1.
It’s a perfect day, a bit cool with sparkling sunshine and bright blue skies. Philip Larkin in his poem “High Windows” describes such a sky this way: “the deep blue air that shows / Nothing and is nowhere and is endless.”
2.
This little corner of creation is full of many things: history, botany, geology. I am referring to Pembina and Cavalier counties in North Dakota, a place where no one goes intentionally and, therefore, all the more exotic for being remote and, even, inaccessible in its own way. The place is, indeed, a corner. The Canadian border is shut fast across the top of this country, screwed down like the lid of great grey coffin. (In late May 2021, when I visited, the border with Canada was closed except to certain kinds of commercial truck traffic and, so, there was a sense that the terrain to the north was hidden behind an impermeable barrier.) The Red River of the North bounds Pembina County on the east and that stream’s tightly woven meanders mark the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, another sort of seal closing off this territory. To the west, the Pembina escarpment rises, a ridge fully three-hundred feet high, running roughly north and south, although on a slight diagonal that tilts toward Minnesota. The escarpment is the bank of the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, a vast body of water that once filled a basin extending from northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan south into central Minnesota where the continent divides into north (flowing to Hudson Bay) and south (flowing to the Gulf of Mexico) watersheds.
This area feels like a nook or cranny. The 49th parallel, the border with Canada, runs west from Lake of the Woods (with its isolate Northwest Corner above that meridian) all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This boundary was established by the Treaty of 1818, a sequel of the War with Great Britain in 1812. The Treaty established the border west of the Lake of the Woods to the so-called “Stony Mountains” – now the Rockies. In the months before the War of 1812, British warships stopped American vessels and confiscated cargos including slaves. The Treaty of 1818 is sometimes also called the Treaty for the Restoration of Slaves, meaning that the British agreed to pay reparations for slaves confiscated before and during the conflict. This fact reminds us of how inextricably slavery is woven into the fabric of American history.
The north country confined between the Red River, the 49th Parallel, and the Pembina Escarpment is open to the South. But nothing is there – the land is empty, crisscrossed by slender, storm-beaten shelter belts running to the flat horizon. Along the runway-straight highways, cold marshes spread their lobes into the sides of very slightly higher wheat fields. A vast airforce base shuts the door to the south, although several counties south of the Canadian border – this is the military facility near Grand Forks, North Dakota. In the south part of Cavalier County, sixty miles closer to the Border, another airforce base is gathered up around a 110 foot high silo, a structure said to house the most highly advanced radar equipment in the world. The towering radar shed is tuned to the north, a sentinel watching for Russian missiles and bombers bringing with them the end of the world. These bases, encircled by miles of fence and wire, enclose our nook of land from the south.
3.
Strange flights of birds soar over the highway. The geese are flying westward and not organized into an aerial chevron. Instead, they make a diagonal line advancing toward the setting sun. Apart from that rank of birds, there is another column, flying in a rough single-file also from the east to the west. I estimate the birds are about 400 feet above highway. In a cup-shaped lagoon, encircled by grey-yellow reeds, a couple of small, brightly feathered ducks are bobbing on the water. The birds overhead take care not to resemble Russian bombers or planes would be scrambled and surface-to-air missiles deployed to shoot them out of the skies.
4.
Icelandic State Park is about 15 miles from the Canadian border and west of Cavalier. The North Dakota State Park is named after Icelandic-speaking settlers who migrated into this area in the 1880's. Iceland was devastated by volcanic eruptions and crops failed, calamities leading to the evacuation of a quarter of the population beginning around 1870. These refugees came to Ontario and, then, spread west, founding Gimli on the shores of Lake Winnipeg a few years later. (The place was decimated by a horrific smallpox plague in 1875). Some of Icelanders in Gimli fled south to the area around Cavalier settling in small, isolated communities. Many of these people were said to be Mormons. Others were Lutheran and built small churches with square towers rising to a pointed cap like a witch’s hat. The churches were white-washed with structural timbers exposed on the walls and shutters around the windows painted black. Some modest stained glass was inserted in the windows. In the museum at the State Park, there are mattocks and some hand-drawn plows and old brown bibles, the color of fallen leaves, printed in old Norse, the language spoken in Iceland. Ancient photographs show dour-looking families standing in front of sod houses or wooden shacks. The people are formally dressed in what seem to be black garments, but, probably, this is misleading: people dressed up for photographs in the 140 years ago and, perhaps, their clothing was dark green or cranberry-colored (Gogol’s hero in Dead Souls, Mr. Chichikov wears a cranberry-colored coat and vest) or, even, some kind of velvet blue. These sorts of hues are invisible in the old black-and-white photographs that have now faded to sepia.
5.
Icelandic settlers lived in Akra, a town that no longer exists, although a meeting hall from that place has been dragged onto the premises of the park. On Highway 39 south, the Icelanders founded another town, called Mountain. That place still exists although just barely. Mountain is a hump of high ground jutting up above the table-flat prairie – geologically, the place is a pile of sand, an ancient beach remnant from Lake Agassiv. This bump in the flat land is like a widow’s hump or the round pillow of flesh between the shoulders of a hunchback.
Mountain is at the center of Thingwalla Township (the “Thing” is the Icelandic parliament). In 2009, the Prime Minister of Iceland visited Mountain and was so enthused by the welcome that he received that he vowed that he would return to the old country and raise 1.3 million dollars for a community center in the North Dakota village. The economy in Iceland suffered setbacks and only $75,000 was forthcoming. The community center was scaled back into a couple of simple pole-barn-style buildings but it was erected. On the internet, you can view pictures of local farm wives wearing garments with elaborately embroidered bodices and horned Viking helmets. The women brandish fearsome-looking axes.
Mountain was settled in 1879. Once there was a small, but elegant Lutheran church in the country, a square-cut white-frame building with steeple clad in dark shingles guarding a little graveyard. The church was one of the oldest in the area. Pictures show firemen gazing helplessly at the flaming ruins of the structure, a knot of black cinders outlined in orange fire – the picture was taken in 2003. The parish was small and had only a few elderly members and so the church wasn’t rebuilt. The land where the church had stood was planted in prairie flowers and a statute of Jesus the Redeemer was set on a plinth overlooking the cemetery.
6.
In the county historical society collections, there is a confirmation picture, possibly taken near the Church in 1915. The photograph shows a girl in white wearing lacy, diaphanous angel wings. She is gesturing toward a little boy who looks up at her. Beside the angel, there is boy with a carnation boutineer with a big, white ribbon tied around on his arms. The boy is wearing a bow-tie and he looks down at the smaller child.
Perhaps, the picture depicts the visitation of an actual angel. The girl seems unearthly. The sun is vertical and it makes her wings glow with a bright, unnatural radiance. Deep shadows fall across the eyes and faces of the children in the picture. Angels probably stopped visiting North Dakota around the turn of the last century and, so, it is likely the picture commemorates the older boy’s confirmation, possibly at the church near Mountain in Thingwalla Township.
7.
The Akra MWA meeting hall sits behind the Visitor Center to Icelandic State Park. A half-dozen pioneer era structures have been relocated and set in a row on the edge of a steep wooded slope that drops down to the Tongue River. A grassy meadow separates the Visitor Center from the antique buildings and the effect is a bit like a parade ground at an old Midwestern fort. At one end of the lawn, a country church has been installed, a white-frame balloon with a steeple outlined in black timber. The Gunlogsen homestead on which the park is now located is at the opposite side of the field, a small wooden house and several modest outbuildings.
