Minneapolis Observer

Buried Treasure

2011-06-08T14:43:00.001-05:00

Beneath that mound in the backyard garden lies some very creative destruction.

By Sharon Parker

(Editor's note: This article first appeared in the spring 2010 issue of MOQ. The backyard referred to here is the author's former residence.)

When we moved into a modest 1927 bungalow on Fifth Avenue some 20 years ago, we picked what appeared to be the best location for a garden, and were pleased to discover that the spot boasted a rich humus that nurtured a vigorous crop of vegetables, even before our first compost pile was ready to use. Occasionally, we would push a shovel into the ground and turn up a steak bone or other remnant of somebody’s long-ago supper.

So we weren’t too surprised when one of our old-timer neighbors told us that Mrs. Nelson, who lived in the house from the time it was built until about 1980, used to bury her garbage in the backyard. Apart from the occasional bone, the only evidence of this long-ago practice was the richness of the soil that invigorated our vegetable garden.

I remembered that old garden last fall, after reading about “deep composting” in Thomas Powell’s little newsletter, The Avant Gardener. Powell described the “new” practice of burying compostable materials rather than amassing them in piles, also known by the German term hugelkultur, which means “mound culture.” It seemed a lot like what Mrs. Nelson used to do, which led me to investigate further, and now I have a small mound in my backyard, awaiting spring and the next phase in my hugelkultur experiment.

* * * * *

What’s different, if not truly “new,” about hugelkultur, is that it offers a way to compost woody plant materials that you wouldn’t ordinarily bother with in your compost pile, because they take seemingly forever to break down — things like tree branches and shrub trimmings, sunflower stalks, squash vines, corncobs and the like. Even heavy logs will eventually decompose after being buried underground. In constructing a full-blown hugelkultur mound, enthusiasts will use a front-end loader to do exactly that, burying logs large enough to build a cabin with. But not bones or meat scraps — as our backyard excavations attest, bones remain intact for decades (and such animal remains may attract unsavory critters, as well as an astute representative of the City inspections office).

Modeled after the natural process of decomposition that takes place in the woods, hugelkultur has caught on with folks in the permaculture movement. Consider how a fallen tree trunk rots, becoming host to lichen, moss, mushrooms, and then more green growing things. Such mini ecosystems last for many years; they foster valuable mycorrhizal relationships between plants, soil and fungi to facilitate the exchange of nutrients, and promote healthy moisture levels.

With hugelkultur, you bury those tough-to-compost materials under mounds of softer compostables and soil. The chunkiness of the buried materials also creates air pockets, which, say hugelkultur advocates, are good for roots. You don’t have to wait for the buried matter to decompose, either; you can plant as soon as you’re done building it. In this way, hugelkultur is similar to no-till gardening, in which a raised-bed is established by first covering the sod with multiple layers of newspapers, then piling soil on top, then planting. By the time the roots reach to where the lawn was, the newspapers and grass are well on their way to becoming nitrogen-rich compost.

* * * * *

I decided to make a hugelkultur mound in my backyard last November, so that it would be ready for planting early in the spring. I dug into one of my existing raised beds, piling the soil off to the side, until I had a depression about eight inches deep, then looked around for woody materials to bury. I fished out the logs from the bottom of the firewood pile, which had sat too long on the ground and were beginning to rot (“Great! A head start!” I thought), added pieces of a dead branch we removed from the Norway maple tree but never got around to burning, the sunflower stalks that are almost as tough as tree trunks, the spindly sticks from pruning the spirea hedge, and the squash vines from atop the compost pile, which had become a fibrous mass of tangles. The pile was now an unwieldy mess of twiggy matter, so I stepped into the middle of it and stomped around a bit to break things up and pack it all down.

In went some leftover segments of two-by-fours I found in the garage, but not the scraps of cedar fencing we had scavenged from a friend (the larger pieces of fencing frame our raised beds), because rot-resistant wood like cedar is, well, resistant to rotting. I would have also omitted black walnut, if I had any, because it’s allelopathic — it prevents other plants from growing.

Some time ago, a Master Gardener warned me that wood chips will draw nitrogen from the soil at the beginning of their decomposition process, so I added some organic fertilizer and plenty of green matter in the form of weeds and whatever was lying on top of the compost pile, for good measure. That may not have been necessary. Toby Hemenway, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (Chelsea Green, 2009), doesn’t think this is a problem. “I suspect that the wood decomposes so slowly that very little nitrogen is bound up by the microbes gnawing at the logs,” he writes.

The rest of the partially finished compost from one side of our two-bin system went onto the growing heap, and I topped it all off with the soil I had removed at the beginning. I stepped back and admired the mound, which stood about three feet high at the center.

It will take years for the woody stuff at the bottom of all that to decompose, but it should make an excellent bed for squash and other sprawling vegetables in the meantime. Several gardeners say that berries of various kinds thrive in the mounds, too. And hugelkultur practitioners claim that these beds heat up in the spring because of the energy generated by the subterranean decomposition taking place, offering gardeners a head start on the season. I don’t know if my mound is large enough to generate any heat — it’s about four feet by four feet — but I’ll be watching for that this spring: I’ve got a soil thermometer and I’m prepared to use it.

At any rate, I know my husband will be happy if I stop tossing the spirea trimmings and squash vines into the compost — he complains about them getting tangled in the pitchfork when he turns the pile. Now, instead, when I prune the shrubs this summer, I’ll look for a spot to start a second hugelkultur mound. Mrs. Nelson would surely approve.

