My first reaction to that, as an anthropologist, was this: “Hey, Imma let you say that now, but if you diss my Pygmies like that I’ll kick your ass.” In other words, I do find it rather condescending when western occidento-hetero-caucasoido-normative types take it on themselves to make blanket statements that some other group of people of which they know nothing are stupid. I understand the whole being annoyed at the bible thing, but this is where modern-day new atheists can be thoughtless when unpracticed in their philosophy and its application.

But it was only a Facebook comment.

My second thought was this: I never read the sports section of the newspaper, but last year when I came across a large fragment of a 30-year-old sports page from the local paper, hidden inside a wall, I read every word. Wouldn’t you? And the Dead Sea Scrolls are two thousand years old, and about a topic that is pretty much as interesting to me as hockey scores and basketball.

In the end, I went to see the exhibit, and I assure you, the part about the stupid shepherds is not only overwhelmingly outdone by other aspects of the scrolls, but in fact is rather inaccurate. The keepers of the scrolls were more like Moonies than shepherds, except when they were tour guides. That’s a topic I may address at another time.

So the other day I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs site in southwestern Minnesota. That’s also a religious exhibit of sorts, if we assume (and we should) that the symbols pecked and carved into two-billion-year-old red quartzite played a role in various Native American cultural practices having to do with spirits, gods, afterlife, and so on. Jeffers has thunderbirds, lightning symbols, warriors doing battle with shamans, turtles, magic turtles, hands, bison (probably the extinct kind), atlatls, and more. The guides, polite and well informed caucasionormatives, describe various hypotheses about the symbols and who made them and why, play down the violent parts (maybe that one of the guy with the spear in his chest bleeding all over the place is all about the transition from boyhood to manhood?) and try to link the religious nature of the site to the presumed religiosity (or, at least, spirituality!) of the visitors. The prayer we make now at this site is enhanced by the thousands of years of others coming here to pray. And so on.

And both subjects have their holocaustic contexts. The Dead Sea Scrolls were probably kept by a Jewish religious sect, or at the very least, were part of a Jewish Renaissance following an exodus of sorts, and were a big deal in a Jewish world increasingly controlled and colonized by repressive and violent outsiders known today as heroes of Western Civilization. And the next two thousand years is, as they say, bloody history.

Jeffers is much older and diffuse in its cultural associations but was a sacred site to the Dakota (and others) at a time when the practice was to do war with the Indians, kill a lot of them, cut off some of their body parts to sell later in town as curios, or deflesh their bones, varnish them, keep them on display in your office, and to do all the killing in a way that maximized your votes, if you happen to be a politician. And, just to put this in perspective, I think we as a civilization came to abhor the Jewish Holocaust at the time it was revealed, in the mid 1940s. Most of the native body parts harvested, for example, during the Dakota Uprising (centered geographically near Jeffers) were returned between 1971 and 1990, and by force of law, not a sense of shame or propriety.

I recommend a visit to both. But don’t be a dick about it. Your ancestors have already pretty much taken care of that.

Hallock Elementary

As Dad gets more frail, it’s clear that he won’t be living much longer. He has very little strength to take care of his own basic needs. He can barely muster the strength needed to breathe, let alone shift positions even slightly in his easy chair without some assistance. He needs assistance with nearly everything, and each meal has a 50% chance of being vomited.

I sat with him yesterday and last evening, and he often nodded into a short nap while in mid-conversation. His condition is not curable because of the multitude of problems his body is presenting. His kidneys and his heart are the main issues, but they lie on top of an underlying diabetes. He is hanging on to get as much life out of his tired body as he can, but he knows that he is near the end and accepts that he has had a good life.

The kids and I each wrote him a note yesterday, a goodbye and thank you note for being such a good man and a great teacher, for being supportive of me and loving towards the grandchildren. It was our way of telling him while we still had the chance that he has been very important to us. We wanted to say it now rather than regret when he dies that we had not done so.

Friday, he asked me to wash his car because there was some mud residue on it from this summer. I asked him to come with us, and he decided it would be nice to get out of the nursing home for an hour or so. We got him into the car and drove up to the car wash in Hallock. When we got there, the owner was working on an electrical short and so the wash was closed. He told us it would be ready in about an hour. So I asked Dad if he would like to go back to the nursing home, and I explained that I would wash it for him on Saturday instead.

He told me he wanted to drive around Hallock for an hour so he could look at it, and remember. So we did. We went out south of town, and he wanted to show me two huge grain bins that had just been built. And huge they were. It seemed to me that they could each store as much wheat as an elevator. They are at least 30 feet tall, with 25-foot diameters. I asked him how much they could store and he guessed at about 100,000 bushels each. Then he fell asleep in the car, so I drove around town some more.

I drove by the park in which I used to play as a kid. Some of the playground equipment that was there when I was six was still functional. The park picnic shelter had been replaced. The ground, instead of dirt and grass, was now gravel. The softball field had been updated and new turf laid. The swimming pool was still there and looked much like it did in 1967 when it was finished. Then we no longer had to swim in the river, which was rather dangerous because of the dam’s currents. When the pool was completed, the city relandscaped the beach so that the reeds grew back as they had been before the dam was built.

I drove around to the north end of town, saw that the roads which had been converted from gravel to concrete in the 1970s and 1980s were cracked and worn. The school had been modernized and updated to accommodate the consolidation with other towns in Kittson County. The hockey arena, built in the early 1970s, had been laid with the cooling mechanisms to create artificial ice.¹

I drove around up north of town, to a former town called Northcote. Northcote was between Hallock and Humboldt on Highway 75, where James J. Hill built a summer mansion to supervise the construction of the northern tracks of his railroad. The marker for Northcote was taken down a few years ago, and only a few people live there anymore. It was never a thriving community when I was growing up. I drove through Northcote and headed east towards County Road 1, where Julie Holmquist had been abducted and murdered in 1998. My mother was at that time the town librarian, and Julie had been a frequent visitor. It had been very upsetting and unnerving for a small town, because it had destroyed the perception that Hallock was a “safe” place to raise kids.

County Road 1 was closed to through traffic because of some construction, so I turned around and headed back to Hallock through Northcote. Dad woke up from his nap and asked where we were, and I told him we were just getting back into Hallock and we could see if the car wash had been fixed yet. He went back to sleep. Ella was napping in the back seat.

I was able to wash the car and get the mud off of it. While the spray shed the dirt of Hallock’s surrounding farmland, I realized that the only thing left to tie me to this small town in the Northwest was my father. I grew up here, but I have moved on. Except for 1999′s 20th anniversary class reunion, I have only come back to visit my parents since I left here in 1981 and for no other reason. I don’t have any remaining friends here from high school. Kristen Eggerling and Paul Bloomquist are here, but they are people I came to know through my parents. I was surprised to find that Matt Entenza buys his cars here from Paul’s Ford Dealership, but that isn’t enough for me to come back often to Hallock.

No, as I was washing Dad’s car, I realized that I was also saying goodbye and thanks to Hallock. I was raised here, and the town shaped me to a certain extent. But I have grown and changed in many ways since I left here for good when I was twenty-two. It is my heritage, but it is only a factor and not the whole of what shapes me. I have been moving farther from my roots with each passing year.

One of the things that I noticed when I was driving Dad around last Friday was the trucks and cars. When I come to town, I think that my Focus is the only small car here. The town is dominated by big American cars and crew cab pickups with dual rear wheels for hauling. This is a change from when I lived here, because in the seventies we had a true fuel crisis and the price of gas got more and more expensive. The crisis in 2008 with extraordinary price hikes was based on pure speculation, and people didn’t have the sense that fuel would stay so expensive. They didn’t downsize their vehicles as they had in the 1970s, and there are relatively few economy cars in Hallock.

Last night, after sitting with Dad while waiting for him to fall into a troubled sleep, I decided to stop at the Caribou Grille for a beer and to see whether there was anyone there I knew. I ordered a beer from a limited selection, choosing the hip “Blue Moon” as the best of a bad lot of selections. There was only one group of people there; no one that I knew at all was in the bar. I didn’t feel like striking up a conversation with strangers, so I finished my beer quickly and came back to the house.

There was a time a few years ago when I considered moving up here to live with Dad. I had thought about building a corporation to take advantage of the potential for wind electricity generation and finding funding for the town to build it. I had thought of it as a way to say, “Thank you,” but now I don’t think I will be able to pull that off and I am not putting my resources into it. I have other things to do, other fish to fry and other plans for where I want to move when my kids are out of school and out of the house.

After Dad dies, I will likely only becoming back for the funeral and the closing of the house and the estate sale. I don’t think that I will be back after that, except for the possibility of coming up here with the grandkid(s) to show them where they have some of their roots. It will be time to say goodbye to Hallock.

Hallock will survive me, I am sure. There is enough of a mixture of family and corporate farming in some of the rich Red River Valley clay and silt to supply food, sugar and sunflower oil so that there will always be an economic need for towns like this one. It may get smaller, but it will be here for many years to come. I will have the memories of walking to school with a ski mask in temperatures close to -40°.  I will have memories of delivering the Grand Forks Herald on Sunday mornings when it was still dark and quiet.  I will have memories of cool autumn days back in the woods with a Crosman BB gun, shooting at (and missing) squirrels.  I will have memories of tromping through the woods with my friends and building forts.  I will have memories of standing on the banks of the South Branch of the Two River, casting a spoon and hoping to snag a small northern pike to catch and release.

I will have memories of sitting in class on September 1st on a hot autumn day, both excited about starting school with a new teacher and wishing I could be out playing “army” with Greggy Rosten and Todd Roach.  I will think about riding my yellow banana bike to the store with my friends, to read comic books and buy a Coke from a returnable bottle for a dime.  I will think about sliding down the hill in the schoolyard, playing “Kick the Can” with the neighborhood kids, and Frisbee football in the snow in our backyard.

I will remember walking on the ice on the river and looking through the cracks to discover the ice two feet thick in places, while at the same time being careful around the bends because it was less than two inches thick and couldn’t support my weight.  I remember starting the snowmobile and the throttle freezing, which led to a runaway Ski-Doo that ran into a house.

There were some great people here when I was growing up.  Mrs. Johnson, while a bit strange, was a fantastic algebra teacher.  She is now up at the nursing home and doesn’t recognize me when I say, “Hello.”  Mrs. Mattson, who encouraged me to write outside of class assignments. Mr and Mrs. Peterson, two teachers who loved to share their enthusiasm for science and Native American cultures.  Mr. Money, Mr. Klenken, Mr. Doppler, Mr. Olson, Mrs. Anderson and all the teachers who gave me the tools to think and learn.