The church is padlocked, but the side door opens into the meeting hall where there is a big room facing an elevated stage about four feet above the timber floor. The stage has a painted curtain rolled into a tight scroll over the platform on which there is a piano pushed against a wall. The scroll of the curtain shows a strip of bright colors, possibly a landscape of some kind. There is an insignia above the stage: MWA – that is “Modern Woodmen of America.” On the walls framing the stage, commercial signs that are handsomely lettered advertise various small businesses in the nearby town of Cavalier – hail insurance agencies, cafes, a haberdasher and an implement dealership. (The wall facing the stage is adorned with similar signs, but modern – these are the sponsors for the building’s removal from the village of Akra a couple miles away and its renovation – “Akra” is Icelandic for “fields”; the word is cognate with “acres”.) The shell of the MWA hall was built in 1901 but the stage was added a generation later in 1928. The signs are the work of a painter named Armann, a man said to have lived in Gardar, North Dakota and obviously talented on the basis of the crisply lettered signs on display. Armann also painted the canvas curtain, apparently depicting a range of mountains graced by a waterfall – the canvas is brittle and the paint unstable and so it is unfurled only on rare occasions.
Stairs lead to the basement, a place that is surprisingly light and airy, although with a strong odor of mildew. A pot-bellied wood burning stove occupies an annex to the main hall where long tables stand, set with vivid green table-cloth. Folding chairs are stacked against the walls. The kitchen is framed by an open counter over which hot food can be served. Behind the counter, an ornate, rather baroque-looking oven stands – it’s the kind of instrument in which wicked children are baked alive.
Although the old meeting hall is musty and seems an artifact of an earlier era, the Modern Woodmen of America are still very much alive – albeit primarily as an insurance company. The MWA was founded in Lyons, Iowa by a businessman named Root, principally as a fraternal association providing life and death benefits. Although open to all in the States where it was licensed, the MWA didn’t insure people engaged in unhealthy occupations (professional sports, brewing, bartending) and wasn’t active selling policies in big cities – places deemed generally deleterious to the well-being of those condemned to live there. Further MWA, sold benefits only in the healthiest States, defined as the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Missouri. For a time, the MWA, founded in 1883, was affiliated with the Temperance Movement (and, therefore, also with the Suffragettes). The “Woodmen” were synonymous with “pioneers”, hardy stock that cleared the forests for settlement and agriculture – at least, this was the initial concept. During its heyday, the MWA sponsored drill teams called “Foresters” that were renowned for their showy precision marching – one of them was featured at Herbert Hoover’s inauguration.
Quaint as the organization seems, the MWA owns a bank in the Quad Cities and has its present headquarters along a leafy stretch of the Mississippi River. The insurer is rated A by Bests and has assets worth 15.4 billion dollars under management.
8.
You can peer through the windows of the Hallson Lutheran Church removed to the park 1994. The church has windows frosted green and blue in lieu of stained glass. The steeple rises from the corner of the building where simple white walls wrap around the tower. God blasted the church with a lightning bolt that knocked down the high steeple and, out in the country, the parish rebuilt that part of the structure, but with a lower tower to avoid heaven’s wrath. When the church was rebuilt at the park, the tower was restored to its original height, probably about 40 feet above-grade. A star-fish-shaped turnbuckle in the center of the sanctuary holds walls and ceiling together. The building’s facade is decorated with black five-pointed stars affixed above windows, most of which are round lunettes. Gothic (pointed) frames enclose two smaller Gothic windows with frosted glass below a similarly colored lunette. The windows looking into the sanctuary are dusty but, peering within, one can dimly descry pews, a carved wood pulpit, and an old altar with pronged finials like little, serrated steeples.
Hallson was never more than a crossroads where a family once of that name owned a general store. The place lost its post office in 1960.
9.
Between a country school and another white-frame shed, a trail drops down steeply to a broad wet terrace above the Tongue River. The terrace is a couple hundred yards wide, attesting, it seems, to the capacity of the little creek to flood when its mouth at the Red River 20 miles to the east is blocked by ice. (The Red River flows north and, accordingly, during the spring-melt, the stream is often occluded with ice in Canada and can’t flow freely into Lake Winnipeg into which it disgorges. When the Red River is ice-dammed, it sprawls over its banks and inundates the flat plain, reversing the flow of tributaries which, then, in turn hemorrhage over their banks and drown the land.) The terrace above the river is 30 feet below the lawns and grounds where the historic buildings have been planted and, again, fifteen feet above the meandering course of the Tongue which flows in tight curves and bends between house-high turf banks. A trail winds through the woods on the terrace. Many seeps form tubs of swampy water on the flat terrace and, between the trees, there are lush stands of fiddle-head ferns with their top scrolls tightly clenched at this time of year. The ferns and, even, the trees are under assault by an invasive vegetal growth that looks like bamboo. Green woody tubes rise about waist-high and the stems are surmounted by very beautiful, conical-shaped buds. These buds (called Strobili) are comprised of alternating scales of honey-gold and black, a bit like the elegant skin of a snake, but hard, symmetrical and coming to a point like the tip of a pine cone. The Strobili have a peculiar manufactured-looking quality –they seem somehow engineered by human intelligence, although, in fact, the truth is that these plants are very ancient. They are called “horse-tails” or Equiseton vegetation, a living fossil on which the dinosaurs dined. Clearly, the horse-tails are aggressively colonizing the sunny patches of the terrace, the places between the old maples and oaks, and they have supplanted, it seems, some of the forest and crowded out most of the pretty, delicate-looking ferns. One population succeeds another – it is the law of life.
A foot-bridge, Cherokee-red and built from iron, crosses the river. The trail loops through woodland. In the underbrush, two deer are startled and they slip through the glade like a knife cuts butter, effortlessly, flashing their white tails like sparks of light in the green dapple. Near the bridge, my son, Martin, launches his drone and it rises smoothly straight up between the shadowing trees. On his control monitor, we can see the taut meanders in the river crowding one another, the mud banks, and, then, the little drone slips up out of sight, something a bit unsettling because we can still hear the rotors turning in the motionless air (wind velocities are only 4 mph) but the tiny frame of graphite-colored metal and spinning blades has vanished into the blue. On Martin’s control screen, we see the river twisting toward a field of bright light that is unintelligible, a shield of white radiance that we later learn represents a lake impounded behind a long dam. Some birds cry out at the drone. Martin brings it back to the earth from 400 feet. The drone shudders a little and lands on the dry dirt next to the trail.
The loop leads back to the bridge and the narrow braid of water between the overhanging mud banks. The track up from the wet terrace to the prairie meadow where the antique buildings are displayed is steep and moist.
10.
The lake impounded behind a long earthen dam spreads its lobed sheet of water away from a little beach, glittering with wavelets. (The wind is now blowing with palpable force – only a half hour after, Martin recorded the breeze of only 4 mph at 400 feet above the river – typically wind increases by ten miles per hour for every hundred feet of elevation.) The beach has been plowed or harrowed and the wet sand is overturned and dark next to the water. A dock sticks its tongue into the water, flanked by tube-shaped trough for launching kayaks.
