Island Folk : The People of Isle Royale [1 ed.] 9780816656714, 9780816653362

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Island Folk

Island Folk T H E P E O P L E O F I S L E R OYA L E

Peter Oikarinen

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

The Fesler–Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book Series This series reprints significant books that enhance our understanding and appreciation of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. It is supported by the generous assistance of the John K. and Elsie Lampert Fesler Fund and the interest and contribution of Elizabeth P. Fesler and the late David R. Fesler.

Copyright 1979, 2008 by Peter Oikarinen Originally published in 1979 by Isle Royale Natural History Association, Houghton, Michigan First University of Minnesota Press edition, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oikarinen, Peter. Island folk : the people of Isle Royale / Peter Oikarinen. — 1st University of Minnesota Press ed. p. cm. — (The Fesler–Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book Series) ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-5336-2 (pb : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-5336-4 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Isle Royale (Mich.)—Biography. 2. Isle Royale (Mich.)—History—Anecdotes. 3. Isle Royale (Mich.)—Social life and customs—Anecdotes. I. Title. F572.I8O38 2008 977.4´9970430922—dc22 [B] 2007045627

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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Contents

Preface: Then and Now / vii A Pinch of History / 1 John T. Skadberg / 5 Ingeborg Holte / 14 Einar Ekmark / 26 Stanley Sivertson / 34 Roy Oberg / 49 Milford and Myrtle Johnson / 60 The McPherrens / 82 Glen Merritt / 91 Grant Merritt / 102 Elizabeth Kemmer—E.K. / 113 Westy and Bylo Farmer / 121 Clint Maxwell / 131 Howard “Buddy” Sivertson / 138 Pete Edisen / 144 Elaine Rude / 161 Appendix A Typical Herring Net Setup / 169 Lake Trout, Whitefish, and Ciscoe Nets / 170 A Typical Hook-Line System / 171 Map of Isle Royale / 173

Preface: Then and Now

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ince Island Folk was first published in 1979, many children of the people originally portrayed in the book are now “old-timers” themselves. I have met some of them and written about a few, but now their future on Isle Royale may be in jeopardy. It’s the National Park Service’s decision. The families’ continued right to occupy their cottages and cabins is being advocated for by a group called IRFFA (Isle Royale Friends and Family Association). I wish them well. The controversy seems to exist between pure wilderness advocates on one side and those who would like to see the cultural history of Isle Royale continued on the other, mostly those who have lifelong ties to the island. Over the years, many buildings and cottages have been abandoned, poorly maintained, or even burned down. This is a sad situation that I hope can be remedied in order to uphold a long tradition of human history on Isle Royale. While gathering material for this book, I came across a diary kept by Dorothy McQuown, a teacher who lived on Isle Royale during the winter of 1932–33. She taught a fisherman’s family, the Holger Johnsons, at Chippewa Harbor. In a passage dated November 6, 1932, she wrote about the overly romantic “clap-trap writing” published about Isle vii

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Royale. “Isle Royale and its romance! Blah!” she wrote after a heavy rain. “It’s a hunk of mud!” She added, “I’m too tired to write anything when night comes after hauling and lifting hundred-pound chunks of wood for that round, black devil of a stove.” That entry made me very conscious of the island’s realities. Icy sleet, dark drizzle, and snow-drenched winds do exist and can’t be ignored—along with the fallacies of people. Yet there is romance. Despite Dorothy’s falling down and spraining her shoulder while carrying water, getting bitten by a caged wolf, witnessing Mr. Johnson being treed by a moose for over an hour, comforting her son and his dislocated arm, and watching the worst storm in years almost blow down the boathouse, the magic of the island overtook her one moonlit night in October: “An eerie night. The moon’s high, a roaring sea, and the frost smoke coming across the harbor. A night for ghosts to walk.” The people I talked to were no ghosts. First on the Minnesota shoreline and then on the island, they overwhelmed me with their generosity, humor, and friendliness. I hope that does not sound like a “clap-trap” statement. I know it’s the truth. And like Dorothy McQuown, though without her hardships, I found my Isle Royale visits exciting, the people impossible to forget. It gave me a chance to capture at least a teaspoon from their buckets of memories. Here is a glimpse of their world.

