Spirit Lake Indian Reservation

So this weekend we've decided to mosey south to Fargo and then west to Jamestown.  If we stay on the Interstates, travel should be no problem.

Our lil' home away from home

Shortly, the skies clear out, and we begin to look down the side roads. I suggest we cut the trip much shorter by taking a step-down from the Interstate but still a good road, State Highway 200.  It's almost a straight shot west to Carrington.  From there we'll head north to Devil's Lake.

For miles and miles we are in the middle of nowhere.  There's a (very) occasional structure which may or may not be a home and may or may not be occupied.  Then, in the middle of this nowhere, we find:

this very pretty, very big church!  I'd love to be here on a Sunday, sitting in the cupola of the steeple, watching the neighbors gathering to worship!

We travel on to Carrington, stop in the local cafe for a hot lunch, and travel on.

We enter the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation at Sheyenne.  I don't know if you've ever been on a Reservation, but every single one we've been on is not pretty.  I realize the United States government wasn't giving away an oasis when it came to picking sites, but, come on.  It's been a hundred and, what? fifty years??  seventy-five??  And the last twenty of those years they've had casinos to help fund themselves...  I'm just sayin'...

And then we come upon Spirit Lake - well, what was Spirit Lake.

Now it seems to be everyone's favorite ice fishing spot!  It's a huge, huge lake, and as far around the shoreline as we travel we find mobile "villages" of ice fishermen (and women) (and children).

Notice the foreground.  While John is out taking photos I'm studying that ridge that follows the shoreline.  My mind is searching for a term that I've heard in the past and finally uncovers "pressure ridge."  I think that's what it's called.  I get John to zoom in on a particular section of it.  (It's an amazing marriage when the man will listen to the directions his wife gives when it comes to taking a picture...)  This is what he's got:

Isn't that what's called a pressure ridge, where two immovable objects butt up against each other, but one of them has to give?  That sheet of ice sticking up there is about 10" thick.  No wonder cars can drive on it.

This sucker is frozen solid, thick solid, all the way to the far shoreline - and it won't thaw out until next summer.  It's even got another 2 or 3 months to freeze even thicker!  Once you get past the pressure ridge it is flatter than a flitter and smooth as glass.

We have taken the eastern fork of the shoreline road and finally end up at the town of Devils Lake.  It's a pretty big place, right on U.S. Highway 2.  Interestingly, gasoline is 15 cents cheaper here than Grand Forks, so naturally Granpa has to fill up the gas tank.  I get a cup of hot tea and a candy bar, some peanuts for him, then we hit the road for home.  It's been a nice getaway day.

The 49th Parallel and Pembina

To wrap it all up:

It 1823 the United States Army dispatched Major Stephen H. Long to Pembina (PEM-bih-naw) to officially locate the 49th parallel and, therefore, the U.S. / Canadian border as defined by the Treaty of Ghent.  He found that all but one cabin in Pembina was located on the U.S. side - and that one cabin actually straddled the 49th parallel.

Pembina was a very strategic location for the time because it linked the U.S. to the Hudson Bay territories.  The real estate adage, "location, location, location," has been forever true.  Even so, in 1823 when Major Long arrived there were only 350 people living in Pembina.  That's a pretty isolated location though, so it's really a pretty sizeable number.

Fifty years later, in 1872, another 60-man boundary team was commissioned and headquartered at Fort Pembina to use more "modern" equipment and locate the 49th parallel more precisely, finally ending any dispute about its location.

Minnesota was a state by 1858; it wasn't until 1889 that North Dakota became a state.  So Pembina is located at the very northeast corner of what would become North Dakota, one river-width from Minnesota, and literally one step from Canada.

One of the things keeping Pembina alive today is an unlikely business:

These guys produce 75% of the tour buses in America.  I had to get Granpa out of there fast before he decided to go custom order one!!

John Jacob Astor and the North Dakota Fur Trade

England's Hudson's Bay Company was chartered in 1670 and was the first established in North America.  About 1774 they moved inland to the North Red River area. 

Canada's North West Company was founded, in 1779.  Though their rivalry was fierce and bitter, by 1821 the two companies merged, retained the name Hudson's Bay, and is still in existence today.  Wow!  A company - an anything - in existence for 343 years!  You can even google it and find www.hbc.com (also known as The Bay).  You might even be buying from them and never knew that they were THE Hudson Bay Company!!