There’s a hydro-electric installation enclosed in cyclone fence perched on the edge of big earth dam. At the center of the dam some coffers of concrete run like a spine across the embankment. The dam seems very long, high, and ponderous given the slender groove of the river, a mud slit where a couple feet of water flow, but, I think, the massive size of the structure is testimony to the width of the Tongue River during the March and April flood season.
11.
The village now called Walhalla (pronounced with a “w” as in “Wally”) is about 20 miles west of the State Park and Cavalier. (We have now traveled about forty miles into the State from I-29, the north-south freeway running from the Canadian border down through Grand Forks, then, Fargo and, then, all the way to Sioux Falls in South Dakota.) The town occupies a sort of dog-leg at the foot of wooded ridge of the Pembina Escarpment. From the distance, the escarpment is metal-blue but, as one approaches, the face of the ridge is incised with ravines all overgrown with woods that open, here and there, to tilted prairies of tall, bleached grass. The dog-leg is evidence that the town is very old, indeed, the second oldest inhabited place in North Dakota. At one time, the town had a different orientation with respect to the overhanging escarpment, but, as the place evolved, or as one population supplanted another, this succession was made apparent in turning the place’s main street at right angles to its original position. On a little traffic island where main street changes directions, the City Fathers have planted a big moose made from corroded iron wire, not exactly abstract, but stylized, a sharp-looking assemblage that, it seems, one would touch only at hazard: the twists and edges of the wire are angular and could bite.
12.
A rippling gravel lane leads to a windy meadow northeast of town where two old buildings stand on a knoll overlooking a plowed field. The buildings are unprepossessing, one of them paneled in whitewashed lathe and the other weathered, unpainted, a big shed the color of a log cabin but erected from flat hewn timber. About a dozen plaques are planted around the buildings explaining their history and, from the number of markers, it seems pretty evident that this was once an important place.
The sky is high and blue and there are little white and yellow flowers growing in the sod. My grandson, Lucas, runs far out into the furrows of the plowed field, kicking up dust and threatening to disappear like the drone, not into the radiant sky but the brown and blue distance.
13.
The historic site is the Gingras Trading Post, now reduced to a rough-timbered warehouse and the home where the owner, Antoine Gingras, lived. Gingras was born around1821 in what is called the Red River Settlement or Colony. He was a Metis (‘may-tees’), that is, a half-breed. The Red River Settlement is not a specific place, but rather a vast tract of land, the so-called Selkirk Estate or Assinbonia – this territory stretched from Fort William in Canada across the Boundary Waters country through what is now upper North Dakota and across Manitoba to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Gingras was industrious and, after spending a few years hunting and trapping, he founded his trading post. There, he prospered – ultimately, his wife had 15 children. Gingras was politically active and served in the Dakota Territory legislature in St. Paul in the early 1850's. His business flourished and, u he opened a chain of stores at Winnipeg, Pembina, and St. Joseph, the town that he founded near his first trading post in the cove of a valley in the Pembina Escarpment – the steep rampart was called the Hair Hills in those days.
When the first Metis uprising against the Crown failed in 1869 - 1870, the leader of the rebels, Louis Riel, fled to St. Joseph. Riel was a wanted man in Manitoba and spent a few months with Gingras, a political sympathizer. Although the border is only 8 miles north of St. Joseph (now Walhalla), the Mounted Police couldn’t pursue Riel into the Dakota Territory, part of the United States. In any event, it was reported that Gingras had raised a mounted posse of 150 men and was prepared to defend Riel if necessary. Riel moved to Montana, taught school for a few years, and a decade later was back in Manitoba, fomenting another larger and, even, more unsuccessful Metis rebellion. (In the aftermath of this conflict, Riel was hanged.)
Beginning in 1851, Gingras was a so-called “free trader” – this means, he was not an employee of one of the big fur companies operating in the Selkirk Estate. (Gingras worked primarily as a contractor for the Hudson Bay Company. Rivalries between the fur trading enterprises were fierce and, sometimes, led to murderous fighting, but Gingras stayed out of these frays.) At his trading post, he exchanged high-quality pemmican for furs that he, then, sold at the agencies to the north near present-day Winnipeg called Fort Garry at that time. Periodically, Gingras would organize a freight expedition down to St. Paul. These expeditions, involving dozens if not hundreds of men and Red River oxcarts, were called “brigades.” Gingras was a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church – his local parish was St. Boniface in St. Joseph, the town that grew up alongside his trading outpost. On one “brigade” to St. Paul, a priest accompanied him – the commerce was an exchange of fur pelts for pork and salt. The priest wrote a memoir in which he described Gingras as “very fat and jolly”. He apparently knew only one tune which he sang incessantly during the long trip – the priest remarked that the song worked its way into his brain and, as he was penning his memoirs, he could hear it sounding. The priest didn’t know “prairie French”, the language in which the melody was sung, and never figured out what the song was about.
Gingras was friends with other notable fur traders – including Henry Sibley, Norman Kittson, and Joe Rolette, all figures of importance in Minnesota’s territorial history. A photograph shows a big man with a bushy black beard sitting stiffly in a rigid-looking black suit and vest. (Perhaps, his vest is made from colored fabric, but the contrasts in the old photograph aren’t adequate to show this.) Gingras has prominent eyebrows and his chin and mouth are concealed in the furls of his dark beard. His big hands with stubby, blunt fingers rest on his thighs below the silver caternary of a watch chain. Apparently, Gingras liked bright colors – the interior of his house at the site has been restored to its original hues. The floors are dandelion-yellow and the moldings around the fireplaces and doors are a vibrant green. The ceiling is bright pink and the walls blue. (I know this from photographs. When we were present, the buildings were both padlocked shut.) Wind buffeted the prairie grass and the insides of the buildings, viewed through the dusty windows, seemed dark and remote, a fat spider crawling away from the shadow of someone peering through the glass. The frame exterior of Gingras’ house was fire-house red with a dentillated trim under the eaves painted the color of yellow mustard.
Gingras died in 1877. Depending on when you think he was born, he was either 56 or 57. In his Will, he appointed the Parish Priest as guardian of his surviving minor children. He is buried in the St. Boniface Catholic cemetery.
14.
The history of this corner of the world can’t be understood without considering the Metis people who once lived here. (The traditional Metis territory was central Manitoba; the settlements at Pembina and St. Joseph were the sole outposts for these people in the United States. St. Joseph, however, was for a time, the largest Metis village in the Northwest.) “Metis,” as I have noted, simply means “mestizo” or half-breed and refers to people who were the product of (mostly) French fur traders and Indian women. The term has two applications. In general, “Metis” can refer to anyone who is mixed blood, part Indian and part European – for instance, Gabriel Renville, the man who translated the Bible into Lakota in 1837 was Metis, although he lived in central Minnesota and not what is presently Canada. There were Metis reserves as far south as Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas – for instance, a Metis reserve for half-breeds associated with the Sac and Fox tribe was established in western Wisconsin and eastern Iowa in the 1820's followed by other reserves for mixed blood people connected to the Pawnee and Omaha Indians. However, the name “Metis” is most often used to refer to the people living in the Red River Settlement, the old Selkirk Estate. This group originated in marriages between French-speaking fur trappers and traders and Cree, Assinboine, and Chippewa Indians. By 1700, there were enough Metis to represent a distinct cultural group. In 1801, modern Metis history begins with the invention of the Red River cart, a particular form of transportation that characterized the population’s mercantile ambitions.