Because of space limitations, many longtime residents and visitors could not be included in this book. I hope those presented here will represent these “island folk.”

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Finally, many thanks to Sue Bertolino, Jan and Jerry Case, Tom Hodges, Nadine and Bob Janke, Pat and Jack Morehead, Noel Poe; for overtime contributions, Theresa Wolter, Tom Wunderlich, and LeAnn Cauthen; and also to Heather Heinz, Janet Kafka, the technical wizardry of Mike Edwards, and my wife, the great teacher and poet, Barbara Simila.

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A Pinch of History

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our thousand years before I stepped onto Isle Royale, hundreds of unknown workers extracted tons of copper from surface fissures. Over a thousand mining pits, some up to thirty feet deep, have been discovered on the island. These “ancient miners” left only stone hammerheads, one-quarter to forty pounds, as clues of their methods. As far as we know they were seasonal workers, for evidence of soil cultivations, burial mounds, roads, and homes has never been found. These miners labored for over a thousand years then for some reason mysteriously vanished, abandoning hammerheads and unused copper at their mining sites. Radiocarbondated wood from one of these pits was found to be from 2160 B.C. plus-or-minus 130 years—about the same time the Egyptians were building the Great Sphinx of Giza. No extensive mining was done again until the 1840s. Before these modern miners came, only the Chippewa occupied “Minong.” No link has been made between the ancient miners and the Chippewa, although some Chippewa were occupying Isle Royale when French explorers surveyed the Great Lakes in the mid-1600s. Few written records exist from these explorations. Not until the Northwest Fur Company established fisheries at 1

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Indian Point, at the mouth of McCargoe Cove, and Amygdaloid Island just before the 1800s did white men occupy the island. Little is known of these fishermen except that they supplied fish for their trappers on the western shore of Lake Superior. In 1837, the American Fur Company brought thirtythree men to the island and eventually built up seven different areas. For three years they packed salted fish into eleven thousand 100-pound barrels—an average of over 180 tons a year. In contrast, longtime commercial fisherman Milford Johnson caught a total of thirty-six tons of lake trout, siskiwits, and herring, in one year during the 1950s. The fur company’s catch was mostly lake trout, both lean and fat (called siskiwits), as well as herring and whitefish. Economic conditions forced them to close the fishery. Although no large company fished Isle Royale afterward, many individuals continued to use the protective coves and harbors. Miners made the next commercial venture in the 1840s. Three periods occurred with much exploration and little profit. Sizable communities were built at Island Mine (1870s), McCargoe Cove (1873–85), and Washington Harbor (1888– 93). A cemetery, steam engine, and inevitable rock remain at Island Mine. One hundred and fifty men and their families once lived at McCargoe, where remains of buildings, mines, and “poor-rock” piles can still be seen. And at Windigo—in Washington Harbor—miles back into the woods, a few rusted pipes, rusty nails, and the base of a cabin are all that is left. Many other mines were started and then abandoned, some following in the tracks of the ancient miners.

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Lumbering at the island has been sporadic. A flood ended one operation at Washington Harbor in the 1890s, and a fire ended another logging enterprise at Siskiwit Bay in 1936. Today’s residents have much to say about the fire of ’36 when approximately 20 percent of the island burned. In the twentieth century, lumbermen, fishermen, resort owners, and the largest group—tourists—were drawn to the island. State and federal officials, millionaires, a movie star, “gangsters” from Chicago, photographers, naturalists, researchers, boaters, backpackers, and people who have just wanted to immerse themselves in the quiet all came to Isle Royale. To protect that quiet, Congress passed a bill in 1931 making Isle Royale a national park project. Private lands were bought with some of the landowners acquiring life leases. Isle Royale officially became a national park in 1940. As of 2007, there were five life leases and nineteen special use permits. The cycle of man’s coming and leaving has always existed on Isle Royale. Now the cycle, at least for residents and fishermen, leans toward departure. As the life leases terminate, more and more buildings have been allowed to deteriorate in an attempt to return the island to a more natural state, though some may be preserved as historic sites. I’ll be sad to see this phase’s completion, but in geological time, man’s involvement with the island is like a fistful of sand on a wide beach. The plants and animals, trees and rocks, wind and waves will own Isle Royale just as they always have.