Two-by-Fours, Snickers Bars, and Furnaces

2011-04-23T15:33:00.000-05:00

After a morning of drawing up plans and calculating lengths of lumber, Craig and I went to Home Depot today to get the wood to build the compost bins. We don't really consider ourselves fully moved in to a place until we get the compost bins built and the garden established, so these outdoor projects have now moved to the top of our old-house to-do list.

We walked into Home Depot with our list of so many two-by-fours and one-by-sixes and nails and other hardware. We decided on horizontal planks for the sides rather than chicken wire, which is getting kind of fancy for us. We also decided not to splurge on cedar, which would be a little too fancy—and, besides, we figured that in the five or more years it takes for the cheaper wood to begin rotting, we may want to modify the design anyway.

After passing the helpful woman who directed us to the lumber department, we were greeted by a cheerful fellow with a clipboard, who said, "May I interest you in a furnace and air conditioner today?" We declined, and as we made our way to the shelves of two-by-fours, Craig mused, "Furnace, air conditioner, Snickers bar—all things you might buy on impulse, right?"

Then I smelled popcorn and started looking around for the source. "I must have popcorn," I said. And there she was, a smiling matronly woman standing next to a popcorn machine. "We give away popcorn every Saturday," she said. "And ask people if they'd like to sign up for a free estimate for any of these things—a furnace or air conditioner, perhaps? Patio or sidewalk?" I thanked her for the popcorn but declined to sign up for the estimates.

We found the materials we needed, with assistance from a few more helpful orange-aproned people, all of whom seemed quite happy to have a job—and who isn't these days?—and made our way to the checkout. There I spied the candy bars and placed a Snickers on top of the two-by-fours to complete our purchase.

Despite the nice young man who cut the wood for us so we wouldn't have any boards longer than six feet, we found that we still had to allow them to protrude out the back of our Honda Fit, and so fetched a length of twine (of course they had precut pieces of twine available for just such a purpose) to hold the hatchback door down. Under the circumstances, we agreed that it would not be a good idea to take our lumber-laden little car on the freeway, which meant that we had to take the long way home.

"That's OK," I said. "We have a Snickers bar."

—SP

Urban phenology: all aflutter

2011-03-20T17:04:00.000-05:00

One spring in early April I was out riding my bike when I spotted a large, dark butterfly fluttering over a mound of dirty snow. I did a double-take, for there was still a chill in the air and plenty of snow on the ground. In fact, this butterfly was perched on the snow, and appeared to be sipping from it, as though the pile of snow were a flower.

I later learned that the mourning cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa—pictured here in my garden last summer), which overwinters as an adult, is known to emerge once temperatures are in the 50s, so keep a look out for them when you are out and about on these warming days. The one I spotted on the mound of snow was likely getting moisture from it.

Other flyers (birds, that is) we don't see much are here or soon will be, too, some just passing through to nesting grounds farther north, and others returning to the Twin Cities as the melting snow and ice exposes food and open water. I know I'm not the only one who's heard the honking of geese overhead at night (many migrating birds fly at night), or spotted robins in the tree branches.

According to the Freshwater Society's Weatherguide Calendar, we should be spotting various waterfowl this week as the lakes continue to open up, and red-wing blackbirds may be heard trilling any day now.

Over at Twin Cities Naturalist (which posts a phenology update every Monday), naturalist Kirt Mona photographed a northern harrier recently returned to the area. And the Minnesota Birdnerd blog offers a migration map, updated periodically, so you can keep tabs on the movement of birds heading our way, as well as reports of recent birding opportunities for the avian fan.

It helps to have these cheerful migrants to draw our attention away from the muck and litter that the receding snowbanks are exposing, doesn't it?

A botanical path from St. Patrick to the Easter Bunny

2011-03-14T16:47:00.002-05:00

Have you ever questioned whether the “shamrock” plants sold at grocery stores and florists this time of year are really shamrocks? The word shamrock is not a botanical name, but a common one derived from the Irish seamrog, a diminutive form of seamar, which means trefoil, clover, or even honeysuckle. (Webster's )

The “shamrock” plants you see in stores are oxalis, a plant of either South American or Mediterranean origin. Oxalis, also called wood sorrel, are probably called shamrocks because of the way they resemble clover.* And perhaps they make a more attractive potted plant than the weed that is more likely the true shamrock, as common in Ireland as it is in our lawns.

In 1893, Irish naturalist Nathaniel Colgan set out to determine which plant is the “true shamrock”; or, as he put it,“to take in hand the inquiry into the species of our national badge.” He asked both subscribers to the journal Irish Naturalist and the Catholic priests in all the Irish-speaking districts of the country to send him specimens of the plant they considered to be the true Irish shamrock. The winner of this contest was Trifolium repens, or the plant we know as Dutch white clover.

Being a fan of this common lawn weed, I was rather pleased to learn that. And it led me to want to grow some clover indoors. The first year I tried it I thought it would make a charming filler for our Easter baskets, but I discovered that it takes much longer to grow clover to an attractive leafy stage than it does to grow grass, so I missed the mark. This year, with Easter arriving so late (perhaps you'd like our handy Useful Calendar to help you keep track of such things), there’s just enough time to fill your basket with clover if you plant it this week.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s what you do:

• Get clover seed where you would buy lawn grass seed, at garden centers and hardware stores. It’s not always easy to find this early, so you might check one of the larger garden centers if your neighborhood one doesn’t have it yet.