I also want to remember and thank the non-teachers who influenced me, such as Gary Melin, who hired me for my first part-time job.  He spent a lot of time talking about politics from a libertarian perspective, and if I hadn’t respected him, I would have dismissed such politics outright. So I tend to listen a little more closely before rejecting libertarianism and conservatism, willing to give some people the benefit of the doubt before ridiculing their politics.

Hallock is where I am from, but it is not where I am.  I have moved on, but my roots there give me a basis for maintaining a larger perspective on the world.  Yes, I have mostly lived in cities since I moved away from here.  I romanticize small-town life, especially when I am in a traffic jam on I-94 in Minneapolis, but I know that I am not suited to return to it.  There is too much to life in the city that I don’t want to give up, and one item in particular is the greater variety of good-tasting beer available.

I was talking to the chair of Senate District 51′s DFL, and he has been considering the 2010 campaign plan to doorknock for our candidates for legislature and the governor.  One of the problems we have had in the past campaigns is that when the DFL in Minneapolis sends volunteers, they have been sent to the outer suburbs and people in those towns seem to be more rural and have rural attitudes.  Some of the volunteers from Minneapolis have encountered racism, sad to say.  His plan is to have the volunteers come up to campaign in the inner ring suburbs such as Mounds View, Fridley, Blaine and places where people don’t have as much hostility and distrust towards “city folk.”  He wants those of us who live in these towns to do the campaigning up where the urbane ends, because we won’t be such “strangers.”

I’ll volunteer to go to the wilds, because I can relate to those people due to my roots in Hallock.  I may not like the reason for it, but I understand the political necessity.  I can thank my upbringing for knowing how to present my candidates so they will be appealing to the people in the outer rings.  Hallock will never completely leave me.

The sad fact is that when I say goodbye to Hallock after Dad is dead, I will really be saying goodbye.  I will also be saying, “Thank you.”

1. Artificial ice is real ice. What I am referring to is that the building can now be heated and the refrigeration system that keeps the ice cold is in the floor. Someday I will write about playing trombone between periods when the temperature inside the arena was below zero–Fahrenheit.

S.1 was a bill introduced into the United State Senate again and again during the 1970s and 1980s, which provided the government with extraordinary powers to investigate, arrest, detain, and prosecute individuals who were vaguely suspected of working against the government. It was a bill that grew every year like fungus from the fertile manure of fear and hatred manufactured by those who controlled most of the resources in the United States and who wanted to make sure that this did not change. Every year the bill would sprout, like the first whiff of mildew you encounter when you revisit a home closed for a period of time, on the restart of Senate business. It was called S.1 because it was the first bill the right wing (mostly Republicans but some Democrats) would introduce into the senate at the start of the season. And of course, it smelled much worse than mildew.

Ted Kennedy and the other liberals, including moderate and liberal Republicans (yes, in those days there were quite a few liberal Republicans), would hurriedly squash the annoying and embarrassing bill, and normal Senate business would continue. Eventually, the yahoos stopped introducing the bill. But it didn’t go away. It did what fungus does. It stayed hidden in the ground, out of sight, invisibly growing and refining and waiting until the right conditions above ground came to be. Hijacked airliners flown into civilian and military targets by crazed fundamentalist Muslims on September 11th, 2001 produced those conditions, and S.1 was introduced again and passed.

You know of it as the Patriot Act.

And many states enacted their own versions of the same bill, and the society we live in now has this as one of its properties: criminal “justice” agencies and police forces around the country have ample funding, legal basis, and legislative and executive encouragement to directly repress individuals and groups who might disagree with the government. They can use spying, coordinated dissemination of illegally obtained information, harassment, home invasion, falsification of evidence, physical intimidation, arrest, and prosecution.

I hope you understand the great irony of all this, which I shall only mention once before moving on. The right wing and libertarian gun nuts and yahoos (and apparently everybody who lives in Texas and Florida) have been fighting all their lives to keep the government from having these very powers, but they did so by using only one, single utterly ineffective tactic: guaranteeing that they (the yahoos) would have the right to bear arms. All other tactics to minimize the ability of the government to control and repress protest, disruption, or even shouting in frustration or producing subversive art were ignored. As a result, the right to bear arms as a means of keeping the government under some sort of control in the political and social arena has been obviated by the Patriot Act. And the Patriot Act exists (here comes the irony) because George W. Bush stole one presidential election and lied his way past another. He was voted and then kept in office by the aforementioned yahoos, Texans, and Floridians. Thus proving that the yahoos and gun nuts are, by and large, morons.

~ ~ ~

I know some people. These people are between 20 and 30 years of age. They dress as postmodern hippies. They are smart and well educated. They are critical thinkers (except about certain things, depending on the individual), and they tend to be activists. They ride bikes, not cars; they eat more organic and less processed; if they smoke, they prefer Indian tobacco; they make zines and volunteer their time for good works; they tend to be atheists; and they hang out in coffee shops. They live all over the place, but most of the ones I know live in South Minneapolis, where they represent the third generation of political activists grown up in this more-radical-than-most-people-realize city. Their parents were all about Hubert Humphrey and Anti Viet Nam, the Utne Reader and the Mother Earth Catalog, Radical Theater and holding the line at the second Red Barn in Dinkytown.

They are the aging youth of a liberal city and I know them (well, some of them) because they found out that I was teaching radical ideas that interested them, so they came to gawk and sometimes talk, and to introduce themselves to me, in some cases to become my dear friends, and sometimes to tell me to fuck off, and sometimes to get inspired.

A subset of these people are more politically active than others, and when the Republican National Convention was planned for Saint Paul last year, they (and by “they,” I mean people from around the country sharing the same Venn diagram) organized protests and modest disruption. They also did something very humorous and intelligent: the production of a low-end, symbolism-rich, faux threat against the authority of the government, the Republicans, the police, and the military. I have it here, and I need you to watch it from beginning to end before you read the rest of this essay.

Did you spot the symbolism? The Molotov cocktail is obvious. The bowling ball may be less so. We will not all agree with the symbolism, but I saw 1984, ablution, anarchists bicycle movement, anarchists of yore and brats on the Weber of more recent times, awakening, the labor union wars, innocence of youth, Kafka, Marathon Man (the movie), more Kafka, Ralph Nader, several references to earlier protest movements in Minneapolis (a sort of “Hi, Mom and Dad!”), the Beaver Cleaver family representing the inured middle class, the Big Lebowski, the coffee shop trope (in several forms), the environmental movement, the holocaust, the local food movement and the old “food not bombs” trope, the more peaceful messages in the Bible, and more. And I laughed the whole time. I love this video. I love the kids who made it. I love the message it gives and the way it is given.

But the Saint Paul Police Department saw it differently.

We now know, because of the release of previously secreted information and some excellent reporting at MinnPost, that this video was the primary piece of evidence used by the police to argue before judges, city officials, state officials, and federal authorities that they needed funding, warrants, and overall administrative support as well as coordination at the federal and state level to spend $300,000 invading several homes, harassing several people, confiscating truckloads of stuff that police claimed was either evidence or dangerous materials, and ultimately arresting over 800 people.

OK, have you stopped laughing? Have you stopped screaming? Have you cleared the tears from your eyes? Yes, it is true. This video scared the authorities into spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to carry out dozens of blatantly unconstitutional acts and hundreds of inappropriate activities. Thousands of law enforcement officials were involved. It was almost like a municipally organized pogrom pitting the police against the populous. The mayor of Saint Paul and the chief of police saw this video, shat in their pants, and the smell is still ripe.

The vast majority of the arrests were the sort of arrests that happen at protests, where protesters are carted off to prison for a few hours or a day and released. But many arrests stemmed from pre-Republican National Convention raids on homes (or other places) in which, it was thought, the ring leaders of a movement that would “destroy the city” of Saint Paul were jailed and charged.

Almost every single charge against almost every single individual has been dropped because there was no case. The vast majority of the confiscated evidence has been shown irrelevant. A very small number of individuals, who are now known as the Saint Paul 8, are still charged with a reduced number of crimes. These charges are likely to be further reduced or dropped. In addition, several quite viable lawsuits are now in play against the police and the city of Saint Paul.

The culture of citizen criticism, positive collective action, and thoughtful radicalism that defined this subculture within Minneapolis has always scared the authorities. Especially the authorities in Saint Paul. The restless spirit of Minneapolis has been used, rather than repressed, by the city itself more often than not, and brought to bear to solve many social problems. But this subculture has always frightened the more conservative, the less informed, and frankly, the less intelligent. When the national movement teamed up with the local to move on the Republicans, it was not enough, apparently, to put up some extra defenses. What had to happen is that this spirit had to be crushed. The free thinkers had to be punished. Those who dared to question the very questionable authority of a rogue political party and a pretender president needed to be labeled as the same ilk as “Al Qaeda” and silenced, even at the cost of our national sense of liberty, and even by a Democratic mayor.

Below I provide a list of resources for those interested in catching up on what happened, what is now known about what happened, and what is ongoing. The Saint Paul 8 have their next hearing in court scheduled in about a month. The prosecuting authorities seem to keep putting it off as though…as though they just want the whole problem to go away. It is widely accepted these days that the highly effective and very repressive actions taken against the RNC protesters (and journalists, and others who were unrelated to any of this) were by and large illegal, inappropriate, retrospectively embarrassing, un-American, and just plain wrong. Almost no one believes that what was done was in any way okay.

At the same time, it has also been said that these activities by the police have put a damper on future protests and broken the spirit of those who might think again about disruption and civil disobedience against an oppressive government.

This, I doubt with every fiber of my being.

News and Resources

Two-part article from MinnPost. This is a must read. Start here.

Part I: Assessing RNC police tactics: missteps, poor judgments and inappropriate detentions
Part II: Looking back at GOP convention: Police kicked into ‘disruption mode’

Details on the Joint Analysis Center: What’s the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center?

Defend the RNC 8 Web Site

Democracy Now reporting on the charges:

Journalist from above report getting busted by the cops in Saint Paul:

Just for fun: Watch Naomi Wolf use the word “permiticization”…but seriously, this is interesting:

I have always preferred train travel over flying, when practical.  I have no fear of flying, and when I do fly, I try to sit by the window because I love looking down at the lay of the land and the tiny cars on freeways.  I am still a kid that way.  I love to fly,  but I would prefer a train because it is a much more relaxing way to travel.

I am old enough to remember regular passenger train service from Hallock to the Twin Cities. This was long before Amtrak.  The Great Northern serviced Hallock, and we had our depot on the west side of town.  It wasn’t a historical site; it was a working depot with baggage cars and ticket windows and a waiting area with a pop machine  and everything.