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This is only a pinch of Isle Royale’s history. There are hundreds of pertinent dates and places. To record them is a job for some patient and hardworking historian. Here, we’re concerned with the personal recollections of those who’ve lived on Isle Royale. Let’s meet some of Isle Royale’s “old birds” and experience their world.

John T. Skadberg .

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understand that you’re Swedish,” I said, smiling and trying to be friendly. His answer came quickly. “No-no. I’m Norwegian.” “Oh.” What a great beginning, I thought. But he invited me into the kitchen anyway, curious as to what I wanted. We were six miles north of Grand Marais, Minnesota, along the sharp and jagged shoreline of Lake Superior. I pulled out a map of Isle Royale as John pulled up a chair and began to talk about his life as a commercial fisherman. “I fished mostly in Hay Bay.” He pointed to a wellprotected bay that lies inside the much larger Siskiwit Bay. “We set float nets for whitefish there.” His arthritic right hand, almost completely crippled into a fist, traced out the familiar lines of the rocky bay. “A few years ago arthritis got a hold of me.” He showed me the hand without any self-consciousness. “See, I can hardly bend them together. These two fingers are crippled, and this hand’s not much better. You’re fishing in December, cold and miserable you know, in open boats in the wintertime, below zero, picking the herring out. Little by little, you get it.” His directness reminded me of Harry Truman’s tell-it-like-it-is, straightforward manner—only John wasn’t gruff at all. 5

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He stood over the map, pointing to all the places he’d fished: Malone Bay, Wright Island, Long Point, Washington Harbor, Chippewa Harbor, and Hay Bay, where he fished for twenty years. “I was nineteen years old when I first went to the island [in 1915]. I was with a guy named Seglem. Yeah, he was an old fisherman, and we fished at Fisherman’s Home the first year and Long Point the next few years. I made one dollar a day—with room and board of course.” He seemed to think that it was a good deal. “The first year that we fished on Long Point, we got a lot of fish, but here was one week we never got on shore.” They would set the nets at Long Point and then make the six-mile run to Washington Island if it was too rough to pull the boat up on the harborless shoreline. The next day they’d come back and lift the nets. All the while Seglem’s wife stayed at Long Point. “When we came down to lift, the old lady would push a little skiff out and bring us a hot meal . . . big sea and northeast all the time, so there were a lot of trout that year.” When it was calm enough, they winched their 22-foot boat up on the Point, the site of a fishery used off-and-on since the 1880s. “One time I pulled in here during a storm,” he pointed northeast to the Paul Islands, a part of the series of long reefs and islands that string along the southeastern edge of Siskiwit Bay. “Lightning hit me, and then I was in trouble. It hit the motor, and I might have gotten it too, but I was standing on a rubber mat with rubber boots. It knocked me to my knees, but it didn’t take long before I got my strength back.” He held up his fingers. “My hands were wet—you could see where the lightning jumped between my fingers,

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a small streak of it. I was really scared. I never been scared before that time, but I got kind of cold. I thought it was the end of me. I had to bail out the boat and try to get the motor started. See, when it hit the motor it followed the shaft out. It burnt up my ignition; it burnt up my points; and the bailer didn’t work. I had a hand pump and pumped the water out that way, but I was afraid to row the boat across Siskiwit Bay—that was four miles, at least four miles. There was a little off-land wind too, so I didn’t know what to do. Well, by golly, I kept chiseling around, chiseling around, and I chiseled the points apart with a little ignition filer. I got home. The next day Ed Holte at Wright’s Island couldn’t figure out how I got back. Wires and coils and points were all burned up, completely gone.” John still stood over the map. “Why don’t you sit down?” I said. “That’s all right. I sit a lot anyway. It doesn’t make much difference.” At eighty-four, John was in excellent shape. His sharp memory, enthusiasm, and perception impressed me. He stood there, waiting for the next question. “Are there any other times you’ve been afraid?” “I can really say I haven’t been too afraid on the lake. With a small open boat, we always watched ourselves.” He paused thoughtfully, remembering something and went on. “I must admit one time that I was afraid. I was fishing hook-lines with Gust Torgeson and Isaac Hansen.” When a “terrible thunderstorm” swept in from the west, all the other fishermen pulled up and headed for the sanctuary of Washington Harbor, ten miles away. Torgeson, a stubborn man, would not leave.