• Scatter it thinly on the surface of some soilless seed-starting mix that you thoroughly moistened already, cover loosely with plastic to keep the moisture and warmth in, and place the pot or basket in a sunny window or under artificial lights. A little heat from underneath may help speed germination, so if you have radiators, set it on them until the seedlings emerge. Of course if you’re starting the seeds directly in a basket, you’ll want to line it with plastic first. And, as this will not have drainage, you’ll need to be careful not to overwater it.

• If droplets of water collect on the plastic covering, loosen it or remove it for an hour or so to let some of the water evaporate. Too much wetness will encourage mold to grow and may rot the seeds before they can germinate. But you don’t want it to dry out too much either, so it’s kind of a balancing act at this stage. Mostly you want to keep the seeds covered and the soil moist until the true leaves come, which will be the second set of leaves to open. Once those are out, you can let the soil surface dry a bit between waterings.

One of the difficulties I have had was that I scattered too many seeds on the soil surface and found that they were much too crowded as they sprouted. Too avoid this, mix some seeds with an equal amount of the soilless mix before spreading them on the surface. Don’t bury the seeds, though, they need light to germinate.

And that’s about it. One of the advantages of growing clover rather than grass is that it’s less appealing to cats, but the Easter Bunny is sure to appreciate it. When Easter is over, toss the clover in your compost or just in the garden somewhere. Clover is a legume and will add a little nitrogen to the soil.

—SP

*Although I linked this sentence about oxalis to the Wikipedia entry on the topic, I did find several wonkish botanical sites confirming that the various species of the oxalis genus are either South American or Mediterranean. Wikipedia is a handy resource, but it’s always a good idea to check up on anything you find there.

Skittering over the lake

2011-02-05T23:53:00.004-06:00

Earlier this winter, the park board delayed opening the skating rinks because the insulating cover provided by our early and abundant snowfall delayed the freezing of the lakes. But now it appears that the prolonged cold weather has triggered another delay of sorts: the park board recently announced that instead of closing after Presidents’ Day, as has been the custom most winters, the city’s ice rinks will remain open until March 6. We can thank our cold weather for that extended opportunity.

I may have to get myself another pair of ice skates. When we moved house about five years ago it was under some duress, and so it was a few months afterwards that I discovered that I must have left my ice skates behind. I’ve never been all that avid an ice skater, so I haven’t gotten around to replacing them yet, but the idea of ice skating continues to appeal to me, and I do have especially pleasant memories of one particularly cold winter that was notable for its lack of snow, when the kids and I skated to the middle of Lake Harriet.

The kids were elementary-school-age, and we were new to homeschooling that winter, so the novelty of having our days our own gave us the exhilarating sense that we were getting away with something. Like we were skipping school, except this was school — the museums, the libraries, the parks, the lakes, everywhere. It was cold and snowless, a combination that had the lakes frozen firm and sure by early December. We had come to know another homeschooling family who were ardent fans of winter, and they pulled and tugged and persuaded us to meet them at the lake to go skating on a bone-chilling day.

I know that it was unusually early for skating because I remember a man jogging around the lake commenting just loudly enough for two irresponsible mothers to hear how crazy we were to attempt the ice. But the warming house was open, and the park board staff assured us that they had checked the depth of the ice with an auger, so we skittered out onto the vast surface unafraid.

Because there was no snow, we could skate the whole lake. It reinforced our feeling that the entire world was ours for the exploring. We looped around the ice fishermen, inquiring cheerfully about their luck, and watched the sail of an ice boat snap to attention as it caught a frigid blast and sent the little vessel skimming across the sleek surface.

The lesson we learned from our homeschooling friends that year, if I may be so didactic, was that the joyful embrace of winter mitigates any discomforts the season throws our way. It’s not that I’ve become an enthusiast for our coldest months, I still prefer the easy comforts and lighter clothing of the other three seasons, but the memory of that pristine moment when the snowless cold created a playground just for us tugs at me now, the way our friends did on that December day.
—SP

It's Catalog Season

2011-01-05T18:56:00.002-06:00

Even though the first garden catalogs started arriving in early December, garden catalog season's true beginning is now—that is, on or after twelfth night, the fifth of January. How do I know this? Well, I just made it up, of course. But doesn't it make sense to you? Around the time you put away the holiday stuff and haul the tree out to the backyard to drop its needles into the compost bin, a gardener's thoughts naturally turn to garden planning. Ergo: catalog season.

Years ago, after reading Katharine White's famous essay "Onward and Upward in the Garden," in which she reviewed various garden catalogs with the same attention she would give to fine literature, I made a point of requesting all the catalogs she endorsed in the essay. But her favorites came from East Coast and Southern nurseries, and I found myself frequently discouraged by the number of attractive perennials they offered that weren't hardy in Minnesota's climate—including some that are grown here, but either the catalog compilers in more temperate climes didn't realize it, or the specific lines they offered had not proved their mettle by enduring what we would call true winter.