The only other long-term contender for the Red River fur trade was John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company.   (Not the best picture - but what do you expect for the 1700's?)

Library of Congress

Astor was born in Waldorf, German.  He heard about the fur business on board ship coming to America.  By opening new markets in Canada and the Great Lakes region his company became so successful that it was/is considered the first American business monopoly.  By 1800 he had a fortune of $250,000 - in the dollar of the day, not today's dollar!  In the next few years he had planned to flood Astoria (now in Oregon) with fur-trading posts, but the British captured them during the War of 1812.

Fur-trading pretty much came to a halt in the 1990's due to the efforts of wildlife conservationists.

Some reference material said Astor also made money in the opium trade - which is believable since China was one of his ports 'o call for the fur trade.

John Jacob Astor was also the founder of the rich and famous Astor family of New York.  One of his descendants died on the Titanic by allowing women and children to take his place on the rescue boats. 

Now That The Packages Have Been Opened

Now that all the Christmas gifts have been opened back in Texas, I can show folks what keeps me busy during the day in North Dakota as a medical travelers wife:  This year it was crocheting.

Calin's

Nina's and a poncho for her doll

Rylee's

These aren't much in the way of gifts, and there are older grandkids that, let us say, get really un-excited when they get a handmade gift, so there had to be some cash, too.  I looked at buying cards to put the money in, but that just didn't seem like much fun.  Then I found my solution:

Little Kids

Big Kids

Then  you box them up by family for shipping.

Christopher's Family

Jamie's Family

Larry's Family

 Toss in an envelope for the parents (one is always a kid at Christmas time!),

 and hope that someone is around with a camera when it comes time to open the packages.

Fur Sales in Europe

Land 'o gumption!  Look at the HATS the men were wearing back in Europe in the 1600's!!  No WONDER they wanted to start wearing beaver-skin top hats!  That guy kneeling in the front, showing furs to the dude, that guy is even wearing HIGH HEELS!


Give me good ol' Western wear any day:

Why, I’d wear this coat today!  Especially here in North Dakota in January!

That fringe used to be longer but they would cut it off and use it for all kinds of things - like we use zip-ties today.  Yeah.  I'm glad I'm an American.  :-)

The Ox Cart Trade

By the 1840's, after the establishment of the 49th Parallel as the border between Canada and the U.S. and after the English and French had retreated above that, the principal means of getting the furs to market was first by ox cart.

Look at the size of those wheels!

The very first such cart used in the Red River fur trade was built in 1800 by Henry Alexander who was living in Pembina.  The trail they followed from Pembina to St. Paul, Minnesota was known as the Old Pembina Trail and covered a distance of 471 miles.  By 1869, 2,500 carts rattled and squeeled their way down the Trail loaded with furs and then back up with trade goods for Indians and settlers.

Looks like an 18-wheeler caravan of today's Interstate highways, huh?

A few years earlier the first steamboat came up the Red River of the North, and by 1878 the first railroad was completed as far up as St. Vincent, Minnesota.  Obviously, these methods of transportation replaced the ox cart almost completely.

Packing the Furs

Trappers couldn't change the weight of the hides, but they could have a bit of control over the size of the bundles.  This is a fur press:

Mighty big contraption for compressing a pack of furs.  Me?  I'd just sit on 'em.  Lord knows my backside is wide enough and heavy enough to squash the air outta that whole stack of furs!

The Chippewa (or Ojibwe) and Fur Trappers

Pembina soon became the center of a vast trade territory whose main object of commerce was furs taken mostly from the Dakota side of the Red River and from western Canada.  When the French, English, and American fur trappers arrived and intermarried with the tribes creating the Metis, they would all meet in Pembina to prepare for buffalo hunts.

Skin that puppy! 

The Chippewa were among the largest groups of Native Americans - First Nations north of Mexico - living half in Canada and half in the U.S.  They were the first to insist on detailed, written treaties with the white man, and they even have the Midewiwin Society as a well-respected keeper of detailed and complex scrolls of events, history, songs, maps, memories, stories, (and get this!) geometry, and mathematics.  In 1745, they used the guns of Europeans to drive the Dakota Sioux farther south onto the American western plains.  They were known for their skill in making birch bark canoes, using birch bark for their sacred scrolls, cultivating wild rice and creating copper arrowheads for hunting - man AND beast!