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“‘It ain’t gonna be much,’ Torgeson said. It blew from the west, then came right back from the east. That’s when I got scared. I thought it was going to fill us completely up.” They had to start bailing, all the while keeping the bow pointed into the waves, alternating the jobs between themselves. Isaac Hansen in another boat at the other end of the hook-line was alone. There was no sign of him. After the waves lessened a bit, they finally spotted Hansen. He had wrapped the hook-line around his skiff in such a way that he could both control his direction and bail at the same time. Good thing, as he otherwise might have been swamped. “Hansen, he says to Torgeson, ‘You should have no one working for you! When I come in you can write out my check!’” Years later, a northwest wind finally caught the foolhardy Torgeson as he was hauling herring nets off of Duluth in his new 30-foot boat. He and the two men with him were found washed up on a south shore beach. “How about winter?” I asked. “Did you ever spend winter on Isle Royale?” “We spent seven winters on Isle Royale. The first winter I stayed at Chippewa Harbor with Otto Olsen [in 1930–31].” If the northeast half of the island can be pictured as the back of a bony left hand with a thick thumb, Chippewa Harbor is in the middle of the thumb. “Otto was a little guy, you know, but he was a good fisherman. And he was a good guy. But when he drank . . . ohhh! Do you have that thing turned on?” He pointed to the purring tape recorder. “Yeah, but go ahead. It doesn’t matter now. Otto’s dead.”

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He hesitated, then launched into the saga of a winter with Otto Olsen, a small fierce-looking young man in the faded picture I now saw, but in his fifties yet still feisty when John worked for him. “Believe it or not, Otto ordered five hundred pounds of sugar for the winter. I said, ‘What are we gonna do with all that sugar?’ ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘make beer.’ I said, ‘Are we gonna be two guys sittin’ on the island drunk on beer from day to day? No-no.’ “But we fished a couple hundred kegs of herring, so we worked quite a bit up until Christmas after the rest of them were gone. Then Otto had to have beer. He had a big crock there, a twenty-gallon crock. First he drank it out of the keg, but it didn’t taste like anything. It was too early. He bottled it, but it was still too soon. When you bottle it too soon there’s too much of a pressure. He set it next to the wall near the stove where it was hot. The first thing you know the corks were popping, puffing ever so often through the night. It was all over the floor. All winter long it stunk of beer—took my appetite completely away. “He kept on drinking; he carried on. Yeah, he hadda have beer. Finally one night in the middle of winter came the dirtiest midnight we ever had: a big northeaster, a big snowstorm. He’s in bed there—we slept in the same bed—mumbling something to himself. Pretty soon he got out of bed and opened the window.” John’s natural accent resembled a singing Norwegian as he imitated Otto: “‘Oh, it’s-a-really goin’ out dere, Jeesus,’ he says, ‘it’s really dancin’.’ ‘Hey John,’ he says, ‘hey John! Come in! Come on in before they take you!’ And then I jumped out of bed. I knew there was something screwy in his head. I said, ‘What’s the matter, are you sleepin’ or are you awake?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m awake.’