My dad’s brother lived in Bloomington and worked for West Side Volkswagen. Whenever Dad mentioned to Earl that he was looking for a new car, Earl would have something set aside with the “family discount” price.  Dad would take one or two of us kids with him on the trip to the Cities to see Earl and Barbara (and get spoiled) and then drive home.  For my twin sister and I, our trip was when we were seven.

We left on a Friday night, getting to the depot at 7:00 p.m. to check in and get on the train.  I don’t know if in my entire life, I had ever been so excited to go to the depot.  In past trips, we had gone there when our siblings were the lucky ones to hop aboard the train, and I had always hated that it wasn’t me. This time, I was getting on and riding the train for a real trip for the first time.

Great Northern Dining Car

We found some seats and Dad asked if we were ready to go to the dining car.  Since space in dining cars was limited, the porter would put people together whether they knew each other or not.  I suspect that this was Dad’s favorite part of the trip.   He is a social person, if not gregarious.  He just likes to talk to people, even if they are strangers.  He may be talking to them about farming, weather, politics, how much things have changed since he was growing up, etc.  He also likes to listen to people, so people like to talk to him.

We sat down with Dad in the dining car, and the porter put with us a man in a hat.  That’s all that I remember about him, other than that he was friendly and knew how to talk to kids.  He made the dinner enjoyable, and we didn’t mind when the conversation turned to grownup stuff, because we were on a train and the world outside of us was moving.  The train rocked gently on the springs, and we could hear the clicking as the wheels rolled from rail to rail to rail.

When we slowed down for Warren, we barely noticed.  We stopped. Some people got off and others got on. The train stated up again as we finished dinner and went back to our seats.  Mom had packed some cards and games for Mary and I to use to occupy our time, and we played with our Etch-A-Sketches for a little bit.  Honestly, my heart wasn’t in the games, because the world was rolling by and I wanted to watch it.  Fields, trees, rivers, horses, cows, barns.   I had seen all of these before but never from the window of a train.  I could change seats and look out the other side if I wanted to.

Our family had made several trips by car, of course.  We were a large family, though, and there was no room for movement on long trips when nine people were packed into a station wagon, or a Volkswagen Squareback, or Chevy Vega, or some sort of pickup truck.  Yes, it’s true, we traveled like sardines at times.

The train was different because it gave us room to move about without squishing or elbowing a sibling.  When the porter came around with a blanket and a pillow, I was ready to go to sleep. As my eyes were slowly fighting their way shut, I stared into the darkness and saw only the yard lights of the farms in Minnesota.  I only woke up once, and had the strange sensation that the train had turned directions in the night.  I asked Dad about it, wondering if for some reason we were headed back to Hallock.  He looked at me sort of funny and laughed.

When next I woke up, we were close to Minneapolis and I stared in wonder at the tall buildings.  Earl picked us up at the station and took us to their home. We had a great weekend.  We drove a red Beetle with a rag-top sunroof back home on Monday morning.

The next great train ride was from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Churchill on the Hudson Bay in Canada.  This was a much longer train ride, at least 1,000 miles.  The rails have to skirt around both Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba and head towards western Manitoba for a stop in Thompson.

We were a larger group on this trip.  It was the summer of 1969 and my grandfather was still alive.  Our aunt and uncle were with us, along with their kids, cousins close in age to Mary and me.  My brother John and my mother were the other family members on this trip.

We found many ways to get into mischief on this trip, both because it was longer and because there were more of us to think up things to do.  The only real trouble we caused was in The Pas, which is where the train stopped for an hour.  After we had spent about 45 minutes wandering around the station, the call was on to board the train in five minutes.  The conductor was blocking the door at the entry, and cousin Barry was getting impatient to get on the train.  So he told me to follow him, and like a fool I did.

We walked down the row of cars, and to this day I am pretty sure that I had told Mom I was going with Barry.  I am likely to be wrong in this.

Barry and I found a car that was not being guarded and the door was open, so we climbed aboard.  We walked through four cars, including a Pullman sleeping car.  We had never seen a sleeping car except for in the movies, so this was kind of fun.  We made our way to the car where the family had set a “home” for the trip.  We picked out our seats, grinning that we had beat the system and were in our seats before everyone else.  Then we waited.  We waited a bit more.  We wondered why it was taking so long for everyone else.

Then Grandpa came to us, and we could see that he was angry with us.  This was a shock, because I had never in my life had him angry with me.  I didn’t even know that it was possible.

“You boys should be spanked!”  I thought he was joking and started to giggle at him.  This was the wrong thing to do.  “I am serious!  We have been looking all over for you and had no idea where you were!  We were looking at the station, in the bathrooms, everywhere!  The Canadian Pacific are holding this train to find you.”  I honestly have never felt so sheepish in my life, and I felt like crying.

Grandpa saw this and softened a bit.  He explained that he was really scared because they didn’t know where we were. Barry decided to “help.”  “C’mon, Grandpa, relax.  We were here the whole time.”  Grandpa didn’t take that well and repeated that we should be spanked.  As he was talking, Mom came along and then the rest, including a conductor.  He was angry, as well, because we had wasted his time.  Mom was relieved, and she was never able to hide her emotions.  She gave me a big hug.

The remainder of the trip, I did exacly as Grandpa said whenever he said it.  I never wanted to have him angry with me again.  We rolled through beautuful country and the trees grew shorter and shorter as we moved futher north towards Hudson’s Bay.  This was probably the greatest train ride I have ever taken, because the Far North is so fantastically and starkly beautiful even in summer.  Churchill, Manitoba is directly on Hudson’s Bay.  Even though it was July, there were still icebergs on the shore and we climbed on them.

The train took us home three days later.  It was a long train ride, but wonderful nonetheless because I could move about the car as long as I told a grownup where I was going to be.   I could move about and see the world from both sides of the train.

Coast Starlight Scenery Car

I have taken one more long train ride, and that was from San Francisco to San Diego on the Coast Starlight.  I won’t rehash too much of it because it was a bittersweet ride along the edge of the Pacific towards the end of my first marriage.  I enjoyed myself until I discovered that the person I was with was thinking about someone else. I had hoped that this trip would revitalize the relationship, but when she told me that she missed her Sam, I realized that my hopes were in vain.

So, the return trip was a sad, poetic one of sitting in the Scenery Car staring at the ocean.  My melancholy was broken only by sitting down with a pair of families, translating for them between Spanish and English.  One of the families was on vacation from Venezuela, and so the Spanish they spoke was a bit more “pure” than what I had learned in Mexico and in college classes. I muddled through.

When we rolled into the station at Oakland, I told her to call her Sam to pick her up.  I would catch a ride with my sister from the station to San Francisco, where I went to bed alone, thinking about the Pacific and Punta Concepcion.  I was going to keep that part of the trip with me even if I had to discard the rest.

I prefer trains, because watching the world move while still being free to walk about the cars is so much more relaxing than flying.  It may take more time to complete the journey, but it gives a person time to look and to think and to watch through the windows on both sides.

I just learned a new example of a butchered place name:

Le Center, Minnesota

Look at that place name and pronounce it properly in French. Don’t worry if your French pronunciation is not great. Just give it a try.

OK, now, here’s how this place name is pronounced in Minnesotan:

Lee Center

(Lee as in Robert E. Lee.)

For years after I moved to Minnesota, I noticed that people had a lot to say about a lake somewhere called “Millacks.” The walleye in Millacks were of great concern. Tourism on Millacks was important to the economy. The governor went fishing on Millacks. Millacks, Millacks, Millacks. That’s all I heard about. (The walleye have apparently gotten better, and we don’t hear as much about that any more.)

In the meantime, I kept noticing on the map of Minnesota a big, giant lake called “Mille Lacs” that no one seemed to ever talk about.

My absolute favorite example of this is a lake out west, not far from Alexandria. This is a case where I actually needed to ask directions at one point and was unable to do so.

“Is this the road to Lac l’Homme Dieu?” I said to the person in the gas station, applying a not too heavy French accent….

“What?”

“Lac l’Homme Dieu? I’m looking for Lac l’Homme Dieu.”

“Don’t know it,” the clerk said with no malice or snark. I had simply pronounced the name of this lake so incorrectly that it was impossible for me to be understood.

It turned out that the lake across the street was the lake I was looking for, known in Minnesota as “Lake Lahamadoo.”

Minnesotans also butcher German place names. New Prague rhymes with Don’t Brag. Let’s not even touch Native American place names. For now.

Up by the cabin, we have Pike Point. How do you think that is pronounced??? Try “Pike eeee.” Pikey Point.

Apparently, Biscay is pronounced “Biskee” (rhymes with “whiskey”).

Well, I suppose I shouldn’t talk, having grown up in All Benny (Albany), situated equidistant between Sken Ect Ady (Schenectady), Kada-ross (Kayaderosseras) and Cooks Acky (Coxsackie). Or having lived later pretty near Woo Stah (Worcester).

In the end, this is all cultural. Or, to be more exact, it all depends on what Schul/School you were shed ooled to go to.

Add your own funny place names below:

As a 17-year-old junior in high school, I realized that I was going to be old enough to be a college freshman yet stuck in high school for my senior year. I was itching and anxious to get out of Hallock. I should be clear that I liked Hallock well enough. I just didn’t have a very good social life.

I talked it over with my parents, and one of the options that came up was for me to finish high school somewhere else. They wanted to make sure that the school I chose had a solid academic record and reputation, but they didn’t want me to be too far from home. I had enough of my own money saved from working at a furniture store in Hallock to pay both tuition and room and board at Mount St. Benedict’s Academy in Crookston.

Historically, Mount St. Benedict’s had been a girls’ academy. When the Crookston Diocese cut their budget in the 1970′s they closed down Crookston Cathedral, the boys’ high school, and The Mount agreed to become a coeducational academy. Boys and girls together couldn’t get into too much trouble if they were Catholic. Right?

The dorms were not coeducational. Boys from out of town who wanted to go to school at The Mount found host families with whom to stay during the school year. Few local boys took this option, and most of the boys were foreign exchange students. I found a place to stay, but it didn’t work out well and so I had to find another. That particular story should make its way into Quiche Moraine, but this is not that day.

I had an advantage over other new kids, in that I already knew many of my new classmates because of the travelin’ Catholic band, Hosea. Our group was made up mostly of people from Crookston and particularly The Mount. We traveled over the Diocese of Crookston, presenting Saturday retreats then playing for Mass on Sunday. Walking into Mount St. Benedict Academy on the first day of school, I saw a slew of familiar faces both from the band and  retreats and the movement I had been involved in called Teens Encounter Christ.