The Red River cart was devised at the Pembina trading center. The cart freed the fur trade from dependance on canoes and river traffic. Manitoba and the Red River valley is very flat and the carts were designed to be drawn by oxen in caravans (“brigades”) between Winnipeg and other northern settlements and St. Paul. The carts had large wheels wrapped in rawhide. The wheels were about five feet high and supported wooden beds on which commodities could be loaded. Mud poses difficulties in the Red River valley and the wheels were built to float over the mire without cutting through surface sod. The big wheels could be readily removed so that the cart bed could be floated across rivers and lakes as a sort of raft. Indeed, the carts were so versatile that their beds also could be used as horse-drawn sleds in the winter-time. A Red River cart could transport 800 pounds with ease – the freight was mostly furs and pemmican as well as other trade goods. The ubiquity of these carts made Metis culture nomadic – people could easily move from place to place, carrying their households on the carts. The result was that the Manitoba Metis followed the buffalo and, generally, lived in encampments that were moved on a seasonal basis.
Metis culture was a unique blend of French and Indian influences. As trade intermediaries, the Metis spoke a number of different languages, typically “prairie” French, English, and even some Scottish and Gaelic as well as Cree, Ojibway, and Assiniboine. Tribal groups within the Metis spoke “Michif French”, “Michif Cree,” and a language now extinct called “Bungee”. (Bungee was a Gaelic-based dialect). The word “Michif” in this context means “mixed” and is another word for “Metis”. The curious thing about the “Michif” dialects is that they are not pidgin – in other words, the dialects don’t have simplified grammar and vocabulary but, instead, adopt the full complexity of the parent languages from which they are formed. This means that “Michif” speakers were fully competent (fluent) in both “prairie” French and the indigenous languages forming the dialects. Metis were primarily Roman Catholic and, like the Cajuns, enjoyed fiddle music. They were the politically dominant tribal group in southern and central Manitoba. When settlers from other European countries, particularly Scandinavia, flooded into Manitoba, the Metis were disenfranchised, a condition that inspired the two uprisings led by Louis Riel.
In the United States, after 1849, Metis who had adopted European customs, that is, “civilized” Metis, were allowed to vote. In the second State gubernatorial election in Minnesota, a Metis trader named Joe Rolette (sometimes spelled “Roulette”) swung the vote to his friend, Henry Sibley, a fur trader who had established operations during the territorial period at Mendota. The story was that any Metis who owned a pair of trousers was considered “civilized” and, therefore, entitled to vote. Rolette owned several pair of trousers and the rumor was that he loaned out the pants to his cronies, one after another, so that the men could vote in Pembina and Cass Counties. Needless to say the vote was one-sided in the State’s far northeast, a landslide for Sibley who became Minnesota’s second governor. There is a tavern named after Rolette on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol. The hotel is in an old Holiday Inn that has lost its franchise – I think it may now be a Kelly Inn. In the old days, when the hotel was a bit more swank, politicians cut deals in Roulette’s, the bar on the premises. In the last few years, the place has been mostly frequented by Canadians come to St. Paul for hockey games at the Excel Energy Center.
15.
A road leads uphill from the traffic island decorated with the rusting wire moose. The highway is straight, passing wooded slopes at the edge of town, and, then, rising in a modest asphalt ramp to the top of the escarpment. A sign marks the local cemetery, pointing down a shady lane where there are some old commercial buildings crumbling alongside railroad tracks. Although I don’t expect that there could be much of interest in the graveyard, I tell my son and grandchildren that we will stop at the cemetery to explore when we return to town. We are now bound up the hill, an undramatic slope that ends atop the escarpment. It is entirely level beyond the top of the rise, flat land stretching away from the line of the two-lane highway in three directions. After a couple of miles, a sign directs us from the blacktop, along a crooked gravel road to where the ground drops away into the Pembina Gorge. There’s a big parking lot with a couple of horse-trailers and four flatbeds, apparently equipped to haul ATVs.
The gorge reminds me of a coulee cutting down from the prairies above the Mississippi River. The valley has steep green sides, all cloaked in forest, and seems to be about a mile wide. On some of the bluffs, the turf has fallen away, exposing big crumbing murals of grey shale and pale yellow limestone. The rivers in this area are narrow and tightly meandered, like coiled springs, and the vegetation at the bottom of the gorge conceals the stream. The hillside by the parking lot is shaggy with foot-high prairie grass, a great expanse of meadow that falls down to where the slope dives into the tops of the trees. Birds are singing. A couple of trails twist down toward the wooded depths of the gorge. The trails have been built to appeal to sportsmen riding ATVs or dirt-bikes and so the paths are broad, but complex with unnecessary switchbacks. Four-hundred yards march along the winding trails advances the hiker only a few hundred feet down toward the shadowy green forests lining the gorge. It’s an inefficient way to proceed and, after a while, we turn back. The kids shortcut the path by running through the tall grass. Around here, there are only a few people and all of them, apparently, are equipped with motorized dirt bikes or snarling ATVs.
16.
Back on the main road, we return the six or seven miles to Walhalla. A side road advertises that it runs to Brick Mines, certainly a place with an interesting name, and, so, we take that gravel lane for a mile to where it dives down a steep slope into the valley. These roads drop abruptly and without any kind of advance warning – the flat plain atop the escarpment is dissected by deep ravines that drag melt-water from the prairie down to the river in the gorge. At the bottom of the long hill, an iron bridge colored Cherokee red spans the Pembina River, about thirty feet wide here and flowing between eroded clay banks. The watercourse is littered with big black boulders that seem to have been polished by the current, today just a faint corrugation of sun-splashed ripples. A quarter-mile from the bridge, the lane gathers its breath and seems about to start uphill toward the tree-lined rims of the deep river valley. At the foot of the upgrade, another gravel track leads under a sinister-looking gate hung across its top with twenty or more bundles of rusting metal, weird-looking hardware shaped a bit like jagged, defunct chain saws. Above the arch from which the metal dangles like perverse, jagged fruit, some tin letters are nailed to the wood frame: Brick Mines Ranch. An antique-looking shed, scratched together from old lathe salvaged from a demolished barn somewhere, displays a rack of antler horns. There’s another nasty shack, built from the same splintery blackened wood, and, then, down the track, I can see that the entrance lane twists to the side among other small, wretched-looking out-buildings. On the side of the entrance gate, a faded sign reads: If you can read this sign, you’re within range. This puzzling message is helpfully illustrated by an image of a round gunsight with a target inscribed within it. The place looks like a location where someone might film a sequel to a sequel to a low-budget sequel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m not willing to venture any further onto this property, although it seems wholly deserted, and so I back up and we drive along the river bottom to the red bridge spanning the river. The gravel road back to the bridge opens onto a good view of a very impressive cliff, a high vertical badlands suspended above the valley next to the wooded gulch that we descended to reach this place. The cliff is striated with the grey shale, veins almost as dark as anthracite, surmounted with pinkish-yellow bands of eroded rock. (The light-colored layers are Niobrara formation; the dark shale is Carlille formation.)
