to the remarkable transformation of human activities in the lands now encapsulated within the park’s boundaries. Once, Ojibwa people would have hunted whitetail here to provide critical calories in their diets. Yet obtaining meat was far more than a purely materialistic venture. The hunt also had sacred ramifications. Every creature’s welfare depended on its manitou, a powerful guiding supernatural spirit. Therefore, a hunter entreated the manitou of a deer to permit a successful hunt, expressing the need for food and acknowledging the solemn responsibility involved in taking life. Basil Johnson writes that after the kill a hunter “offered tobacco in 2 thanksgiving to the manitou of the victim and…to Kitchi-Manitou, the Master of Life, for sanctioning the taking of life.”2 Deer and humans were thus bound in a sacred cycle of gift giving. To view a deer in this place is not simply to see a biological entity, but it is to see in stark relief how modern humans’ desire to extract profit from the land eventually eradicated a lifestyle and culture dependent on nature’s largess for material subsistence and spiritual well-being. A short walk from the trailhead at the Oldenburg Point parking lot quickly leads to the renowned Grand Portage of the St. Louis, a transportation route that played a key role in Indians’ way of life, and in irrevocably altering that way of life. Hikers setting out from Oldenburg Point to walk the portion of this trail preserved within the park may stroll along unaware of the historical significance of their path. But the Grand Portage Trail’s physical characteristics reveal its history. Most park trails are wide, grassy tracks kept passable by periodic mowing. Actual footpaths generally do not appear in these tracks, but utility vehicle tire scarring sometimes is evident. In contrast, the narrow Grand Portage Trail stretches through the forest as a packed dirt footpath, which needs no mowing to remain travelable. Where maintenance vehicles have devegetated a wide area, the old trail shows up as a thin strip of entrenched clay down the middle of the impacted area. Many thousands of human footfalls over hundreds of years are preserved there in the packed, barren earth. Although local historian John Fritzen writes that the seven-mile route around the unnavigable dalles of the St. Louis River was “a difficult trail with steep hills to climb and wet swamps…to wade through,” it had been a major Indian thoroughfare for hundreds of years at the time of first contact with Europeans in the late seventeenth century. The St. Louis connected the open waters of Lake Superior with the interior of Minnesota and regions beyond, and for this reason the Ojibwa called it “‘Kitchigumizibi’ or Lake Superior River.” The watershed’s proximity to two major continental divides meant that the river could serve as a highway for early peoples to travel to and from the Hudson Bay drainage via the Pike River Portage, or the vast Mississippi River network via the Savanna Portage or the Prairie Portage.3 Indians traveling to or from villages near the mouth of the St. Louis would have passed Oldenburg Point on their way to trade or to harvest foods like wild rice. In the winter these settlements broke into small family units that dispersed across the landscape, each managing its own hunting territory to insure some success for each family. The first running of sugar maple sap in the spring marked the end of winter’s solitude, as it summoned several small families to a traditionally shared grove to make sugar, thus initiating the movement back to communal village life in the summer.4 These groups moved over the Grand Portage past Oldenburg Point during their seasonal migrations, and the abundant sugar maples 3 and deer at Oldenburg Point suggest that some Ojibwa could have occupied this place and utilized its resources for winter and spring subsistence. During migrations, gender dictated how families moved over the Grand Portage. Women took a different route than their male relatives, disembarking at the Women’s Portage farther downstream and joining the main trail after several miles.

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