In addition to the friends I already knew, I met some new people. I can’t give their real names, and you will soon find out why. One of them was “Tim,” and the other was “Mark.” Mark and I became friends just sitting next to each other in poli sci class on the first day. Mark introduced me to Tim.

Tim was “close to nature.” Tim’s particular expression of this closeness was to wrap Mother Nature in small pieces of paper and then burn it by inhaling deeply. Jeff was another such nature lover.

Mark, Tim, Jeff and I spent the second day after school experiencing nature in this way, and Jeff and I ended up being pretty good friends. Jeff was an athlete and a half. He was the star football and hockey player. He was recruited by Yale for hockey and had the academic “stuff” to justify a free ride scholarship beyond the standard athletic scholarship.

Jeff and I were classmates in the best biology class I ever took in high school. Sister Lamberta taught Field Biology, which was an experiential environmental class. She combined class instruction with regular trips to the campus’ nature trail, and we learned botany and wildlife zoology by identifying trees and studying habitat. It added greatly to my understanding of evolution with common descent. (Sister Lamberta didn’t think creationism was worth spit.)

The nature trail was a great excuse to get out of the classroom and away from the teachers. Jeff and I often paired up for Sister Lamberta’s assignments to collect certain data. Since we were both rather quick to do the assignments, we often were done with what we needed to collect long before the time allotted. And so we were teenagers who loved a particular form of Mother Nature, out in nature with time to spare.

In late September of 1978, our class was enlisted in a very important assignment. We were to collect the dead wood on the trail for the Homecoming bonfire. We had no assignment more complex than to pick up wood out back and drag it to a pickup location for the campus truck.

We didn’t have to think for this assignment, since even a stoned person can tell without too much difficulty the difference between “live” wood and “dead” wood. Jeff had thought ahead and brought with him a very potent form of Mother Nature. So, when Sister Lamberta sent us out, we decided to start the assignment under the influence of Mother Nature.

I had never in my life tasted such potent Mother Nature. I experienced effects that had never been brought to my attention before, and while I was not hallucinating, I was extremely ecstatic in my surroundings.

At the beginning of the year, I had noticed that Tim’s sister “Connie” was very pretty. I wanted to ask her out but was told that she had a boyfriend and had been seeing him since she was in eighth grade, so I didn’t have much of a chance. Two days before this particular outing, I found out that Connie and her boyfriend had decided to take a timeout from their relationship in order to see other people. I thought about the implications of this for a couple of days. Since I was an “other people,” I asked Connie to Homecoming, just before our field biology class. She said, “Yes!”

I was out there on the nature trail, both high on life and high on a rolled up and smoked version of Mother Nature. I started talking to Jeff and the other classmates who had gathered around the growing pile of deadwood. Everybody agreed that life was pretty good and were especially happy for me that I had a date for Homecoming.

For some strange reason, which I can’t for the life of me explain right now, I picked up a leaf from the ground and started rubbing it on my face. This didn’t add much to my experience, but I was just hangin’, ya know? I decided to look at the leaf and the plant that it came from. I began to run through the identification process. Shape of leaf, stem, color, the way that the leaves bunch together…

Poison ivy!

All of a sudden the world, which had been so great just moments before, suddenly took on an air of grand suckiness. How would I explain to Connie that I couldn’t go to Homecoming? How could I explain to Sister Lamberta that I had been so foolish with a plant that was so easily identified? Would I get sent home and kicked out of the school and have to explain this to my parents? An inquiry would be held and THE WHOLE SCHOOL WOULD NOW KNOW THAT I HAD BEEN SMOKING MARIJUANA!

One of the side effects of marijuana is that the user can develop a form of paranoia. The paranoia that I experienced there was not friendly. I just sat and tried to make excuses for why my eyes were red and dilated, why I might have mistaken poison ivy for something else.

We went back to the school in time for the next class (physics), and I avoided Sister Lamberta’s eyes. I knew from past history and experiences with my own reaction to poison ivy that the outbreak would take a day or two to show. I knew that I had a little time to think of something, while not stoned, before I had to explain myself.

Physics at that school was a bit easy. We were covering classical physics concepts that I had covered in 9th grade, so I didn’t have to stretch myself much and that particular teacher wasn’t likely to make the connection that I might have been engaging in an illegal extracurricular activity during the previous class.

I made it through the day with no consequences. The paranoia died down before supper time. I never broke out in a rash from poison ivy. I kept my date with Connie, which was a fine experience, but I sensed she would rather have been with her boyfriend. She went back to him two weeks later.

My year at Mount St. Benedict’s Academy was a great experience, and I did a great many things that my parents don’t need to know, okay? My dad doesn’t read the internet, and my mother has passed on. So now I can confess, and this time not to a priest but to the world.

I also learned that a Catholic private school is not always the best option for parents who want to shield their kids from the wicked ways of the world.  No, sir.

This was a simple assignment, really.  Drive to Lakeville, examine a car for flood damage and send an estimate to the insurance company.  It was a car that had been transported from East Grand Forks, Minnesota to Lakeville.  It was owned by a married couple with two kids, people evacuated when the Red River crested nearly five feet higher than estimated and swamped the entire city of East Grand Forks.  People who were refugees of the 1997 flood.

I watched the flood news on TV.  The Red River of the North wrested control from human attempts to subdue it.  It called out “This is MY valley, and I will have my way with it this year.”  I had not seen such a flood in all of the time I live in the Red River Valley.  The flood of 1979 was close.

In 1979, I was preparing to graduate from high school, and I was living in Crookston. The Red Lake River flows through Crookston towards the Red River in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  When the Red Lake River crested, I helped with piling sandbags and saving peoples’ homes in Crookston.  When that was done, I joined a crew of my fellow high school seniors and drove to Grand Forks to help out over there, where the water was still rising.

We worked through the night in the south side of Grand Forks, piling sandbags in the rain.  We were sent to a location in a wealthy neighborhood, piling sandbags in a protective ring around the home of a rich family.  They didn’t come out to say, “Hi,” or, “Thanks.”   We could see them inside drinking highballs.  I was of legal age and wanted one.  None were offered.

We arrived back in Crookston in time to shower and get ready for school.  We had worked among thousands of volunteers from the University of North Dakota and the Grand Forks Air Force Base.  We felt good that we had saved people’s homes and properties.

After the threat to Grand Forks was fended off, the thanks via the letters section of the Grand Forks Herald were many.  People were grateful, and we appreciated their kind words and their praise.  There was one letter writer, though, who made me particularly upset and angry, and trust me, this was not my larger experience of the people of Grand Forks. From memory:

When the sandbaggers came, there were all kinds of riffraff and especially blacks that came into our yards.  I wish I hadn’t had to put up with that.  I would rather that they had let my house flood than have blacks and long-haired college kids on my property.

That has stuck with me for thirty years, along with the question of whether or not it was written by the homeowners who watched us while they were drinking their highballs.

The 1997 flood was a much worse flood.  In 1997, the sandbagging was not enough to save Grand Forks.  The river rose higher than it had been since 1826.  Downtown Grand Forks was destroyed by explosions and fire that added on to the damage caused by the water.  The Grand Forks Herald published every day thanks to the printing presses of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and each day I saw the devastation so far away.

This time, I wasn’t there to help out.  Hundreds of people were heading north to Grand Forks to help, but I was unable to get away from work.  One of my coworkers, who was in the National Guard, was called up to help in the emergency.  I could only watch on TV and call my parents to see whether the Red River had widened to reach Hallock.  They assured me it hadn’t.  Yet.

So I felt helpless as people were evacuated from Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.  The local TV stations carried stories of cattle stranded in flowing water, unable to reach higher ground.  Some cattle were frozen standing in place as the floodwaters froze at night.

***

This was a simple assignment.  I worked for an independent auto damage appraisal company, writing estimates for auto repair.  My boss’s guidelines were clear.  If the floodwaters had reached the bottom of the seat, the car would be declared a total loss.  I didn’t need to continue to write the estimate up until the damage reached 70% of the value of the car.  I would only need to note the level of water damage.

The reason is simple.  The electronic control module, the CPU for all of a car’s computer-controlled functions, doesn’t show immediate effects of corrosion.  A flood-damaged car wouldn’t be visibly corroded, but since the ECM can’t be cleaned, the corrosion from floodwater would continue to “eat” at the electronics until they no longer functioned.  A car with such damage can run just fine until it stops.  This could happen on a freeway, while passing a big truck.  People could die.  My company didn’t want to be held liable for the deaths in such a scenario.  The policy was firm.

I contacted the owners of the car and set an appointment for the next day.  I arrived at the house where they were temporarily staying, and met the woman who owned the car.  She was trying to keep a brave face, but I could see the pain in her eyes as she smiled and thanked me for the appraisal.  I told her of my own roots in Grand Forks, and she told me how much it hurt her to have to leave.  I was getting a little verklempt myself.  I took my pictures of the damage and went back to the office.

A major contributor to the flood in 1997 was an early thaw.  Water was standing in pools in the fields when a major blizzard hit the Red River Valley. The pools froze under the snow.  As a second thaw hit, the water couldn’t drain down through the fields.  It flowed directly to the river, leading to a rapid rise.  Since the river runs north, it flows towards a still-frozen section, which causes the water to back up.  The river widens.  Dikes built to protect the towns along the river cause the flow to run faster toward unyielding ice.  The river backs up and widens even more.  The loss of wetlands speeds up the runoff towards the river.  The river widens even more.

Why are people so crazy as to build along a river that can flood so badly?  It’s the soil.  The soil is fantastic farmland.  It is a loamy clay.  Sugarbeets, potatoes, wheat, barley, sunflowers, oats, sorghum, rapeseed, flax, barley.  That’s why people stay in the Red River Valley.  But it has a price, and occasionally it demands repayment in the form of a flood.

The Natiomal Weather Service is looking at conditions in the Red River Valley and is predicting another major flood for 2009.  Fargoans are filling sandbags today, as I write this.  They can’t lay them until snow and ice have melted.  When I was driving through Fargo this last week, I noticed that they still have a great deal of snow on the ground, with ice beneath the snow.  This means possible rapid runoff.

When I see a story like this one in the Grand Forks Herald, I think of my simple assignment twelve years ago. I uploaded a file and the pictures.  Following my boss’s instructions, I had simply noted “Total Loss. Water above the bottom of the seat.  No further estimate required per guidelines.”