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‘Well,’ I says, ‘you don’t see nothing but a big snowstorm. It’s so damn black you can’t see your hand in front of you.’” “‘Oh’ Otto says, ‘you are here.’” “‘Of course I’m here. Where do you suppose I would be? You get to bed.’ Well, he had to have some beer. ‘You got a head so full of it, you don’t know what to do.’ You see, he had his bottle sitting right next to the bed, and every time he woke he had to drink some. He never got sober. So next morning I got up, and I took two fish heads—trout heads—they were pretty good for a meal now and then. And I boiled them, rinsed off the brine and the salt first. I gave them to Otto and, you know, when he got the salt working against that booze, he started sweating. It was just like a river running off of him. But he was still drunk, feeling sick, so he reached up above the windowsill, and sure enough, he found some pills. He took some of them, and Jeesus, he was getting sicker. He pissed blue for a week. The pills were a ‘dose’ for a disease he picked up in Duluth. I said, ‘This is the end of it. No more beer. I’ll throw all the sugar out. Forget that you got it.’ I tell you there is nothing more miserable in all your life than a drunk you can’t get away from. He had an old phonograph with three records that he’d always play, and I can still hear them in my dreams, in my sleep. He was singing, and he was carrying on and more and more beer, you know. Well, there was no way you could read or do anything.” John shook his head, frowning. “But he was a good man, a good fisherman and cook, when he wasn’t drinking.” But John wasn’t always trapped inside. On clear days he did the trapping. He talked about catching fifty-three coyotes in one winter using only six traps. “They’re easy

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to catch. Once I even had a fox and a coyote in the same set.” He used two traps tied to a common stake. “And I shot a coyote that was digging in the garbage. All it had in its stomach were two mountain ash berries and some small twigs.” Apparently, coyotes led a precarious life in the winter. About fifteen years after John spent his winters on the island, the coyotes disappeared and were replaced by timber wolves sometime during the late ’40s. Another time John’s superior trapping skills caused problems for some hungry eagles. “Two bald eagles had a nest across the bay. I caught one of them in my trap. I used fish guts for bait and he must’ve been hungry. He was caught just at the tip of one leg, and I was wondering what on earth I was going to do. Well, I got a crooked stick, and I held it against the eagle’s neck so he couldn’t move, and I let him out. Oh, I never felt so sad in my life! I thought it was broken, but he jumped a few times, went to a log, and stood on it blinking and blinking. After a while he took off, and far away you could hear the other eagle squawking, all kinds of squawking when they joined up. The other eagle had been waiting for him.” John’s memory hadn’t disappeared. He reminisced for a long time, making me turn off the tape recorder when he thought particular facts might offend someone. Sometime during these stories he had finally taken a seat and now leaned forward in the wooden chair. With his green wool pants, the kind that never wear out, dark blue shirt, and green suspenders, he looked as if he was back on the island during the ’30–’31 winter. Behind him was a black barrel stove with a grill and a coffee pot balanced on top, but there were also a refrigerator and other modern

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accessories to remind us where we were. Gone were the days of two-ton catches and $12,000 years. He’d quit Isle Royale when he was seventy and the Minnesota shoreline when he was seventy-six, disgusted with government regulations that controlled his lifestyle. “The Department of Natural Resources dictates where we can set our nets,” John told me, a common complaint I heard from every fisherman, “so I pulled them up. And tourists, sportsmen, would come and fish around our net buoys. They thought that was the only place to get fish. They tangled line in the nets, you know, and cut them too.” “And did you see,” he pointed across the dark road to Lake Superior, “the way the water looks? Of course it’s polluted.” It was a strange greenish color, the gift from a taconite mill that dumped its wastes in nearby Silver Bay. Even Isle Royale is not immune to the immense forces of civilization. Brown water sometimes drifts down from Thunder Bay, and occasionally a familiar paper mill smell wafts through. It was only a spark of a beginning, maybe a small blaze, but John seemed to be glad that he wouldn’t see the complete deterioration of Lake Superior. “Well, I can really say I never enjoyed myself so much as I did when I was on Isle Royale.” He was quiet. It was a signal to go, so I gathered up my gear, those mechanical intruders, and began to leave. He followed me outside to the crisp night, and we stood talking under the star-sparkled sky. Fishermen do not hurry. “Drop in, in the summer,” he said. “If I’m not here, you’ll find me in town. If you don’t find me in town, I’m down there.” He pointed to the ground. Even so, deep-creased eyes twinkled in merriment as he closed the door.