We stop by the bridge. It’s dry and cool in the gorge this day with a limitless blue sky overhead. The red bridge looks like a child’s toy, an erector set, perhaps. The iron angling up to the overhead span on the bridge is labeled with a sign that says that this is a Pratt Overhead Truss bridge circa 1905. Martin and the kids climb down the slope to stand on the heaps of rounded black boulders lying along the edge of the stream and, indeed, strewn at intervals, like big, unstable stepping stones in the middle of river. It looks to me as if the stones may have been manipulated to create several enclosed lagoons downstream, perhaps weirs where the Indians or Metis might have spear-hunted fish. Between the boulders, in shadowy pools, there are some black bones, femurs and smaller skeletal parts, that Martin fishes out of the water. After a few minutes, Martin and the grandchildren clamber back up the slope. (It was too steep and muddy for me.) Someone has obligingly left a carefully whittled walking stick propped up against the red side of the iron bolted girder of the bridge.
(Later, I see advertisements for a competition called the Brick Mines Hill Climb. The pictures show young men in helmets urging their motor bikes up the sheer escarpment, tails of flailing gravel spewing out behind them. A prize is offered: as much as $10,000 although the sum will be dependent on registrations. I can’t tell if the contest will occur in a couple of months or happened two years ago, before Covid shut everything down.)
17.
Another side road, just above the sharp straight descent into Walhalla leads to the Tetrault Woods overlook. The gravel road runs level across a flat field a mile long before narrowing into a sketchy track. The track is gouged into the prairie and cut with culvert-shaped erosion ditches in some places. A dignified grove of pines, all the same height, grow in a plantation above deep drifts of red needles. The pines make an unnatural colonnade crossing the prairie.
The ever-narrowing gravel track ends at bald hilltop overlooking the gorge. From this place, several limpid-looking stretches of river are visible below, bends and curves emerging under low brown clay cliffs from a deciduous forest filling most of the valley and climbing a bit reluctantly up the sides of the valley, cut open here and there to reveal grey-black and yellow strata. It’s a pretty vista and, apparently, renowned for Fall colors when the hardwood trees filling the valley are red and amber-colored with the advance of Winter. The people who maintain this prospect over the gorge (it has a little belvedere and a picnic table) have commissioned someone to pose stylized autumn leaves, hacked from sheet metal, along the fenced path to the overlook. The leaves are the size of hubcaps but look very sharp and dangerous to touch. In the center of the path, a metal column is entwined in jagged looking steel wire, rusted like the flanks and belly of the moose in town, and more of the leaves with their hacksaw-edges hang in the iron coils. This all seems more than a little dangerous to me.
Local histories recall that Tetrault was an old fur-trader who had a cabin around these parts. Tetrault fancied himself an old voyageur, smoked a clay pipe, and dressed in brightly colored trousers and vests. Either he lived a few years before the present or a long time ago. The accounts are unclear on this point.
Tetrault’s friend was a man named Cyril Dumas, also a colorful local celebrity. Dumas also acted like a voyageur from the 18th century and was reputed to be a great liar. Dumas said that he had traveled for many years by canoe in the far Northwest. He had fought polar bears and been harassed by packs of hungry wolves and seen the Northern Lights more times than he cared to remember. Once, high in the Arctic, he canoed on a river of black paint past a sulfur mountain
18.
Within a few miles of Walhalla, the Scandinavians founded two villages, Olga and Vang. Each possessed a tavern, store, and a Lutheran Church. Vang, I think, even had a newspaper, although local histories say that the man who founded that enterprise was probably mad. Neither of these towns exists any longer and no trace of them remains.
A little south of Walhalla on Highway 9 another iron truss bridge crosses the Pembina River next to a hoary trestle bearing train tracks. In this area, a local girl, a farmer’s daughter, was seduced by a Syrian peddler. She had the peddler’s child out-of-wedlock. When the peddler didn’t return as promised the girl hanged herself from the truss bridge. Not content with this revenge, the girl rose from the dead as a ghost and rambled along the asphalt right-of-way, soliciting rides from terrified motorists. This is the White Lady Ghost said to haunt White Lady Road. An old oak tree standing near the bridge is called “the hanging tree,” a name that evinces some uncertainty about the facts of the tragedy, obscure to the point of being non-existent. It’s not clear to me whether she has been seen in this area recently.
19.
The Walhalla Protestant graveyard is very large, a big tract of old stone markers scattered across a wooded hillside indented with several shallow ravines. A passable dirt lane runs from the road at the edge of town up the hill, looping around the several acre site. On top of the hill, it’s sunny and there are new stones pitched here and there on the well-groomed grass lawn. The older graves are strewn among the shadows of the old oaks and maples.
As we wander among the graves, my granddaughter, Hannah, leans against a slab of engraved stone set atop a big block plinth. Nothing holds the slab in place and it pitches onto the turf with an awful thud. It appears that many of the older graves, consisting of square pedestals on which carved columns or upright obelisks are set, are very unstable. The mortar previously gluing the stones to their plinths has failed.
Near the top of the ridge, we find a curious example of synchronicity. A thigh-high monument, cut from time-eroded chalk-white limestone, displays a little tree. The stone tree has been mercilessly chopped down so that only a stump remains studded on its sides with branches also brutally pruned away. At the base of the mutilated stump, a dead dove has been chiseled in deep relief atop the pedestal supporting the pale limestone tree. The grave remembers a child who lived for only nine days in July 1894. The unique feature of this gravestone is the forlorn dead dove displayed next to the desolate little tree. A few yards from this monument, a lightning bolt has shattered a real tree and dropped it to the sod. The custodian has used a chain saw to cut up the broken tree, leaving a bare stump pillowed by wood dust, and some thick branches, from which side boughs have been pruned, lying athwart two other old, heavy graves cut from granite.
Downhill from the smashed real tree and its limestone-carved correlate, the hillside ripples between two ribs of more prominent hillside cupping a little gloomy ravine. In the ravine, in the deep shadow, there is a massive stone enclosed in terraces set step-wise in the slope. A cast-iron fence armed with lance-points runs around the big stone, a block standing as high as a man’s chest, among several other very old graves, covered in red and grey lichens. It’s hard to read the words on the old grave-stones, although one of them talks about a missionary “boring among the Indians” – evidently, the word is “laboring” but the “l” is chipped away from the stone legend. A peculiar flat slab lies rooted in a short pier of limestone. The words on that tablet are easier to read and have something to do with a woman who died of “quick consumption” – the “consumption” doesn’t seem to have been too expeditious since the slab, cracked across its center, says that the woman was afflicted with the sickness for ten years.
The big monument has rusticated sides and back, bearing a polished scroll on its front that reads WALHALLA MARTYRS. What can this be about?
20.
Around 1500 people lived at St. Joseph (St. Joe) in the early 1850's. (By contrast, the population of that place, now called Walhalla, was less than a thousand in 2010). The inhabited place was the center of Metis’ commerce south of the 49th parallel. The village is described as comprised of 30 neatly built log cabins faced with flat, hewn timber occupying a park-like wooded valley where the Pembina River flows out of the steep, forested escarpment. The Gingras Trading Post was on open country to the east, erected on a low hillock. Along the Pembina River, the Kittson Trading Post was closer to the center of the village. When trader Gingras founded the town, two church bells were hauled to the place by Red River cart and suspended in one of the trees at the edge of the Hair Hills. (One of those bells survives today and is located in the belfry at St. Boniface, Walhalla’s Catholic church.) Most of the residents at St. Joe lived in buffalo hide tents with Red River carts at hand for transportation. After a couple years, Gingras with the local Catholic priest built a parish church, a small school, and even a wood-frame convent. The parish of St. Joe was prosperous and equipped with a small cemetery in the shadow of the church.