I also found myself increasingly turned off by White Flower Farm's pretentious Amos Pettingill (although the story behind this pen name is interesting enough), as well as its decidedly anti-urban bias, with its insistence that full sun could only mean sunshine literally all day, from morning to dusk, with no acknowledgment that plants requiring full sun were thriving in city gardens everywhere with as little as six hours of sunlight daily.

I have since dropped all those catalogs, as well as the ones I used to get because they were Dad's favorites (he loved Burpee's tomatoes most of all) but which began to not suit me so much, and have gradually replaced them with catalogs that are more fitted to our character-building climate as well as my Midwestern rustic-urban (is that an oxymoron?) sensibilities, and my peculiarities of taste. Some of these I found through their ads in the Minnesota State Horticultural Society's magazine, now called Northern Gardener, and some I discovered at a winter gathering of gardeners in which participants brought their favorite catalogs for a kind of show-and-tell (along with coffee and treats, as I recall).

I expect more catalogs to come trickling in over the next few weeks, and in the meantime I'll get started on perusing the ones I've received so far, flagging pages with sticky notes, making lists and sketches, and then winnowing it all down to something approaching a realistic ambition for my not-so-big and just-sunny-enough city plot this summer. I'll even review a few of them on this blog in the coming weeks, even though reviewing garden catalogs has become something of a cliche since Katharine White started it all some 60 years ago. So I'll make no pretense of originality, but admit that reading garden catalogs is a cozy winter pastime enjoyed by gardeners everywhere.

Here are links to the catalogs pictured, in case you are eager to get some of them for yourself:
Jung Seeds, John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, and Nichols Garden Nursery.

How David Douglas Brought a Popular Christmas Tree into Cultivation

2010-12-10T21:39:00.005-06:00

Lewis and Clark called it Tree No. 5 when they made their famous trek through the American northwest 200 years ago. There is no indication that they had any thought of decorating what we now call Douglas-fir, and they most certainly didn’t cut one down and drag it home for Christmas, but no doubt they admired its graceful towering beauty—the species native to the Pacific Northwest reaches 200 feet and more at maturity, and lives hundreds of years. (The photo was taken by Bob Dunlap for Gustavus Adolphus college, and is used here with the photographer's gracious permission.)

About 15 years earlier, Scottish physician and naturalist Archibald Menzies was journeying with Captain George Vancouver on the good ship Discovery, and made a brief note about this same tree, which he spotted on the island that would later be named for his captain.

But it was the intrepid plant hunter and Scotsman David Douglas who, in 1827, brought seeds back to England, where it has since become as popular a Christmas tree as it is here, mostly due to its habit of holding onto its needles much longer than spruces or pines, a quality it shares with other firs, such as balsam and Fraser.

Except Douglas-fir isn’t really a fir at all, which is why botanists prefer to hyphenate the name, nor is it pine or spruce. Because it has such distinctive cones, which are the seed vessels and therefore the feature of the plant used to classify it, a whole new genus was coined—Pseudotsuga, meaning “false hemlock” (why not Pseudoabies for “false fir” I can’t tell you). And because botanical etiquette calls for choosing the second name, which narrows it down to species, after the first person to discover it (“discover” here meaning to “write something about it in a European language”), the proper scientific name of the plant is now Pseudotsuga menziesii.

What I really like about Douglas-fir, besides its obvious charms, is its namesake—the unofficial one, that is, a kind of Indiana Jones of botanists, who went to great lengths to find and bring home hundreds of specimens of plants to England at the behest of the Royal Horticultural Society. He kept detailed journals of the plants he encountered, as well as his adventures along the way, which the Horticultural Society published in 1914.

During a plant-collecting expedition in 1826, Douglas went in search of a huge pine tree hitherto unknown to his peers back home, which he had learned about from talking to various Indians, as well as the French settlers who were already pretty well-established thereabouts. Now known as the sugar pine, or Pinus lambertiana, it’s one of the tallest of this genus—like the Douglas-fir, it’s known to reach about 200 feet. The story of how Douglas managed to gather cones of that tree is a colorful one and worth sharing. He not only endured some of the Northwest’s famously miserable weather, but also language barriers and, ultimately, a misunderstanding that required some quick thinking on his part.

Douglas spoke French, knew a smattering of the Indian languages of the area, and always carried a pouch of tobacco, the currency of diplomacy at the time, all of which helped him gather information about the plants he sought. “[T]wo individuals … both talk the Chenook tongue fluently, in which I make myself well understood; from the questions I have put to them and the answers given, I am almost certain of finding [the sugar pine] in abundance,” he wrote in his journal.

But for the journey to find these and other specimens, he had to hire a guide with whom he could communicate only in a form of sign language. And it rained nearly the entire two months of the journey. “The rain of the two days before rendered the footing for the poor horses very bad; several fell and rolled on the hills and were arrested by trees, stumps, and brushwood,” he wrote on October 16, 1826.

About a week later, he wrote, “Last night was one of the most dreadful I ever witnessed. The rain, driven by the violence of the wind, rendered it impossible for me to keep any fire, and to add misery to my affliction, my tent was blown down at midnight, when I lay among bracken rolled in my wet blanket and tent till morning. Sleep of course was not to be had, every ten or fifteen minutes immense trees falling producing a crash as if the earth was cleaving asunder . . .”

The pack horses didn’t like it much, either. “My poor horses were unable to endure the violence of the storm without craving of me protection, which they did by hanging their heads over me and neighing.” But the intrepid collector had his priorities clear—“I am glad I took the precaution of carrying the specimens of seeds and plants on my back, otherwise they would have been much destroyed.”