The adjuster, my client, called and asked for the detailed estimate.  I argued with him and explained the policy.  He wanted an estimate that showed 70% damage.  I told him it wasn’t necessary. My boss backed me up, and the adjuster relented and agreed that the car should be settled as a total loss.  Then I did something that is technically unethical, but the right thing to do.  I called the owners of the vehicle and told them how to negotiate for the maximum settlement of a total loss for their vehicle.

I did it because the adjuster was a jerk to me.  I did it because I had been unable to go to Grand Forks to help sandbag.  I did it because the highball drinkers and the letter writer who hated that blacks and long-haired college students had been in his yard are anomalies in Grand Forks.  I sincerely hope that Grand Forks, and indeed all of the Red River Valley from Wahpeton to Winnipeg, fare well and avoid a major flood in 2009.

Chuck told me:

Charley came with the first troops to the Fort when it was organized in l870. He was a Sergeant at the time. During the Civil War he was captured and escaped. He became sheriff in l875.

He brought out Eugene Harris (Dr Harris’s brother), Dr Harris’ Mother and sisters, as well as his own Mother, in 1882. Charley was a cousin of my Grandfather.

What happened in the book actually happened. The names are accurate except for the girl [Marguerite] and her family. The times are accurate, so are the soldiers names and officer names at the Fort. As sheriff from 1875 until his death with cancer in l884 he farmed a quarter at the border about 3 miles west of the present custom house.  In addition to being sheriff of Pembina County those years, also ran a saloon just south of what we knew as the old Heneman store, with John Kabernagel. I didn’t mention John’s wife Hannah in the story, whom I knew very well as a child. The shootings are fact and true, the jail escape is well known. The trips west to recover the teamsters’ goods is true and accurate.

Chapter l, Dakota Territory, l878

Sheriff Charley Brown was beginning to feel the pressure. Things were getting complicated; work was piling up faster than it could be handled. A bachelor, he lived alone above his sample store located near the north end of the business block, a business block with no vacant lots. Wood-framed stores and shops were crammed haphazardly together, wall to wall, creating an excellent chance of a future, massive conflagration.

Now, at 31 years of age, Charley was beginning to have frequent occasions of strange dreams, nightmares that he had not had since his teens. They were of his war years, years long past. Usually it was the same dream but with subtle variations. He marveled that waking up from a dream only took seconds, but how long the dream seemed.

The Confederate captain was adamant. Charley was to be hung as a spy. The noose around his neck was snug and scratchy; then the officer suddenly swung his quirt at the horse Charlie was astride, the one he had attempted to steal. At the same moment the officer shouted, “That’ll teach you Yankee bastards not to steal horses!” Charley felt the sudden burning pain and choking as the rope tightened with a jerk.

Awakening in a cold sweat, he discovered his bed sheets clammy, damp from perspiration. He also realized he had again been grinding his teeth as his tongue detected a lump inside his cheek. Twisting in bed, he reached over to the bedside table, fumbling blindly for the kerosene lamp. As his fingers contacted the base, he slid his fingers lightly up to the chimney. Removing the glass carefully, he set it aside to grope for a match. Striking one under the bed iron, he touched it to the wick. Replacing the chimney, he flung the bed covers aside and swung his feet to the floor. It had not cooled during the night and the floor seemed warm.

Bewildered, he questioned his sanity. Why am I dreaming about the war? It’s been over for years. Something’s getting to me! What is it? The nightmare brought back memories of the time he and two friends had been captured by Confederate cavalrymen. The enemy had overrun them during a counterattack by the rebels against Buford’s Federals. Hiding until dark, they had attempted to steal enemy horses at St. James Church, only to be captured when the horses created a fuss.

The rebel captain of the cavalry unit wasted no time. All three were to dance at the end of a rope as spies. It was the timely arrival of General Jeb Stuart that spared their lives. The heavily bearded commander appeared out of the darkness, demanding the reason for the clamor. After an explanation, he addressed the captain scornfully. “They are just boys. Send them to the rear.”

Charley, already a brevet second lieutenant, and knowing how close they had been to death, saluted the General. “Thank you, sir!” he said.

General Stuart studied Charley briefly with a wry smile before turning away.

Reaching for his watch on the bedside table, Charley saw it was nearly 5:00 a.m. Even from a distance he could hear a cock crowing with pride over his harem. Dressing slowly, he picked up the lamp and moved to the kitchen to make coffee.

A faint light was showing in the eastern sky, faintly illuminating his kitchen. While the coffeepot rocked on the kerosene stove, he stepped to the sink, poured water into a china bowl and washed his face. Rubbing briskly with a towel, he bent further to look into a mirror that hung too low. Dampening his hair, he parted it, determined to get a shave later in the day.

Carrying a steaming cup of coffee downstairs, he unlocked the door of the saloon he shared with his business partner, John Kabernagle. Eyeing the spittoons as he began sweeping the floor, he shook his head in disgust. Men either couldn’t or wouldn’t spit straight, missing the receptacle, and making a mess on the floor. He made a mental note to tell their swamper to surround the pots with more sawdust.

Finally finished tidying up the floor, he put the broom away and began clearing and wiping the tables, moving the dirty mugs and glasses to the bar. As he stepped outside to lock the door, a last brief perusal of the room satisfied him. On the boardwalk outside, he found the air already warm. The morning sun was an eye-catching ball of fire that caressed the eastern sky with yellows and orange, fading westward to corals and turquoise. Glancing in each direction along the street, he found it totally deserted. The lightness of the morning air still carried faint traces of the acrid odor of smoke, smoke from the burning peat bogs to the east, in Minnesota.

At the north corner he stepped from the raised plank sidewalk to cross the rutted dirt street toward the jail. He knew that John, his business partner, would open the doors of their tavern promptly at 10 a.m.

Suddenly a resounding boom from Fort Pembina’s morning salute gun sounded throughout the town. It echoed among the buildings, the harbinger of another workday at the army post located just a mile to the south.

He hesitated momentarily to view the weather-bleached, two storied, squared-log jail. There was that bedraggled, swollen-bellied cat sitting complacently in front of the door. Turning toward the one-holer located behind the jail, he spent some moments, then returned to the front door to remove the brass padlock. As he opened the door, the feline arose to walk daintily inside, rubbing and purring against his boots the moment he sat at his desk. Exasperated, Charley shook his head, addressing the cat loudly. “You skinny, misbegotten critter, you’ve gotten yourself knocked up again!” A guilty feeling came when he realized he had forgotten to bring his table scraps of last evening. The cat looked up at Charley dolefully, blinking her eyes slowly. Charley knew the female to be independent and usually antisocial. Now, he thought, she’s looking for sympathy. Many times the cat had been inadvertently locked in the jail for a day or two, but had come to no harm since he always kept a tin of water inside the door.

Reaching into his top drawer Charley withdrew a sheaf of wanted posters. Gazing out the small, six-paned window directly in front of his desk, he mourned the dirty and cracked panes. Among the broken edges, purple and violet tints sparkled and twisted in the sunlight. Backing his chair toward the doorway, he gained additional light to ease his reading. While he scanned the sheets, the cat jumped to his lap, purring and nuzzling his hands. Petting her absently, he could feel her body throbbing beneath his fingers, giving him a feeling of tranquility. Lazily he attempted to memorize the poor facial drawings and described details of the felons.

His attention was momentarily diverted by the sound of footsteps as lawyer Bob Ewing climbed the outside staircase to his office above the jail. He heard the twang of the screen door spring, then the rattle of the key in the lock. The screen door closed with a slap, followed by a thump as the inner door closed.

Dust motes drifted down from the ceiling as a heavy chair scraped on the floor above. Charley mentally cursed the builder of the lockup, knowing that although the floor above was heavily double-planked, the carpenter had failed to put felt paper between the two layers of lumber. Dust gravitated down whenever the lawyer or his clients moved about.

Finished reviewing the wanted posters, he turned to a two-day-old copy of the St. Paul Globe, knowing well that the paper was owned by the railroad magnate, Jim Hill.

Charley was the only law for well over forty miles in each direction, excepting to the north. There, just two miles away, lay the Canadian border, where Constable Bob Bell was in charge, assisted by Fred Bradley, who was Justice of the Peace.

Recently Jud LaMoure, a local resident, had been made a Deputy United States Marshal. Unfortunately, he was seldom around, being involved in politics and his several business enterprises. Actually, Charley felt comfortable in his position as sheriff, since he had the full cooperation of Captain Collins, the commanding officer at Fort Pembina. He could usually find qualified men if he needed deputies.

Although the sheriff stood a bit over six feet in height, he was becoming conscious of his weight. In the army he had held just below 190 pounds, but now he tended to gain easily. He often thought of his friend Constable Bob Bell of Emerson. Bob, a huge man, was developing an overhanging paunch; also incipient dewlaps were beginning to sag from his cheeks. Perhaps it was conceit, but Charley found himself eating less and walking more, aware of the consequences.

His prowess of manly defense while in the army had made him a legendary figure, fame gained during the war and as First Sergeant of Company I, 20th Infantry. Even so, since the beginning of his sheriffing days, he was known to be a generous man, not a harsh disciplinarian. There were times when he was confused by his own emotions. He had killed men ruthlessly in combat, but now he held a live-and-let-live attitude. He knew he had been brash as a boy, headstrong and willful.

At sixteen years of age, he had run away from his West Virginia home to join the Confederate Army. His grandfather’s influence had resulted in his ignominious return home in the custody of a Southern sheriff. Within days he had run away again, this time joining the Northern Army, having been thoroughly disenchanted by the rough treatment administered him by his southern captor.

His thoughts turned to his problem with Marguerite. They were to have supper together this evening at the Crawford House in St. Vincent. Just last week she had brought up the subject of marriage. Since her younger sister, Susan, had married his friend, Ian McLaren, she had been pressing for a permanent relationship.

Looking directly into his eyes, she had said, “We’ve been walking out together for nearly two years now. Let’s get married at Thanksgiving time.”

When he was evasive, she became angry.

The breed girl was beautiful and talented, but Charley’s training while a youth had made the idea of a mixed marriage a hell on earth. Raised in the east, a son of strict and religious parents, made miscegenation unthinkable, almost a crime against nature. At times his conscience ate at him, knowing he was being unfair to her. Still, somehow, he was unable to face a breakup.

Although there were many attractive white females available, none had caught his interest. Marguerite had brought something new and vivacious into his life, something he had never shared with any other woman. He knew it would be impossible to forget her entirely and knew it would be up to him to terminate their relationship. His conscience ate at him, knowing the longer he put it off, the more difficult it would become. He had never before been so deeply troubled, his moral senses so debased. He felt guilt-ridden with remorse, feeling he had sullied his own reputation, and hers. His conscience eased somewhat, remembering that Margurite liked trinkets. He would stop at Feldman’s Jewelry tomorrow and pick up a small gewgaw for her.