There weren’t any Protestants in town – or, at least, no churches of that affiliation. The Metis were comfortably Catholic. To the East, at Cass Lake in what is now Minnesota, beyond the Red River, there was a small Baptist Mission to the Ojibway. An interpreter at Cass Lake, a half-breed named James Tanner, visited relatives in St. Joseph and thought that the relatively populous and thriving village might be a fertile field in which to sow the Gospel among the Metis, ignoring the fact, it seems, that these people were already Roman Catholic. Tanner hiked down to St. Paul and, then, traveled to the East Coast where he raised money for his Mission among wealthy Baptists. With a man named Benjamin (or Elijah – the record isn’t clear) Terry, Tanner returned to St. Joseph in the Spring of 1852 and the two began proselytizing among the Metis in the village. There are several accounts of what next occurred, varying in some details. Tanner decided to build a log cabin and small school – apparently, the two Baptists had been living in a buffalo-hide tent. Terry went into the woods along the nearby Pembina River to fell some trees for this enterprise. In some accounts, Tanner was with him; other accounts say he was accompanied by a Frenchman. In any event, the logging expedition didn’t end well. Three Sioux men encountered Terry and shot him dead. If Tanner was there, which is, perhaps, doubtful, he escaped. In any event, the Frenchman either coming upon the mangled corpse or having seen Terry killed, sounded the alarm. Terry had two arrows embedded in his chest and had been disfigured with a hatchet. (One account says that he was scalped.) Terry’s corpse was hauled back to town and, then, a dilemma arose: the local Catholic priest didn’t want a heretic in his cemetery and, so, there was no consecrated ground in which to deposit the mutilated body. Finally, the priest relented to the extent of allowing Terry to be buried in the corner of the Catholic cemetery allotted to suicides, a sort of Potter’s Field. The author of the chronicle of the Walhalla Martyrs, one Mrs. Ed Moritz writing on October 6, 1941, seems to have been a pious Protestant – she notes that poor Terry was buried in a grave “unmarked, uncoffined, and unknown,” faulting by implication the Parish Priest for lack of charity. James Tanner is said to have pronounced a few words of scripture over the unmarked grave of his friend and fellow apostle.
The next year, Reverend Alonzo Bernard with his wife and four children appeared in town, also arriving by Red River cart after departing the Cass Lake Mission to the Ojibway. With Pastor Barnard, was another missionary, P.B. Spencer, also married with three children. It’s not clear that Mrs. Ed Moritz remembered the first names of the two wives, although evidence of their identity is clearly visible at the grave markers in the local Protestant cemetery. From the gravestones, the names of the women were Cornelia Leonard Spencer and Sarah Filena Bernard. Kittson, the fur trader, and other leading man in St. Joe apparently represented the Scottish Evangelical (Presbyterian) persuasion in the area and he is said to have welcomed these Baptist missionaries who joined James Tanner in his endeavors. Sarah Bernard’s health was fragile – she had ruined her constitution ministering to ailing Indians in Cass Lake. (At least, this is the understanding.) She became extremely ill due to the difficult frontier conditions at St. Joe and her husband decided that she would die unless treated professionally at Kildonan, a larger town in the Selkirk Estate in Manitoba. (Kildonan is a “riding” – that is, an electoral district, located in what is presently the northwestern part of Winnipeg.) Parts of this story seem garbled or implausible. Mrs. Bernard didn’t improve, no doubt due, in part, to being hauled across great tracts of the empty northern steppes. Rather, in Kildonan, she was diagnosed as suffering from “Quick Consumption”, seemingly some kind fulminating pneumonia. It was obvious that Mrs. Bernard would not recover and, so, she asked to be taken back to St. Joe so that she could be buried in a poplar grove near the Baptist Mission. Obedient to her wishes, Reverend Bernard supposedly set forth with his cart, hastening toward St. Joe about ninety miles away. The party was trapped in a violent blizzard and Mrs. Bernard almost froze to death on the open prairie. Accordingly, so the story goes, the travelers reversed course, waded through the deep snow, and returned to Kildonan where Mrs. Bernard died. Reverend Bernard commissioned an elaborate grave stone for her and had the body transported back to St. Joe, a journey undertaken (Mrs. Ed Moritz tells us) after “streams were well-bridged with ice.” (This detail suggests that it was cold enough to keep Mrs. Bernard from becoming too noisome during the trek back to the Mission.) En route, the elaborately carved gravestone was dropped and split into two pieces. The separate shards of the stone were retrieved and later set over the grave in which Sarah Filena Bernard was interred. The grief stricken Reverend Alonzo Bernard waited until Spring (apparently not concerned with “streams being well-bridged with ice”) and, then, traveled with his four children back to Ohio where they were left in the care of a relative. Rev. Bernard, not dissuaded from his mission, then, set forth, after reaching St. Paul, following the Red River trails back to St. Joe.
Meanwhile, more trouble had ensued at the Baptist Mission. On May 31, 1853, another party of renegade Sioux, said to be three as well (perhaps, these stories overlap in some details) attacked the cabin where the other missionaries, the Spencer’s, were living. (None of the outlaw Indians seem to have been much concerned with Tanner, who was, after all, a Metis himself.) Mrs. Spencer had risen to nurse her seven-month old infant and lit a lantern. She heard a noise outside the window and, when she rose to inspect, the three Sioux fired their guns and knocked her down. Mrs. Spencer was hit in the chest and bled to death. Her husband barred the door and watched until dawn. The Indians were gone and, at first light, he hurried into the village for help. The records don’t exactly explain where Mrs. Spencer was buried, but, one account, says that she was laid to rest next to her friend, and fellow missionary, the unfortunate Sarah Filena Bernard. Tanner again conducted obsequies, now for the third Baptist victim, associated with the Protestant Mission. Probably, the bodies were buried in the poplar copse where Mrs. Bernard had asked to interred.
Left with three small children, Mr. Spencer arranged for a kindly local woman, Marguerite Latraille (nee Joliebois – “happy woods”) to nurse the infant. Latraille was a Metis woman married to Felix Latraille, the local government Indian agent. Undoubtedly some of the details of these stories originate with Mrs. Latraille who lived to be 104 years old. She is buried in the nearby township of Leroy in a Catholic cemetery. (Mrs. Latraille knew how to cure buffalo hide, make tents, and produce pemmican, the staple of the Metis diet – she was an important source of this kind of lore until well into the 20th century.) In the Fall of 1853, presumably with the infant baby girl weaned, Pastor Spencer left the Mission, sadly wending his way by cart south to St. Paul. (Mrs. Yeardo’s story of the Walhalla or St. Joe martyrs provides the picturesque detail that children too small to walk were slung in cradles under the heavy metal axle of the Red River cart and transported in that way – this sounds like a bit of local legend annexed to the story.) Curiously, Spencer ran into Reverend Bernard somewhere along the trail. Bernard was returning to the Mission. Mrs. Ed Moritz, who writes in a pleasingly florid style, remarks that the two men “were strangely permitted to mingle their tears.”
Reverend Alonzo Bernard persisted at the Mission for a couple more years but gave up on the endeavor, supposedly due to more raids by the hostile Sioux. But there are a couple of observations that must be made: the Sioux didn’t seem to bother the Metis or their Catholic priest and nuns. Therefore, a suspicion arises that no one really wanted Protestant missionaries in Roman Catholic St. Joseph. I am not claiming that the Catholics had anything to do with the two murders, although it is curious that the Sioux showed no interest in harassing any of the local people except the Cass Lake missionaries. Clearly, significant hostility existed between the Catholic priest and the Baptist missionaries – the recollection of this animus is reflected in the account that Elijah (or was it Benjamin?) Terry had to be buried in the unconsecrated corner of the Catholic cemetery.