When he finally reached a stand of the sought-after pine, he measured “the largest one I could find that was blown down by the wind,” which he found to be 57 feet 9 inches around the trunk, and 215 feet tall.

But the coveted cones, containing the seeds that he wanted to take back with him, were at the tops of the very largest trees. He managed to collect only three cones—by shooting them down, which alarmed the local Indians and got Douglas and his guide into a bit of fix. “I took my gun and was busy clipping [the cones] … from the branches … when eight Indians came at the report of my gun. They were all painted with red earth, armed with bows, arrows, spears of bone, and flint knives, and seemed to me anything but friendly.”

The language barrier impeded Douglas’s attempt to explain what he was doing, and the eight declined to set aside their weapons (he doesn’t mention whether he set down his), so Douglas offered them tobacco to climb some of the trees to fetch more cones, while he and his guide beat a hasty retreat.

So it was that the sugar pine was introduced into cultivation. Somewhere in the midst of that particular quest, he also picked up some cones of the Douglas-fir, much to the delight of holiday revelers ever since.

—SP

The Currency of Power

2010-11-26T12:17:00.008-06:00

A Review of North Country: The Making of Minnesota, by Mary Lethert Wingerd (University of Minnesota Press, $34.95)

I’ve always been fairly sympathetic to those who opposed romanticizing the “first Thanksgiving.” We all know by now that the Pilgrim squatters on the East Coast were just a continuation of the widespread destruction wrought by Europeans, through disease and deliberate policies, to the people who had lived here for tens of thousands of years beforehand. Not really a happy commemoration for our Native American neighbors.

But I’ve never fully appreciated the European-Indian disconnect in my hometown. Yeah, I’ve heard the perennial complaints of so-called conservatives chafing at the gambling monopoly enjoyed by the Mdewakanton Sioux at Mystic Lake. But I’ve always lacked the kind of context needed to begin to understand the local Indian reality.

Years ago, when our children were small, we took them on a field trip to Fort Ridgely, the epicenter of the brief, but bloody, Dakota Conflict in 1862. We wandered through the fort’s ruins and along paths leading to strategic points on a nearby battlefield. The kids had read about the war as part of our decidedly casual homeschooling curriculum, but the trip helped bring it to life in some way.

I wish now that we would’ve had Mary Lethert Wingerd’s sprawling history, North Country: The Making of Minnesota, to guide us prior to making that trip, because nothing else I’ve read so clearly explains the collision of cultures and politics that eventually led to those hostilities—and, presumably to the ongoing dilemma facing urban Indians even today. The St. Cloud State history professor delves deeply into the quality of interactions between Europeans and Native Americans as a way of interpreting pivotal events in our state’s convulsive birth.

“The north country was not a site of conquest. Rather, it had become a meeting ground of civilizations, a place where geographic and cultural borders were blurred and unfixed. The mutually beneficial exchange of furs for European goods required a cultural exchange as well, a process of interaction that left no one—Indian or European—unchanged.”

That’s not to say that Wingerd ignores the larger political—and often geopolitical—context informing these events. Her grasp of European history during the age of exploration and colonization is impressive. But it’s her ability to capture the nature of European-Indian relationships, at a very personal level, that sets this work apart.

When French adventurers began exploring the Upper Mississippi region in 1640, about 38,000 Dakota lived here. But the goods that became the staple of trade between these Europeans and the native tribes—iron pots, knives, and blankets in exchange for beaver and other pelts—had been introduced to them by coureurs de bois, or vagabond traders, three-quarters of a century earlier. As Wingerd notes:

“The coureurs de bois were essential, if undocumented, players in shaping the history of Minnesota. Official histories credit Pierre Esprit Radisson and his brother-in-law, Medard Choart des Groseilliers, as the first whites to enter the future state of Minnesota sometime between 1659 and 1660. However, it is almost certain that illicit French traders had paved the way years earlier. They left no record of their travels or their numbers since, as historian William Folwell noted, ‘it was their interest to conceal rather than to advertise the regions in which they drove their trade.’ Their names are unrecorded, but some 200 illegal traders are estimated to have worked the northwest before Radisson and Groseilliers set out on their historic travels.”

These freelance traders survived, Wingerd explains, because they were more interested in freedom than in riches or fame, and “meant to make a permanent life in the lands of their Native American trading partners.” This approach proved effective for them and the licensed French traders who arrived in the mid-17th century because they understood the importance of kinship in any commercial transaction with the Dakota.

Kinship was the primary way to cement alliances and keep the peace, Wingerd writes. As such, there was frequent intermarriage between tribes—including the Dakota and Ojibwe, who were forced westward by the gun-toting Iroquois—and between European traders and Indian women. “Indian-white unions and the children they produced created the cultural milieu that kept a delicate political and social balance in equilibrium,” she notes.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

"Trade was framed as an exchange of gifts rather than as a simple commercial transaction. It had a symbolic value that exceeded even its material worth."

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The French—and, later, the British—had to come to terms with the cultural differences inherent in dealing with Native Americans, whose concept of trade was dramatically at odds with the commodity-centric view of the Europeans. “In the Indian worldview,” Wingerd writes, “trade was framed as an exchange of gifts rather than as a simple commercial transaction. It had a symbolic value that exceeded even its material worth. One traded only with friends, and friendship, as long as it remained intact, bestowed the rights and obligations of extended kin.”