Another thought came to mind. Recently renegade Indians from Wood Mountain, in Manitoba, had shown up in the Hair Hills to the west. They had crossed over into Dakota Territory from Canada, causing alarm among white settlers and trouble among the local Indians. After seizing a teamster’s horses, wagon and government goods, they had run the man out of the hills. Furthermore, Charley had word that the same redskins had been posting warnings on trees and cabins, ordering whites out of the area. He mused, “Thank the Lord the Indians posted those notices! Now the military will have to take action. They’ll have to give me backing when I try to get that government property back.”

As sheriff, he was sure the Indians were leery of the military, knowing well the aftermath of the Custer debacle just two years ago. Surely they would back down — that is, if they could be found. But how could he recover the government goods? A grim thought came, “Heck, if I know anything about Indians, those goods have been spread to hell and gone by now! Still, there’s a slim chance I might be able to recover the team and wagon.”

Another vexing problem had presented itself just last evening, in the form of a Deputy United States Marshal. Charley had been eating his evening meal at the Pioneer Hotel when the proprietress, Mrs. Fisk, brought a stranger to his table. Resting her hand familiarly upon Charley’s shoulder, the rotund lady smiled. “Charley, this gentleman says he has business with you. His name is William Anderson.”

She turned to the stranger coyly, “You’ll have supper with us I expect?”

“Yes. Thank you!” He locked eyes with the Charley, who had risen to shake his hand. “Do you mind if join you, sheriff?”

“Not a bit, take a seat.”

Mrs. Fisk turned away with a smile of satisfaction, knowing the stranger would contribute to her coffers.

Charley looked quizzically as Anderson adjusted his chair forward to the oilcloth-covered table. He noted the man’s heavy body, his oversized nose that emphasized the square jaw. Casually, Anderson placed a shiny Deputy U.S. Marshal’s badge on the table.

“If that’s a bona fide badge, maybe I’m the wrong man for you.” Charley remarked.

“How so?”

“Jud LaMoure is the deputy marshal in this district. I don’t intrude into his business unless he asks for help.”

“Let me put my cards on the table.” The marshal picked up his badge, returning it to an inside vest pocket. Then he fished in an outside pocket to produce a curved stem pipe and tobacco pouch. Taking his time, he casually filled the pipe, tamping down the tobacco with his index finger. Before striking a match he raised his eyes to Charley. “I’m looking for a Texan. He’s been involved in several bank holdups, and lastly, he was one of the gang involved in the train robbery at Mesquite, Texas.”

Charley mused, “No strangers in town that I know of. Oh, there are still quite a few railroad workers I don’t know personally, but I doubt your man is here.”

“He’s here! Believe me—I know! He had a local lawyer named Ewing write a letter to his wife in Dallas. Our postal people intercepted it; the lawyer carelessly used his personal letterhead. Perhaps I should explain further. You must have heard of the Big Springs train robbery last November. The robbers got $60,000, all in $20 gold pieces. You’re probably aware that we’re still looking for two of those bandits and a good chunk of the missing money.”

Charley’s interest grew. He had reward posters on two of the Big Springs robbers and recently the Grand Forks newspaper, The Plaindealer, had warned of their presence in the immediate area. The wanted posters listed their names as Frank Carter and John Underwood.

“I’ve heard of them, but few strangers have come into town recently. Sure, we’ve got about 4,500 residents between the towns of Pembina and St. Vincent, but the hotels usually keep me informed of suspicious characters. Weren’t most of those involved in the Big Springs robbery either captured or killed?”

“Yup, but the Mesquite robbery involving Bill Collins happened about four years ago. We’ve been biding our time ever since, waiting for a break. We finally got it!” Anderson looked confidant, then added, “He may have been living here for a month or more. He’s young looking, tall and husky—used to weight about 200 pounds. He’s got a booming voice and the personality to charm a rattlesnake.

His voice suddenly turned bitter. “We were raised together as lads and attended the same school. In fact we were the best man at each other’s wedding. Trouble was, his marriage didn’t keep too well after he began associating with thieves. By luck, I turned to law.” He puffed a few moments on his pipe, then asked, “Where does this lawyer named Ewing hang his shingle?”

Charley smiled. “That’s easy; he couldn’t be closer. His office is just above the jail. He’ll be there in the morning.”

The marshal glanced around the room, then turned back to Charley. “I’ll be around until I can gather up Collins. Can you recommend a clean hotel? I’ve had enough of crummy rooms and bedbugs.”

“We’ve got several good hotels and quite a few rooming houses. Where is your gear? Nothing wrong with this place; Mrs. Fisk has rooms in the back and upstairs. She’s fussy, keeps them clean.” Charley chuckled, “Watch out for her;  I think she’s looking for a husband.”

“This lodging will be satisfactory.”

The cold, unemotional reply and the look on the man’s face told Charley his attempt at levity had failed.

After cleaning his plate Anderson slid back his chair and stood. “Can I count on meeting with you tomorrow morning around 8 o’clock, say, at your jail? By the way, where is it?”

“A block west and a block north, just west of the street. You’ll see Ewing’s sign by the outside staircase.”

Charley removed a small oyster tin from a pocket and began scraping the remains from his plate. He noted the puzzled look on the marshal’s face, and said sheepishly, “This is for my mouser at the jail. She’s got a litter of kittens on the way.”

After his discussion with the marshal, Charley’s intuition took over. Putting the facts together, he suspected the wanted man to be Bill Gale. If it’s him, he thought, it’s a darn shame. Although he had met Gale only casually, he took an immediate liking to the man, but also a suspicion. He judged the man was a mover who never stayed long in any one place. The man had a southern drawl and had worked at odd jobs around town for the past few weeks. Yet he had caused no trouble and minded his own business. Charley knew that Gale now tended bar at Jim White’s Halfway-House Hotel in Huron City. It was just two miles north of Pembina, situated on the Canadian border. Gale was a six-footer, a husky man, as large and heavy as Charley. Charley knew he was no man to fool with; the bulge under Gale’s left armpit indicated a firearm. That didn’t bother him, knowing many of the men in town carried some sort of weapon, either gun or knife.

He knew the hotel where Gale now worked had an unsavory reputation, equipped as it was with girls who rendered services to men. It was located astride the border between Canada and the United States and was well known, famous for its red stripe painted down the center of the barroom floor. The north half of the room was in Canada and the south half in Dakota Territory of the United States.

Salty perspiration trickled down his forehead and burned his eyes as he looked up at the flyspecked calendar. The loud chirp of a lone cricket came from the rear of the jail cell, answered by another, located somewhere under his desk. It was the second Saturday in September, with the promise of the day becoming another scorcher. A drought condition had prevailed all fall and it had not cooled during the night. Nature was playing a dastardly trick, making winter seem far away.

Tugging the watch from his vest, he examined the gold-cased Howard casually. It was one of his few foibles, a fine, expensive watch.  Already it was 9 o’clock and the marshal had failed to appear. “Why am I waiting for him? I’m not his keeper!”

Deciding not to dawdle longer, he swung his feet from the scarred desktop. The springs under the slant-back chair protested as he stood. The thought came: “I’ll take things one at a time. Bob Ewing can wait; there’s plenty of time to find the moniker of the man he represented.”

Reaching for his keys and flat-brim Stetson, Charley closed and locked the outside jail door. Some days ago he had forgotten to lock the door and returned to find pranksters had taken the leg irons, cuffs and other restraints and secured them across the arms of his swivel chair. Then they had hidden the keys so cleverly that it had taken a half hour to find them. He suspected his occasional deputies, either Bill Moorhead or Ned Cavalier, to be guilty. More than likely it was Ned, since he was the practical joker and sport about town. He was usually involved in some wild scheme, usually a lottery that turned to his profit. The thought amused Charley, for he knew that eventually word of the guilty party would leak to him. The opportunity for revenge would come; he’d have the last laugh!

Cutting through the alley to Mason’s Livery, he entered the rear of the barn to get his saddle. A hostler, busy scraping out horse stalls with a shovel, nodded briefly.

“Durned hot day, dry as a popcorn fart.”

“It’ll be plenty cool soon, winter is just around the corner.”

“Want your horse saddled?”

“Naw, I’ll do it. It appears you’ve plenty of crap to shovel.”

His bay in the corral came obediently to his cajoling call. After a brief show of affection, Charley carefully spread the saddle blanket and eased up the saddle. Circling his horse, he lifted and examined each hoof in turn. Finally slipping on the bridle, he mounted and headed for the bridge. A disturbing thought came: that marshal’s not much at keeping appointments.

The hooves of his horse made brittle sounds on the dry planking as he crossed the makeshift bridge over the Pembina River. Stopping momentarily to pay the five-cent toll, he noted the water beneath the bridge to be only a foot or so deep. He reasoned a dam was needed here to hold back a head of water. It was obvious that the river was so shallow that it would in all probability freeze solid to the bottom this coming winter. When that happened, water for the livestock in town would have to be hauled by wagon from the Red River, a cold, miserable task.

He was pleasantly surprised to find a light breeze from the southeast as he turned toward the fort. The road held three well-worn ruts, formed by the ox carts that had traveled the path for years. The center rut was formed by myriads of oxen’s hooves. The ankle deep dust on the road muted the sounds of his trotting animal.

A warm feeling of satisfaction came whenever he returned to the fort. After all, he had spent twelve years in the army and most of his friends remained in the service. Also, he realized his timing was perfect. When he finished his business with Captain Collins, the officer would no doubt insist upon his staying for dinner.

He was determined to ask that Lieutenant Kirkpatrick be allowed to head the military escort needed for the foray to straighten out the Indians. He had worked with the Irisher before and they got along well. Since today was Friday, he determined they would leave for the Hair Hills early on Monday morning.

“Gadfrey!” he sighed, “It’ll take nearly three days just to get out there. Then we’ll have to find those scalawags!

On his way to the fort, Charley reviewed the loss of his horse and buggy in the Mason Livery fire just two months ago. As badly as he needed and wanted another trotting horse, good ones were few and far between. Also, they were mighty expensive.

His thoughts turned to Mrs. Geroux. “She’s had two buggy runaways this past month. Why does Lucien keep that wild team? More to the point, he’s wealthy and owns that big hotel. Why doesn’t he buy an older buggy horse for his wife? I’ll have to corner him on that!”