At the time of the commemoration of the Walhalla Martyrs monument in 1881 the Catholic population at St. Joseph, a place now bearing the pagan Scandinavian name of Walhalla, was on the wane. A couple decades earlier, around 1870, the Metis population at St. Joseph was said to have declined to only 50 although a priest was still ministering to the flock. Apparently, an Icelandic politician briefly visited the area around 1877 and remarked that the deep Pembina river valley was a suitable site for the mythological “Valhalla” – the politician seemed to be influenced by the notion that the townsite was in a valley (a “dal” in Old Norse, the language spoken in Iceland.) But, of course, “Valhalla” means “hall of the dead” or the “chosen ones”, warriors collected from battlefields by the Valkyries and resurrected in a celestial feasting hall and, perhaps, the suggestion for the new name, was sardonic. (There’s little in the record on this subject; most local histories suppress the name St. Joseph entirely and are written as if the town was always called Walhalla). The new Protestant ascendency seems to have been celebrated by the installation of the massive monumental stone commemorating the “Walhalla martyrs” (who were, of course, people who died when the town was called St. Joseph.) Scandinavian and northern Europeans were now in control of the village and its religious and political institutions. The Metis had retreated into Manitoba and, indeed, were being driven far into the north in the wake of Louis Riel’s second unsuccessful uprising. What remains of the Metis culture is now confined to reservations hundreds of miles north of Winnipeg in the wilderness of sub-arctic Canada. One population had succeeded another. In the Quasquicentenniel souvenir brochure, published on the 125th anniversary of the 1843 founding of the town, the local Metis, only a fading memory in 1973, are described as “fond of good times, light-hearted and gay, they sang and danced and were never know for their industry...” The Metis delight in bright colors, particularly shades of red, is also mentioned.
In 1888, Mrs. Latraille (nee Joliebois) still knew where the bodies were buried. She and the Catholic priest guided the Protestant town fathers to the poplar grove where the two women were interred. A corner of the Catholic cemetery was dug open to retrieve the skeleton of Benjamin (or was it Elijah?) Terry. The bones were deposited under the looming rusticated monument to the Martyrs. Mrs. Yeardo, in her account, describes a picturesque photograph showing the commemoration of the monument, a ceremony attended by Mrs. Spencer’s children, now grown to adulthood. I haven’t been able to find that photograph said to be made on June 21, 1888
21.
There is a sad sequel to the tale of the Walhalla (or St. Joe) martyrs. Serious warfare between the Sioux and the United States erupted in 1862 with the Dakota uprising. That war was fought, to some extent, in North Dakota in 1863 when General Sully pursued the unrepentant Dakota war parties across the plains. Small scale skirmishes occurred for several years thereafter and, of course, the whole tragic story ends at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in January 1891.
As it happened, homesteader named Delorme lived in a cabin a little south of St. Joseph, also on the Pembina river. Delorme’s household consisted of an old couple, their son and daughter, a son-in-law and several children. A war party of Dakota Indians attacked the cabin – this attack is supposed to have occurred in July 6, 1871. Another son-in-law, said to be half-breed (that is Metis), lived apart from the cabin and happened upon the murder scene while gathering berries. The Indians had killed the son and son-in-law living at the cabin with two well-placed shots. They had clubbed the old man to death and used a ceremonial sword that they were carrying for some reason to hack his face apart. The man was mortally wounded and lived for only a few minutes after he was found. The young woman living in the house hid under a bed with her small children. Parts of the story are unclear or garbled. An Indian apparently tried to pull one of the babies out from under the bed, but the child and mother resisted. The Sioux, then, fled. It seems that the children were found unmolested in the cabin. The young woman, however, abandoned the scene, possibly thinking her children had been seized, and was found three days later wandering about in the woods. She was suffering from severe inanition and couldn’t provide a coherent account of the incident. Her own mother, described as an old woman, had been dragged by the Indians and hit with various clubs in an attempt to “break her back.” She played possum, however, and survived, despite receiving several nasty injuries.
The day after the murders were discovered three companies of cavalry were dispatched. (The story doesn’t tell us where the soldiers originated.) The cavalry followed the trail of the Indians down toward the Devil Lake area where there were some large encampments of Indians engaged in the buffalo hunt. The account, then, peters out, indicating that the cavalry couldn’t identify the hostile Indians. Most likely, the cavalry encountered many Indians, all of them angry about the genocidal outcome of the Minnesota Uprising and other fights with the White men, and deciding that discretion is the better part of valor abandoned the pursuit.
(The Internet makes information otherwise buried in archives now readily available. For the account above, I have relied upon Ms. Diane Yeardo’s narrative on the Walhalla city web-site. However, there are additional details provided elsewhere on the internet – these materials are to be found among the papers of A.B. Welch, a friend of the Dakota tribes and former military officer, who compiled a oral history of these Indians, supplemented by many interesting pictures and official records, including correspondence between soldiers and officers stationed at Devils Lake. Here is what can be gleaned from written documents provided by Colonel Welch.
In November 26, 1877, a party of eleven Dakota Indians – four men, four women, and three children – appeared at the Devils Lake Agency. The Indians were recognized as associated with the Delorme massacre. This was suspected on the basis of earlier contacts with these people. Apparently, a party of four Indians was earlier encountered at the Agency in July 3, 1874. The Indians, most notably Wapepa (“Brave Bear”) and another man named Ishakiyapi (spelled in different ways) said that they were headed north to visit relatives in St. Joseph, although it was generally thought that the expedition was for stealing horses. The party was encountered a couple days later by “freighters” – presumably teamsters – near Devils Lake. At that time, the Indians displayed a fresh scalp and said that they had ambushed and killed some Chippewa. In fact, they had come from killing members of the Delorme family the day before – although this wasn’t known at the time. Although the account is somewhat unclear, Wapepa was later arrested and confined to a guardhouse at Fort Lincoln, near Bismarck. However, Wapepa seems to have escaped and made his way west to the Crow Creek Agency. From that place, he went to Standing Rock and, then, returned to the Devils Lake region where he camped near the Agency in November 1877. Another Indian recognized Wapepa and informed authorities that he had killed White settlers at St. Joe – that is, the Delorme family. The Agent at Devil’s Lake wrote to the Court Commissioner in Bismarck, requesting a warrant to arrest Wapepa and Ishakiyapi. This letter dated February 2, 1878 was received in Bismarck and the Commissioner authorized the arrest of the two Indians, part of the eleven member group who had arrived in the area a couple months earlier.
On March 2, 1878, a warrant for arrest was served on Wapepa and Ishakiyapi. Both men were taken into custody and imprisoned at Fort Totten. At a preliminary hearing, a few days later, other Indians gave testimony implicating the two prisoners in the murders at St. Joe. Ishakiyapi somehow contrived to escape and ran from the building where the military commission had arraigned him, fleeing across “the open prairie”. A guard shot him in the thigh and he fell down about 300 yards from the place from which he had escaped. As the military police approached, Ishakiyapi is supposed to have drawn a knife, stood up, and, then, charged at his captors. They shot him two more times, resulting in his death. (The story seems suspicious to me – why hadn’t Ishakiyapi been disarmed? Was he carrying a knife in during the Commission hearing?)