By the end of the 1700's, the Ojibwe controlled nearly all of present-day Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and Minnesota areas. They also controlled the entire northern shores of Lake Huron on the Canadian side and all the way west to the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota.  (Sounds like these were the guys that would have inhabited the Indian Nation the British wanted to establish as a buffer between Canada and the U.S.)

Trappers were here as early as 1729, and as early as 1738 the French laid claimed to the area now known as Fort Pembina. It wasn't until 1780 that it was considered "inhabited," with the first trading post (Fort Panbian) being built in 1797 by a Frenchman with the Northwest Company. 

John Adams was serving as second president of the United States (1797 - 1801), and the Dakota Territory would not be under United States jurisdiction for several years to come.  The Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon by Thomas Jefferson wasn't until 1803.

The Hudson Bay Company of England built a fort in Pembina in 1803 and occupied it until 1823.
The first permanent settlement began in 1812 by (surprise!) Scottish and Irish settlers.  They either tore down the Frenchman's Fort Panbian or incorporated it into their Fort Daer.

Religion arrived in 1818 in the form of two priests sent by the Bishop of Quebec.  His diocesan boundaries went from the Great Lakes, to the North Pole, to the Pacific Ocean! In 1823, when Pembina was determined to be on U.S. soil, the Englishmen relocated their priests and business to Fort Gary in what is now Winnipeg.  The clergy didn't return until 1848.

Whew!!

Furry Critters

Even after the coming of man (especially the white man), the area abounded in furry critters,

(Not like that, Granpa!  Up close like THIS...)

 An American Marten










              and a Fisher.




Martens are like Minks, and they nest in trees like squirrels.  The Fisher is two to three times larger than the Marten and doesn't have the light patch on his chin and chest.

Granpa's picture does show their size difference better than my pictures, huh.  Maybe his way is better ... maybe.

There was also the beaver:

Beaver were big dudes weighing in at 30-40 pounds, but could be monster dudes weighing up to 70 pounds!  See his furless flat tail?  When there was danger around he would slap the water with his tail to alert his buddies.  It was also good (along with his webbed feet) for swimming.  His teeth were like chisels and set deep into the jaw bone so they didn't get pulled loose by all the gnawing.  I think I read somewhere that they also grew continuously so they never wore down.

Now, how many of those furs would it take to fill these packs?

First you set the traps, then you run the traps, then you skin the critters, tan the hides (or at least prep them), then you take them to the trading post in Pembina.  THIS is what is known as back-breaking work!

In one of my way-back-when earlier posts (November 14, 2011), I related the museum-learned fact that to buy a handmade Quaker-style hat in the 1840's, hunters could trade 100 rabbit hides.   Like I said, they used hides like money.

Earliest Settlers in North Dakota

We are talkin' ear-r-r-rly settlers, as in 5500 B.C. to 400 B.C.  Now, this is positively before Al Gore came up with Global Warming, but during this time it was very dry and warm around Pembina.  From an archeological dig in the area a part of a jaw bone was found and forensic anthropologists came up with this representation (like they do on the TV show, "Bones,") of what the woman that jaw bone belonged to might have looked like:

Her menfolk hunted with a nifty weapon called an atlatl.  Our sons learned about the atlatl in a church summer survival camp when they were teenagers.

The atlatl is a spear-throwing tool that uses leverage to achieve greater velocity in dart-throwing.  (Mightly long dart!)  It pre-dates the bow and arrow.  There is a notch at the back end that you rest the dart or spear on:

They may not have known what "leverage" was, but they surely knew what worked.  The foot long throwing device allowed the hunter to throw a spear the length of a football field at a speed of sixty mph!  The additional velocity would be absolutely necessary to bring down something as large as the American Bison much less a Wooley Mammoth.  (Do you know what the daddy buffalo said to his son when he went off to his first day of school?  Bi-son!   Thank you, my Facebook friends!)

(I don't know why they depict that woman with such a not-happy look.  Surely even back then there were things worth smiling about.  Smiling keeps you healthy.  Everyone needs to smile more, hence the bison joke. :-)

Pembina, North Dakota

Pembina (pronounced PEM-bih-naw) is the oldest settlement in the Dakota Territories.  It got its name from the Indian words "anepeminan sipi," meaning high bush cranberries.  The neat thing about IT is that the berries remain on the bush all winter - until someone or some thing comes along and eats them:

Like maybe a certain berry-eatin' man I know:

Gooood-lookin' feller, ain't he?