He smiled to himself, thinking of his business partner. John had recently discovered his buggy missing. The horse, untended and untied, had taken off, crossed the bridge and was found at the brewery just south of town. Fortunately, both buggy and horse were unharmed. Kabernagle was teased unmercifully about it. Ned Cavalier had jested, “John, your horse is a creature of habit. He knows your every Sunday desire. He just forgot to take you along!”

There was no doubt in Charley’s mind who had slashed his trotter, then burned Mason’s livery barn. Water under the bridge, he reflected. He’s dead now, the dirty pup! How many heinous crimes had Murphy gotten away with in his lifetime? How many murders? It was lucky Pete caught him when he attempted to rape Pete’s youngest daughter, Susan. It was certain Murphy would have killed her after using her.

Charley still felt guilty about arresting Pete for killing Murphy, then leaving him in the custody of Captain Bob. Gullible Bob, his jailer, had let railroaders tempt him with drugged whiskey then remove Pete from the jail and kill him. Although Charley knew several of the guilty men involved, he had no firm evidence. Now they were safely across the border in Canada, out of reach.

Shaking his head in frustration, he tried to relieve his conscience. “How could I have known those railroaders would seek revenge for Pete’s killing Murphy because Pete was a breed? I’m positive Murphy was the one who raped and killed that young Indian girl at Roseau Crossing; he probably was involved in the disappearance of those two missing soldiers too!” Reflecting, he was thankful Susan and Marguerite didn’t blame him for the disappearance of their father. They had been shocked at his removal from the jail by unknown assailants, but were not privy to the fact that their father was positively dead. The only ones who knew were the railroaders who committed the crime, the smuggler who had found his body while crossing the border, and himself.

Even he would have not known, except that the smuggler who stumbled on a protruding, moccasined foot exposed by the weather had reported it to him. He worried if he had done the right thing, since he had returned to the site of Pete’s grave with a shovel and completed the burial. At the time, it had seemed the right thing to do. Now he was beginning to feel guilty because he had withheld the information from the girls. He told himself, Someday, when the time is right, I’ll tell them.

Approaching the northwest corner of the fort he left the road, taking a shortcut across a stretch of rippling prairie grass. Entering the fort proper, he cut around the end of the long enlisted men’s barracks that extended across the north end of the parade ground.

Opposite, to the south, across from the esplanade, were several one-and-a-half story houses occupied by the officers and their families. The store on the west side of the open ground was long and of two stories. Adjoining the store, extending even further south was the hospital, a large portion of which had two floors with an attached kitchen and sick ward. From his past army experience he knew the post dayroom and headquarters were both located in the south portion of the store, there being no other suitable building on the post.

Each fort building foundation had been built of raised wood posts, with sides of the buildings boarded to the ground for winter warmth. The open side of the parade ground lay on the high bank facing the Red River, guarded by three solitary seven-pound brass cannons, standing side by side.

Dismounting from his bay, Charley casually wrapped the lines on the long hitching pole in front of the headquarters. He noted the inner door stood open, no doubt due to the heat of the day. His first steps on the porch alerted the Charge of Quarters, who stepped outside the door.

“Good morning, Sheriff! Come inside. Lieutenant Hoch is on duty.”

Following the corporal inside, the Lieutenant arose from behind a desk and extended his hand to greet Charley. “Good morning, Charley! What’s your pleasure today?”

“Hello, Oliver. I’m here to see Captain Collins. I’ve some trouble over in the hills west of St. Joe. I need a little assistance. Canadian Indians have crossed to our side of the line again, and are giving the settlers hell.”

Hoch shook his head dolefully. “The Inspector General is here inspecting the post, and we’re trying to finish qualifying the men on the rifle range before the snow flies. We’re hard up for ready patrols just now. I have my doubts, but of course, it’s the captain’s decision. He might spring for a few men.

“I probably need only about a dozen. Don’t believe the Indians have much support from the locals. Probably a small bunch who have their dander up and will back down and skedaddle back to Canada if pushed hard.” Reflecting, he added, “A couple of weeks in your guardhouse on bread and water would really straighten them out!”

Hoch turned to the corporal, “Find the Captain and inform him the sheriff is here. I think he’s at the laundry.” He turned back to Charley. “The steam jenny over there is giving the laundresses a fit. They’re afraid it will explode.”

Charley managed a wrinkled grin. “Hold up! It’s not necessary to send Corporal Donegan. I’ll walk over there myself.”

After Charley left the day room, Hoch questioned the veteran corporal. “Wasn’t he Captain Wheaton’s First Sergeant when the captain was in charge a few years ago?”

“Yes, sir! And don’t let that easygoing manner fool you. He was hell on wheels before he quit the army in ’75. He was a real tight soldier, a man’s man, tough as nails. During the war he was a real leader! He made brevet lieutenant after our first scrap and his platoon was usually given the dirty, most dangerous jobs. He took over the company command on more than one occasion, only to be deposed by Pointers who were jealous of his ability. His men would go through hell for him; I know, for he was my lieutenant until he was captured late in ’63.”

Taking a direct route across the parade ground Charley passed between two of the officer-cottages on his way to the laundry. A sudden spurt of firing came from the rifle range to the west, causing him a quick glance in that direction. Rounding the laundry building he found Captain Collier in the act of admonishing a soldier.

“Let the fire die out after the laundresses finish for the day, then disassemble the safety valve and clean it thoroughly. You don’t need that huge fire in the boiler. Keep it small and feed it often, just enough to keep the steam up. The noise of the steam escaping from the valve is frightening the women.” He half turned upon hearing Charley’s approach, then added, “Stay on the job when the boiler is fired. I don’t want to hear any more complaints from the ladies.”

Facing Charley, he began to smile. “Come to put the touch to me again?”

“Yup! Indians in the Hair Hills are putting the run to settlers. I’ve got to try to recover a team and wagon loaded with government goods they’ve seized. It was destined for the smallpox area. It’ll probably be a cold day in Hades if I get any of that stuff back!”

Collins shook his head. “Darn trouble makers! We underestimate the Indians at times. Fetterman sure did! So did Custer! I only wish I understood them better.” He sighed, “Charley, I can’t spare you any men until late next week. Can you wait that long?”

The sheriff shrugged his shoulders. “Guess I’ll ride out that way on Monday. If I have no luck I’ll be back on your doorstep.” He hesitated, “Hock implied that you’re swamped with the federal inspector visiting. I know what you’re up against.”

“Just my career,” Collins joked. “General Gibbon is the inspector; he’s not too hard to get along with.”

“He’s fair,” Charley admitted. “He’s inspected the fort before, back when I was stationed here under Captain Wheaton.”

Light conversation ensued as they walked back toward the parade ground, finally the captain suggested, “Let’s go over to the house. My wife and son will be put out if you don’t stop. We don’t see much of you—might as well have lunch with us.”

At 1:30 that afternoon, the sheriff arrived back in town. Hearing voices from Bob Ewing’s office, he climbed the outside staircase. Opening the screen door, he found Deputy Anderson and Jud LaMoure seated near the lawyer’s desk.

Anderson looked embarrassed, “Sorry I missed you this morning, sheriff. I ran across Marshal LaMoure at breakfast and we discussed my problem at length.”

Jud spoke up woodenly. “Charley, it seems the man Anderson wants is Bill Gale.”

Charley took a chair next to Ewing’s desk. “Kind of figured it had to be him. He hasn’t been around here long, and I kind of wondered about his accent. It’s from the southwest, sure not local.”

“I still need him,” Anderson spoke up softly.

Ewing looked guilty. “You’re right, Charley; he’s from Texas. Said he was trying for a new life. He had me write a letter to his wife saying he would soon send money to get her here.” His face bore a look of chagrin. “It’s my fault they’ve found him out.”

“He’s no innocent,” Anderson grumbled. “He was arrested in Dallas last February for assault and carrying a concealed weapon; he pleaded guilty to that — jumped a $15,000 bail in June, just took off.”

“Charley, wasn’t he working for Bill Moorhead this fall?” LaMoure asked.

“Yes, but he’s working for White now, bartending in his hotel at the border. At least that’s the last I’ve heard.”

LaMoure laughed, “What a grand place to work; White’s running a damned whorehouse out there.”

“Until someone complains, it’s not my problem,” Charley shrugged.

Anderson spoke up, “Collins has been moving. I traced him to Missouri in early August, then to St. Paul. Finally I got word from Dallas that he was here.” Anderson turned to LaMoure, “I stopped in Fargo and talked to your boss, but he was busy in court. He said to see you and the local sheriff. They told me he might have crossed the border into Canada by now. If so, I’d have to bait him across the line somehow.”

“You’ll probably have to do just that,” Ewing said. “If you take your warrant to Canada you’ll get the runaround. Best you catch him on this side.”

Charley turned to Anderson angrily, “What do you want me to do? I’m only the sheriff; you and Jud are both Federal Marshals. You two can make your own arrest; it’s a federal matter—your job.”

Anderson was defensive. “I told you Bill and I were friends back in Texas. He’ll recognize me immediately and be on his guard. He’ll know I’m after him and probably run again.”

LaMoure looked at Charley hopefully. “What if you and I go over to Huron City tonight? We shouldn’t have any trouble with him, seeing there are two of us.”

“Not tonight, Jud. I’ll be tied up in St. Vincent.”

Jud knew of Charley’s occasional dalliance with Marguerite and remained silent.

A long moment of quietude fell, finally broken by Charley. “Jud, I’ll go out there tomorrow night with you, but I’ll hate every minute of it. If he can be arrested without anyone getting hurt, him included, I’ll play along. It has to be tomorrow night though, ’cause I’m heading to the hills west of St. Joe early on Monday morning. I’ve got some Indians to fuss with out there.”

Deputy Anderson stood, and then began to smile. “I appreciate your help sheriff. Perhaps my stay in Pembina won’t be too long.”

***

I had never heard of a place called Huron City, just north and maybe a tad west of Pembina, but then, there’s a lot of things I don’t know, like there used to be a place called Sultan, Minnesota not far from St. Vincent, but it’s just a memory now. Chuck says this about Huron City: “The hotel there is well known as was the owner. The hotel bar had a red line painted down the floor, half in Canada and half in the U.S. Charley and LaMoure went out to Huron City to capture the desperado, but he was armed and dangerous.”

Trish Lewis is a network administrator in Fargo, North Dakota. She grew up in the farthest northwest corner of Minnesota, where the north wind outside in winter inspires…reading. She maintains a history blog at St. Vincent Memories.