The French realized that their presence in this part of the world was, as Wingerd emphasizes, “entirely dependent on good relations with their Indian partners.”

The French could claim perhaps 1,000 soldiers in the entire region (from Montreal westward), a paltry force against the thousands of Dakota and Ojibwe in the area. Still, there were plenty of incentives for the native tribes to maintain the peace. Beaver were plentiful and European goods were much in demand. There was no good reason to upset the status quo—especially when guns and ammunition became part of the exchange. Firearms were a useful tool when protecting hunting grounds from Ojibwe interlopers, who were often better armed than the Dakota.

All this changed, however, when the British overcame the French and began to colonize the “New World.” The British attitude toward the native tribes was that of an imperial conqueror, rather than partners and allies. Meanwhile, the “West” was gradually opening up to European settlers, a trend the British attempted to block, but were essentially powerless to curtail. These settlers were, for the most part, virulently opposed to Indian culture.

Wingerd does a masterful job of localizing this political and cultural dissonance at Fort Snelling after Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, after which Zebulon Pike journeyed up the Mississippi to negotiate with the Dakota to build a military and trading post at the confluence of the St. Peter (later Minnesota) and Mississippi rivers. The Dakota allowed the posts to be built in exchange for $2,000 and the right to use the land as they had always done. Pike sent word to Washington that he had acquired “100,000 acres for a song,” but, as Wingerd points out, “From the perspective of the Indians, for whom land was not a commodity to be bought and sold and who defined territorial sovereignty as use rights, they had given nothing away. To the contrary, they viewed an American post on their land as a positive, the reliable source of trade goods that they had long been seeking.”

But, with the fur trade declining (credit arrangements had changed, making it difficult for traders and Indians to survive a bad season, as they would be on the hook for the advances from the industry’s major player, John Jacob Aster’s American Fur Company) and white settlers moving onto Indian land, the Dakota—and the Ojibwe—were forced to make concessions.

“While Indians maintained an internal culture of mutual obligation and collectivism, in dealing with whites they adapted to the harder rules of monetary exchange. They understood that money had become the currency of power.”

In the most far-reaching treaty yet negotiated with the government, the Ojibwe in 1837 ceded 60 million acres of timberland in western Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota for $700,000 in goods and annuities over the next 20 years and $100,000 to mixed-blood relatives, plus $70,000 to repay their debts to the traders. The Mdewakanton band of the Dakota gave up all their land east of the Mississippi for a trust fund of $300,000 that would pay out a 5 percent annuity in perpetuity, plus $25,000 a year in food goods, farm equipment and services for the next 20 years and $10,000 in agricultural goods and livestock. Plus, $110,000 to the mixed-blood relatives and friends of the band and $90,000 to pay off all of their debts.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“The only things that didn’t come up the river that season were the provisions and monies promised to the Indians and the traders.”

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“Neither tribe was prepared for the speed at which events moved once the treaties were signed,” Wingerd writes. “The ink was barely dry on the Ojibwe treaty before timber speculators began converging on Fort Snelling and soon literally hundreds of small operators ranged up and down the St. Croix River, ignoring the fact that the treaties had yet to be ratified. Squatters from the reserve also began moving across the river, claiming choice pieces of Dakota land, building cabins, and planting crops. . . . Steamboat traffic boomed the following spring, passengers eagerly hanging over the rails to get a look at what the newly opened lands had to offer. The only things that didn’t come up the river that season were the provisions and monies promised to the Indians and the traders.”

This is, for better or for worse, the story of Minneapolis’s birth. At Fort Snelling, Major Joseph Plympton petitioned his superiors in Washington for permission to expand the military-controlled boundaries around the fort, ostensibly to “furnish the daily wants of the garrison.” In reality, however, Plympton and other officers were keen to lay claim themselves to some of the most valuable of the ceded Indian lands upstream at St. Anthony Falls. A nascent timber industry was emerging, and Plymptom envisioned sawmills at the falls.

“The pace of change in these years was breathtaking,” Wingerd writes. “At the same time that treaty making hacked away at Indian lands and the reorganization of the fur trade eroded Native people’s economic viability, a newly hardened racial ideology underminded existing social relations at their most intimate core. The first land cession treaties in Minnesota country were negotiated in 1837. A mere twenty-one years later, when Minnesota entered the Union as the thirty-second state, the borderland culture born in the fur trade had been thoroughly supplanted by a society shaped by white settlers. Native people soon would have no place in this new social and economic order.”

Given this reality, it’s not surprising that, a quarter-century later, the Dakota were—in what Wingerd calls the state’s civil war—embarking on a suicidal conflict against the U.S. government. That battle is long over, but thanks to Wingerd’s meticulous research and fluid prose, we can finally understand the forces that fuelled its rage, and that continue to generate discord and frustration even today.

—CC

This book review first appeared in the fall 2010 issue of MOQ, which also includes articles on urban homesteading, hunting in the city, bike lending, and more, as well as an urban almanac, more book reviews, and a poem. Most of that will not be posted on this blog. If you'd like to purchase a copy for $4 postpaid, please use the message feature (envelope icon) to contact us.