The Border

Did you know that Napoleon was defeated in the Spring of 1814?

After defeating Napoleon, the British plan was to move all of their troops to the United States and expand the war that they started with us in 1812.  The idea was to force us to give up our access to the Great Lakes and to take part of the Louisiana Purchase that Napoleon had sold to us in 1803.  (Napoleon had needed money to fight his war in Europe.)  The British were attacking with three different forces:  one in D.C., one in New York, and one in New Orleans.  (Ever heard a song called, "The Battle of New Orleans,"  by Johnny Horton?)

You remember the War of 1812 - when Washington, D.C. was invaded and the White House burned by the British?  Then they were driven out by a hurricane that killed more British than any battle...

The Treaty of Ghent ended the war of 1812 and was signed in the neutral territory of Ghent in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (now Belgium), and simply said, enough is enough.

December 1814

Can you believe that it was the RUSSIANS who brokered the U.S. / British peace treaty?  That's the Russian Ambassador shaking hands with John Quincy Adams in the painting.  However, with the Treaty of Ghent, no territory changed hands, captured troops were handed over by both sides, and slaves were returned by the British - or paid for.  BUT, it did establish the U.S. / Canadian border at the 49th parallel.  The British HAD wanted land designated to create an Indian Nation which would act as a buffer between the U.S. and Canada in the Northwest Territory (Ohio to Wisconsin).  I wonder how that would have changed the face of America today?

And now you know why the U.S. / Canadian border is such a nice straight line:  it's the 49th Parallel.  Well, until you get over to the New England states...  That was an okay outcome for the War of 1812.

Gettin' Closer !

As we move on toward the border, through stands of frozen trees...

and open fields ... with ... what's this?

why!  It's a coyote!  See how bushy his tail is??  (Sorry for the blur, but cloudy, foggy weather and great distance isn't conducive to good photography.)

We're headed for an old French fur trading post in Pembina (pronounced PEM-bih-naw).

It sits right on the edge of the North Red River - considering the fact that the waterways were the super highways of yester-year, that's a really good place to set up shop, eh?  I'm told that there is no other building in North Dakota that is older than this one.  Antoine (pronounced An-twon) Gingras was one of the richest men of the northern plains in the 1840's.  Among other things, he was a proponent of self-government for the Metis.  (Fur traders often married American Indians and their children were called Metis.  Their culture was totally different from either parent group.)

So that's all there is to the old French fur trading post.  Bummer.  They should at least have a buffalo hide tacked to the outside wall...

Headed to The Canadian Border

So, it's December 15th, and we finally decide to brave the weather and head north to the border.

It's foggy with dry, blowing snow.  It's only 70 miles to the border, but we've got Big Bertha (the monster sleeping bag) in the back seat, I always take enough snacks to keep a small army happy, a thermos of hot water for hot tea (to keep ME happy), and bottles of water.  Larry gave us a roadside emergency flasher before we left Texas, so we figure we're good even if we go off the road.

Occasionally there are isolated homesteads...

ancient cemeteries ...

and scenery that is worthy of the name, Frozen North.  This won't thaw out until Spring. (Brrrrr !!)

Beautiful!

Christmas Gifting

Well, Granpa and Granny Beth conspired and combined to give me a treadmill for Christmas!  Granny Beth noted that it will only work if I get on it.  (Oh, so true!)  So, we set it up in the living room in front of the TV (that way maybe John will get on it, too.)  It has six pre-programmed workouts, gives a continous read-out of time, distance, and supposed calories burned, or it lets you set the tread for anywhere from 1 to 10 mph.  It folds down and will fit in the van very nicely (though it weighs about 100 pounds!)

I gave John some cash with orders to buy something for himself, since I NEVER get it right.  I also got him a popcorn popper, a mug for his coffee cup collection, an EggBeat dock for his iPhone that amplifies sound without any batteries or power of any kind, and a 10" skillet As Seen On TV.  That skillet is so slick you can't even get the eggs to hold still long enough to get the spatula under 'em.

We attended the Christmas Eve candlelight service at Grace Baptist here in Grand Forks, North Dakota.   It was very, very good.

We do hope your Christmas holidays were all you wished for and that Christ was your true reason for the celebrating!