In 2008, the Minnesota state lottery contributed $116.3 million to state programs. As you can see below, in the (very cute and nonthreatening) figure from the 2007 lottery annual report (pdf), this is about a 3.5% increase from 2007′s contribution.

Contribution History

That’s not too shabby. It suggests that lottery revenue is at least keeping up with inflation. Of course, the trend in the down economic years of 2001–2003 is somewhat troubling, but we don’t yet show signs of a similar slump this time around.

At least, we don’t see a slump in lottery revenue. Tribal gaming is another matter.

An evening of gambling may offer a welcome diversion from hard times, but casinos are finding they aren’t immune from the recession, according to John McCarthy, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association. He estimated that casino visits and revenues are down 3 to 5 percent since the slowdown took hold last fall.

In some places, the decline is more dramatic.

However, one source of hard data — revenue the Fond du Lac Ojibwe shares by special arrangement with the city of Duluth from the Fond-du-Luth casino — is telling: The figures show a $211,000 drop in revenue in the third quarter of 2008, compared with the same quarter in 2007. The 12 percent decrease was the largest drop in at least several years, according to the city’s figures.

Karen Diver, chairwoman of the Fond du Lac Reservation government, estimates that the late 2008 decline was more in the 5 percent range at the tribe’s much larger Black Bear Casino Resort, which benefited from the completion last year of a $119 million expansion.

And it seems to be getting worse as the economic news stays bad.

“I guess there are some recession-proof businesses out there, but we’re not in that group,” said Tad Johnson, special counsel to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, which operates Grand Casino Hinckley and Grand Casino Mille Lacs. “For a while we were getting a similar number of customers but they were spending less. Then, a couple weeks ago we started to notice that there were fewer people, too.”

Given that casino-style gambling, either through a metro-area casino or through adding video gaming machines at the airport, appears to be the path to new revenue most favored by the legislators who are talking about it, does it still make sense to move ahead with these proposals? Possibly. One of the reasons given for the large decline in revenue in Atlantic City is the presence of newer, shinier and presumably more convenient gaming in nearby Pennsylvania and New York.

The same could potentially happen here if new gaming is added in the metro, if we’re willing to just move money around the state. A casino in our largest population center could draw enough revenue from the more distant tribal casinos, even in an economy where fewer people are gambling.

However, there are reasons for caution. According to a 2005 legislative report on the history of gambling in Minnesota (pdf), only once before has Minnesota entered a gambling industry that was in decline.

The opening of Minnesota’s first pari-mutuel racetrack in June of 1985 was one of the Twin Cities’ most eagerly awaited events of the mid-1980s.  Named Canterbury Downs, the Shakopee track was a $70 million showpiece that could accommodate 30,000 fans.  The president of the Thoroughbred Racing Association of North America called it “one of the jewels of racing in the country,” and said it “should be a benchmark for other states to study.”  Its owners projected average daily attendance of 10,500, well above the national average for thoroughbred racing.

The first season of racing in 1985 seemed to justify this optimism.  In 83 racing days the track drew an average attendance of 13,163, putting it in the top 15 racetracks in the country.

Not bad so far, but…

One disturbing element was also noted: the average daily betting handle of $1.014 million was almost $200,000 below projections. The average Canterbury fan bet $77 per day, well below the national average of about $120. But the track still showed an operating profit for the first year of about $37,000.

Although many indicators from the first season seemed to point to prosperity for Canterbury Downs, subsequent events suggested that the track had opened several years too late for its early success to be sustained.

Over the next two decades, the track changed hands several times, eventually becoming less a destination for pari-mutuel betting than a prop and a showcase for Minnesota’s horse industry. During this time, many attempts were made to change the Minnesota’s gambling laws to help make the racetrack profitable by adding other forms of gambling.

The report does note that horse racing has specific barriers to participation that other forms of gambling don’t have. It requires knowledge of the sport and its handicapping. However, Canterbury Downs is still notable for being the least successful gambling endeavor in the state. It was only with the addition of a card club in 2001, as games like Texas Hold ‘Em grew in national popularity, that the track became a stable concern.

So the question becomes, as Minnesota faces declines in casino gambling revenue, are we willing to risk another Canterbury Downs? Once again, how big a gamble is the state willing to make?

My older sister’s wedding was in 1974.  She and her groom had a friend who was an accomplished photographer, and they asked him to do the wedding photos.  I had met their friend, Roger, on a few occasions prior to the wedding and had found him to be a fascinating person to talk to.  He seemed to be keenly aware of issues in science and culture and could articulately discuss them in ways that I could interpret even at age 13.  He also had long hair and a beard and looked something of a showered hippie.

I ushered at the wedding, which meant I didn’t have to sit through the typically long and boring Catholic wedding ceremony.  The groom’s brother Dale and I were back in the antechamber of the church, guiding in stragglers and prepping to roll out the white carpet runner that the newly sanctified couple were to follow during the recessional.  Roger came back to chat with us occasionally during the ceremony and started telling us about his father’ s project.

Robert Asp

Robert Asp was a teacher in the Moorhead, Minnesota, public schools.  One day, while helping a friend shingle a roof, he fell and injured himself.  He was laid up for several months, and since he couldn’t teach during that period, he needed some activity for his mental refreshment.  In the days before the internet, people studied by using paper devices called “books.”  (You can still find them in museums libraries.)  Robert’s brother found books on their Norwegian heritage and shared them with Bob (Robert).  While reading about the Vikings and their ships, Bob developed the idea that in order to reach out to people and inspire interest in and curiosity about their own heritage, he would build a replica of a Viking ship and sail it from New York City to Bergen, Norway.

Ships, for some reason that I can’t thoroughly explain, inspire romanticism in people.  It may be that the idea of ships being small and vulnerable against the huge elemental seas and oceans are symbolic of man’s inability to tame nature.  Perhaps in placing ourselves at huge risk by venturing out and exploring the world, we are satisfying our native desire to grow as a species while recognizing that individually we are small. We are as a species always seeking to expand our environment.

Did Bob recognize this yearning? Did he believe that building a Viking ship would inspire people to learn about their own history through the hazards experienced by the Scandinavians who landed in North America long before Columbus had his circumnavigation interrupted by Hispaniola?  I don’t know, because I never had the chance to meet Bob Asp.  I did, however, see the Hjemkomst while it was being built.

Two years after my sister’s wedding, I was with another sister and her husband on a mission to buy a woodburning stove.  This other sister and her husband had purchased a small farmstead and were in the process of trying to return to “natural” ways: saving on fossil fuels by seeking alternative energy sources, grinding their own wheat for flour, raising their own chickens and goats and generally trying to commune with nature.  My sister and her husband were trying to discard those aspects of technology they found distasteful while retaining the aspects of modern life that they still enjoyed (such as waterbeds and loud rock music).

They had plenty of fallen wood in their groves, and it was natural that they would want to take advantage of this free fuel to cut down on the amount of oil they fed their furnace.  They cooked and baked with a modern woodburning range, and it made sense that they would also want to heat their house with a woodburning stove that fed warmth through their ductwork.  They found the most efficient would stove they could through their Whole Earth Catalog, then found a dealer in Minnesota who distributed this particular brand.  So they planned a trip to pick it up directly from the dealer rather than have it shipped to them.

I was staying with them during my summer vacation, and they invited me along.  We checked the map, and I saw that Hawley, Minnesota, was well within the route to the dealer’s town.  So, I asked if we could take a small diversion to see the Viking ship that Roger’s dad was building. They had been curious about Bob’s progress and agreed that it was worth the extra five miles to check in with Bob.

Bob was building the ship in his spare time.  He had healed from his injuries, and he was back at work teaching in Moorhead.  It hadn’t occurred to us that Bob might not be at the “Hawley Shipyard,” (Hawley is at least 250 miles from Duluth, the nearest port), so we didn’t bother to call to see if he would be there to let us in.

The Hjemkomst Keel When we arrived in Hawley, we drove around a bit to find the shipyard, which was just a shop that Bob was renting in order to build this ship.  Nobody was there.  We couldn’t get in to see it in progress, but we could see it through the windows.  In order to have the space he needed to build his dream ship, Bob had torn out the main floor and was building it up from the basement floor.  At this stage, we could see that he had progressed from the massive keel and its bow to where he was building the hull, one rib at a time.

We peered through the windows from all angles, talked about how great this all was and then left to continue our journey to buy a wood stove.

In the ensuing years, I lost track of the Hjemkomst and Bob Asp.  I didn’t know Bob had died until I saw a story in the San Francisco Chronicle of a ship leaving New York Harbor for Bergen in 1982. Bob wasn’t on board, but Roger and his brothers and sisters had assembled a crew, including a skipper with experience sailing Viking ships.  The Hjemkomst was outfitted with a few modern safety items, such as two-way radio, but in large part, the journey pitted the crew against the open ocean in much the same way our ancestral Viking explorers had been up against the elements.

Five hundred miles into their journey, they ran up against an Atlantic storm.  It nearly sank them as they discovered a leak that ran horizontally among the strakes. They patched it hastily. They considered turning back toward New York but decided against it after realizing that the prevailing winds meant that the return journey would take as much time as would continuing the journey to Norway.

They arrived in Norway to great fanfare as the citizens of Bergen greeted them with fireboats spraying water fountains, but they couldn’t dock on the day they arrived.  The shipyard was closed on the weekends, and they had pulled in on a Sunday.  On Monday, they secured her to the dock and kissed the ground of their ancestors.  Bergen welcomed them home.

The Hjemkomst was transported back to Minnesota following this journey and now sits in Moorhead, protected from the elements in the Hjemkomst Heritage Interpretative Center.  I took my kids to visit the Interpretative Center a few years ago and told them about Roger and Bob.  They were mildly interested but more disappointed that they couldn’t climb aboard the ship.

The Interpretative Center is now part of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. Wherever you live in Minnesota, it is well worth the trip to learn about the Scandinavian history of settlement Minnesota and the Dakotas.  If you aren’t Scandinavian, perhaps it will inspire you to learn more about how your family came here.

You can learn more about the center at Minnpost.com.

The Beagle

I can’t pass up this opportunity to share with you the dream of another group of people who wish to use the romance and allure of the sea to share their passion for science and learning.  The Beagle Project, of which I am an enthusiastic supporter, is the dream of some dear friends of mine to build a replica of the barque that carried Charles Darwin on a five-year journey that led to his formulation of the theory of natural selection.

I invite you to follow their efforts to build this ship by tracking the Beagle Project Blog and to contribute to their efforts. Bob Asp proved that this can be done, but he relied on financial help through many sources.  The Beagle Project relies on us, as well.