Urban Phenology: It’s Party Time for the Crows

2010-11-21T12:49:00.002-06:00

During a recent late-afternoon visit to the Mississippi Market co-op on West Seventh in St. Paul, I noticed that the stand of tall trees between the co-op’s parking lot and the river appeared to be a crow gathering spot. You’ve probably also noticed the beginnings of this annual crow flocking ritual. In late fall and through the winter, crows flock at dusk to large, raucous gatherings in tree tops, then move on to communal roosts for the night, which often grow to include thousands of crows, augmented by birds whose daytime feeding grounds may lie 12–13 miles away (a study in Ithaca, NY, traced them out 20 km from the communal roosting sites), and by seasonal migrants from farther north. According to experts at Cornell University, we don’t really know why they do this, but some theories include safety in numbers (especially from great horned owls) and to share information about food sources.

Sorry we don’t have a photo for you, but here’s a link to Birdchick’s site, where she posted some nice photos, thoughtful commentary, and even some video from last January at the somewhat famous crow roost around Loring Park.

If it seems that crows favor cities, you’re right. On Cornell University’s crow FAQ page , the following explanations are offered:

• In 1972, crows came under the protection of the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; this means you can’t just shoot them anytime and anywhere. This has made crows less afraid of humans.

• Hunting is prohibited within city limits.

• Cities are warmer than rural areas.

• Great horned owl populations are lower in the city. “Next to people with guns, Great Horned Owls pose the largest danger to an adult crow,” say the folks at Cornell.

• Some of the largest trees, the ones that are best for large roosts, are located in cities. Surprised? It’s because while our city fathers and mothers were planting trees, rural trees were being harvested for lumber or cleared for farming.

As spring approaches, this behavior ends as crows separate into small family groups to begin nesting.

—S.P.

Indian Summer, ca 1850

2010-10-21T12:48:00.000-05:00

Our lingering mild autumn reminds me of this apparently anonymous entry (likely Mrs. Atwater, as she is mentioned obliquely in the introduction) in volume 1 of Isaac Atwater's magnum opus, History of the City of Minneapolis, published in 1893. One chapter is titled "Pioneer Life in Minneapolis—From a Woman's Standpoint," which muses on nature, gardening, and social life in the early city, and includes these observations about the autumn of 1850 in the village of St. Anthony:

"The months of October and November were one long, exquisite Indian summer with scarcely a cloud in the sky—rain nearly always falling in the night—the air mild, soft and delicious. In a little garden on Nicollet Island surrounded by great maple trees, amid the brush and stumps, squash vines were still green during the first part of November, and beets, turnips and cabbages were daily taken from the garden. But in the first week in December, winter came with a vengeance, the mercury going down to 30 degrees below zero."

This is Not a Book Review

2010-10-18T22:17:00.000-05:00

The book was sitting on the dining room table: The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino, published earlier this year by Coffee House Press. It was an advance reader's copy that publishers send out for review; but we hadn't ever gotten around to reviewing it. Even so, I'd been attracted to the slim volume with its image of a jaunty fedora on the cover for some time, and have been intending to read it. Craig asked if I was planning to give it away. He might think this because I have a stack of books on the coffee table—not coffee table books—that I've been meaning to give to a charity or bring to Half Price Books for some weeks now, so it's logical to suppose that this book was destined for that stack.

"I'm planning to read it," I said.

"I've read it," he said.

"What did you think of it?" I said

"It was rather dark," he said.

"Dark humor?" I said, intrigued.

"No, just dark," he said. "Your wife leaves you for your best friend kind of dark," he said. "One bad thing happens and then another. It was rather depressing, as I recall."

Now I wasn't so sure I wanted to read it. I looked at the hat on the cover. On first glance, it looks more like a bowler than a fedora. "I like the cover," I admitted. It made me think of Magritte. "Well, then you should read it," he said.

Thinking of Magritte makes me think of Belgium, where a new Magritte Museum had opened in Brussels the summer that we went there. Every visitor was directed into the elevator and then up to the third floor, where you worked your way around counterclockwise and then down to the second floor and ended up on the first floor where stood the gift shop and the exit. It was an orderly procession, and going through the museum in this proscribed manner (not that you could have chosen otherwise) afforded you the chronology of his life and work. I was most fascinated by the greatly enlarged journal page titled Les Mots et les Images ("Words and Images"), and the creased pieces of paper on which he had played a visual exquisite corpse game with his artist friends. (An exquisite corpse game is one in which each participant draws—or writes, in the original form—a part of the whole without seeing what the others have drawn. The creases are where the paper was folded to hide the already-drawn portion from the next participant, leaving only small registration marks so that the segments would all go together to make a patchwork creature. On the one where Magritte drew the head, it was represented only by clouds.)

I wanted to buy a poster or postcard of those two works in the museum gift shop, but there were none to be had. I did buy postcards of some of his other iconic works, including two different apple paintings inscribed Ceci n'est pas un pomme ("This is not an apple"), and the one of the pipe, the first of this sort, titled The Treachery of Images, and inscribed Ceci n'est pas une pipe. But it appears that he never did a Ceci n'est pas un chapeau painting. I guess he made his point with the apple and the pipe.

Perhaps this essay could have been titled “The Treachery of Book Covers,” or “The Treachery of Deciding Whether to Read a Book Based on Someone Else's Experience of It.” When I opened the book so that I could note its length and, instead of calling it simply a "slim volume" could have instead referred to it as the "151-page novel"—to get that more precise phrasing that we careful writers are supposed to proffer—I became intrigued by the organization of the back of the book, a kind of appendix called Commentaries. It was a list. I am attracted to literary lists—aren't lists all the rage among intellectuals these days? I am intrigued. Having examined both the cover and the appendix, now I think I must read the book. Review to follow.