Ishakiyapi’s parents came to collect the body. His brothers professed peaceful intentions and were, even, given an ox so that they could pursue ranching and agriculture. (Again, this suggests some anxiety about how exactly Ishakiyapi had come to his end.) The record doesn’t disclose what happened Wapepa. Two other Indians who had been part of the war party to St. Joseph were arrested but they predictably claimed that the murders had been committed by Wapepa and Ishakiyapi, who, of course, was dead and, therefore, couldn’t refute their claims. The military authorities expressed confidence that the other two Indians could be convicted but it is not clear what happened to them.
In the course of these proceedings, it was revealed that the four member war party, led by Wapepa, went to the Delorme cabin on July 5, 1874. There was discussion about a horse trade and the Indians went with the three men into a stable, ostensibly, to examine an animal and discuss the transaction. In the stable, the Indians shot and killed Joseph Delorme and his son Louis Delorme as well as Joseph’s son-in-law Baptiste Moran. The Indians clubbed Joseph Delorme’s wife (maiden name Isabelle Gurneau) and the settler’s daughter married to Baptiste, Nancy Delorme. The two women were said to have been “stunned” but “shortly afterwards recovered their senses One of the men was scalped and the Indians stole eight or nine horses. They were seen driving their stolen horses south by another Indian in the area the next morning, July 6, 1874. Apparently, the herd of horses excited interest. The next day, the Indians met the “freighters” and tried to sell them some of horses, said to have been taken from the Chippewa – at that time, the scalp was brandished and one of the Indians showed the teamsters a bloody sword. It was very hot and the scalp smelled foul and so it was thrown away. The sword was later recovered as evidence.
This information, some of which is contradictory, is contained in a series of letters between the Indian agent at Devils Lake and the Court Commissioner at Bismarck.)
22.
Not all of those buried among the Walhalla Martyrs died tragically. Reverend Oliver Goldie, said to be born in Scotland in 1831, immigrated to Canada when he was around fifty. A non-denominational preacher, he tramped around the Pembina country, apparently, haranguing anyone willing to listen to him. Homeless, the man lived in the homes of pioneer settlers, “for sometimes as long as a month at time” – at least, so reports Diane Yeardo. (She is quick to note that Goldie was “liked by all”.) Goldie spent considerable time with the Ojibway at the Turtle Mountain Reserve and acquired Indian habits – he slept on the ground in the open and “rode his pony (named) Billy Buttons”. (It’s unclear to me how riding a pony named Billy Buttons is an Indian “habit” – but I am following Ms. Yeardo’s chronicle.) Oliver Goldie was a tall man and his feet dangled down to the ground when he rambled about the north country on his diminutive horse. He was an extravagant-looking fellow; his hair was “died” (sic) bright yellow.”
Reverend Goldie’s pony was his best friend and the pastor said that he wanted to be buried beside Billy Buttons. But the beast died five years before the Reverend. Goldie bought a cemetery plot in the Protestant graveyard (apparently, ponies are Protestants, possibly, even, Lutheran). Diane Yeardo tells us where the loyal horse is buried – he was interred between three trees forming a triangle ten feet north of brick building that was still standing at the corner of the cemetery when Ms. Yeardo wrote her account.
Reverend Goldie died in March of 1898. Contrary to his express wishes, the local gentry buried him among the dour Walhalla Martyrs and not next to his faithful pony. Mrs. Yeardo says that the Reverend Oliver Goldie was the “cousin of Robert Burns” known as the “Bard of Scotland.” I am unable to verify this family relationship. However, Burns wrote a poem in 1785 called “Epistle to John Goudie, in Kilmarnock”. John Goldie (or Goudie) was a skilled cabinet maker and wine merchant. Goldie was interested in theology and wrote several treatises on the subject. Burns knew Goudie, borrowed money from him, and satirized his religious convictions in the poem. It begins: “O Gowdie, terror of the whigs/ Dread o’ black coats and rev’rend wigs”. Burns who thought that Goudie’s religious views were questionable, accuses him of “(s)our bigotry” that “girns” (makes grotesque faces) at the pious cabinet-maker and wishes the ten “Egyptian plagues” upon him. It is certainly possible that Oliver Goldie (an alternate spelling for “Goudie”) was related to this man, perhaps his grandson. Homer nods on occasion and so does Ms. Diane Yeardo – she tells us that Goldie died on March 19, 1898 at the age of 78; in fact, if Goldie were born in 1831, as Yeardo claims, he would have been 67 at the time of his death. (He would have been 78 in 1909).
I’m not critical of Ms. Yeardo. The past is hard to know and filled with confusing legends and unconfirmed facts. We don’t even understand that much about the present. Life is lived by approximation in a fog of uncertainty. And we wouldn’t know anything about Oliver Goldie but for Ms. Yeardo’s industry.
23.
The land south of Walhalla is featureless, flat and empty. Ragged and disheveled shelter belts mark ghost farmsteads. Nothing remains of the farmhouses or barns. Sometimes, far from the highway, a remaining farm may be glimpsed, but these inhabited places are few and far between. In other places, the road runs between big wet-lands, where dark canals zigzag through the marsh.
A four-lane highway crosses the level prairie, running toward Grand Forks – this is about forty miles south of Walhalla. At a rest stop, we see a two couples standing next to their SUV feverishly smoking cigarettes. For some reason, they aren’t able to smoke in their vehicle and so they are making up for lost time here in the parking lot next to the toilets. It’s a long holiday weekend and the trash containers are already overflowing with garbage patrolled by fat black flies.
The smokers light new cigarettes from the fags they are about to discard and inhale deeply. One of the women walks a poodle. The dog is smoking a cigarette as well.
24.
The four-lane road to Grand Forks runs flat and straight across the bed of old glacial Lake Aggasiv. Twelve miles from the city we pass a row of three light blue water towers set within a long quadrangle of big, new office buildings. This is the Grand Forks Air Force base. There’s not much of a GI strip outside the gates to the huge military base –there’s just one pay-check cashing storefront that seems to be abandoned and a Domino’s Pizza. (Presumably, the flight crews for the SAC bombers and their commanding officers order pizza to be delivered during the long nights standing sentinel over the continental United States.)
At Grand Forks, a huge billboard announces that Zebra Mussels are here! The billboard shows a fanged bouquet of mussels next to an outboard-motor-equipped fishing boat. The public service announcement warns North Dakotans to clean their boats before putting them into the waters of the State, a measure that is supposed to keep the mussels from infiltrating local streams and lakes. Zebra mussels are an invasive species. In the early 1980's my brother-in-law earned his doctorate in conservation and zoology by spending a summer scuba-diving in Minnesota creeks and lakes, counting the razor-sharp mussels studding the bottoms of those bodies of water. The mussels had not yet spread everywhere but their population was certainly on the rise. Twenty years later, this scientist, Dr. Rick Hart, was invited to dive once more in some of the places where he had surveyed the mussels two decade before. He found that the mussels were now ubiquitous, growing in great spiky masses in the depths of Minnesota lakes and rivers. The mussels had annihilated all of the indigenous molluscs. No longer were there any traces of the mussels that had once populated those waters. In effect, the indigenous species were extinct.
June 4, 2021