—SP

Underwater Island

2010-10-08T16:20:00.000-05:00

We cross the Ford Bridge almost daily, mostly because we live on the Minneapolis side and Craig works on the St. Paul side, and so have ample opportunity to observe the state of this small island in the Mississippi just downstream of Lock and Dam No. 1. Spring commonly submerges it under the rains and snowmelt that swell the river, while summer restores it, offering an inviting retreat to some solitary visitor—we've noticed a canoe on its sandy shore, a campfire, even a small tent on occasion. Herons and other shorebirds fish in the tranquil shallows surrounding it, especially when the volume of water spilling over the dam is moderate.

In drought conditions, such as those of early this summer, it can become something of a peninsula conjoined to the Minneapolis side, rendering the lock useless for navigation. But we don't recall ever seeing it submerged like this in the fall. And on a recent visit to the observation area of the lock, we noticed that not many birds found the conditions amenable to fishing, either. We spotted only a handful of gulls, a single cormorant, and a pair of Canada geese that flew upstream past the dam, likely looking for calmer waters than the boiling depths below the dam.

(Additional photos may be found here.)

Tea and Publishing

2010-10-03T01:06:00.000-05:00

I’ve been struck lately by how often a financial consideration—a need to spend less money—leads us to take steps we were needing to take anyway, but hadn’t really confronted until it hit us in the pocketbook. This inaugural post on the Minneapolis Observer blog will be quite familiar to readers of the fall 2010 issue of MOQ, except this paragraph, and the last one. When I wrote it for MOQ, we weren’t even thinking about making that issue our last one, but as we were getting ready to print, after having scrambled to pull it together while it’s still fall, following a hectic spring and summer in which we bought a house, did a lot of work on it, moved, and then delivered our daughter to college in Michigan, I finally got caught up on my bookkeeping, and concluded that we could no longer afford to keep publishing MOQ. And when the decision to cease publication left me feeling not disappointed, but relieved, I realized there was more to it than just the money. —SP

• • • • • • • • •

I like a cup or two of tea in the morning, with milk and a little honey. It makes for a gentle beginning to the day, a fitting accompaniment to the newspaper spread across the dining room table, or to gazing out the window at the lively scene that unfolds around the bird feeder. But far too often I have risen from the table to attend to some task that beckons, leaving my mug half-filled with still-warm tea, only to return and find the beverage cold and unappealing. I usually remedied this by reheating the tea in the microwave. But when a couple more interruptions are followed by further reheatings, the tea loses its charm. Other members of my family have on occasion even opened the microwave in the afternoon to find my abandoned mug, the tea-milk mixture curdled and forgotten.

We’ve had a microwave oven since the 1980s, when my parents gifted us with a sturdy model that lasted a couple of decades. When we rented a house four years ago, we were happy to see that it was furnished with a new microwave—indeed, we wouldn’t have hesitated to purchase one ourselves, had it not been. However else would we defrost our meat for dinner? We could hardly afford to eat take-out on a regular basis.

So it came as something of an epiphany when we bought a house this summer and, in the process of remodeling the kitchen, had the presence of mind to ask ourselves, do we really need a microwave oven? We had a short wall moved to accommodate a standard-size range (the existing one was only 20 inches across), with a narrow cabinet between it and the refrigerator, and had assumed that we would put a cabinet above the range, with the requisite microwave, even going so far as to have an electrician install an outlet there—and then stopped.

It was more like a pause, really, to recoup our finances and avoid digging ourselves further into debt before moving on to the next phase. As with any old house, there is no shortage of projects. But that pause, and the question that followed, led us to consider whether a microwave oven was really such a useful and essential appliance, or whether it was, for us, anyway, more like a crutch that encouraged poor planning and easy distraction. What if we only bought enough meat at one time for a few days’ worth of meals and didn’t put it in the freezer? What if I drank my tea while it was still hot?

Old habits die hard, of course, and I have found myself reheating tea in a pan on the stove on more than one occasion; but on many more such instances, I have stopped in the middle of rising from my chair and told myself that the urgent task that suddenly entered into my head can wait 20 minutes. It brings to mind a quotation from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn: “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”

• • • • • • • • •

When we started publishing MOQ, it was after we had shut down The Minneapolis Observer, a free monthly newspaper that had consumed all of our resources and then some—money, time, and creative energy. While it was the size of our debt that led us to stop the newspaper, doing so made us realize how stressful and hectic our lives had become. And yet, we had also experienced much joy and gratification in publishing The Observer. We thought that perhaps a little quarterly journal with a small circulation and equally small budget would provide a more sustainable outlet for our creative urges, and allow us to continue the relationship with readers that we had found so gratifying. We still feel those creative urges, and we still value that relationship with readers—and we still want to publish something on paper, from time to time. Maybe we'll call it MOZ for Minneapolis Observer Zine. But we won’t be selling ads, taking subscriptions, or committing to a schedule. We will be mailing it to MOQ subscribers who have opted to receive it to fill out their subscriptions, but we’ll just make it available whenever it’s ready to be printed. After we finish our tea.