Ingeborg Holte

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s I turned into the yard, six deer looked up from their food, stared at me with a rigid alertness, and then flashed away, white tails waving good-bye behind graceful leaps. Uneaten grain remained on the ground. I was near Grand Marais, Minnesota, to meet a spirited lady named Ingeborg Holte. Any woman who’d take the trouble to feed deer, chipmunks, woodpeckers, and pesky blue jays must be a special person. She was. With a burst of bustling energy she invited me inside. Before anything else, I noticed her artwork—several oils and watercolors that hung on the walls. One was a moody watercolor of Isle Royale with fog drifting behind fish shacks. Another depicted the opposite of quiet fog, a gull swooping above black cliffs attacked by furious waves. It was a remarkably powerful picture, capturing the explosiveness of Lake Superior. She was equally energetic with words. “I was thinking about the feelings fishermen have about storms,” she explained after my compliments. “Everything that they’ve got is invested in the nets out there. When there’s a storm, you just agonize through it. Your whole family does. And Mother used to go around and say, ‘Shhh! Don’t say anything. Don’t upset Dad now. Dad’s having a hard time.’ 14

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You could hear those waves thundering. We’ve had storms here that’ve pushed the boathouse back ten feet. And the waves would just thunder in and pound and roar.” Ingeborg paused and looked up as if she were scanning her thoughts for more childhood memories. Born in 1901, Ingeborg was not even a year old when she went to Chippewa Harbor on Isle Royale. Her childhood seems to have shaped her dramatic nature. While Ingeborg’s dad, Sam, who fished by sailboat as early as the 1880s, was on the lake, she created her own adventures. “I remember hanging over the dock, falling in, Mother hauling us out. This went on and on just about every day. I don’t think we ever learned how to swim.” Most fisherfolk didn’t. “I also remember digging up some lovely Indian artifacts. We didn’t know—we used them for making mud pies.” She laughed abruptly and shook her head. “It was a nice life. We could go in the water with nothing on, just the moose and squirrels looking.” Fishing has always been in her blood. For centuries, her ancestors have been fishermen, and she continued that tradition. As a child, with her brother as a crew member, she set a small cotton net ten feet offshore and “actually caught four trout one time.” By the time she’d met and married Ed Holte in 1928, she had had a little experience with fishing. “Did you ever help Ed?” I asked. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it!” Ingeborg has a vigorous presence about her. When she drifts into the past and then comes back with a sparkling awareness, you must listen. “The part I helped him with was when he had a smaller rig. Ed always thought that if you save your nets, you were

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further ahead, even if you didn’t get as much fish, which always bugged me because it always seemed like we had the smallest catch.” “So there was a little fisherman’s rivalry?” “Oh sure, there was always some of that. The two things I envied most were people who had lots of fish and beautiful greenstones. And I was extremely jealous of both.” She laughed at herself. Like Ingeborg, Ed Holte, who died in 1971, had an individualistic flair. He did not follow the typical fisherman’s routine of early morning departure. “Ed would set the nets in the evening, which was really marvelous. Around five o’clock in the afternoon we’d go out toward Hay Bay, then pick them up real early in the morning—about ten boxes. With just one person, it would’ve been pretty hard to lift. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it alone—he could—but I used to worry. Furthermore, it was an opportunity for me to run the outfit. Ed didn’t have that real drive to get every fish that was in that lake like some did. Like me for instance.” She laughed a little self-consciously. “I’d get disgusted. I was a dyed-in-the-wool fisherwoman. It was irritating when you had to nudge him to go out and get some fish. He was a kind of conservationist, really.” Ingeborg paused, so I asked another question: “Were there ever any times you just said forget it and left the nets out there because of a storm?” “You don’t tell a fisherman to forget it!” Especially a Scandinavian, I thought. “No, we never did. Crossing the bay was sometimes pretty rough, but we always finished. One of the worst parts coming home was through the markers near Fisherman’s Home. Oh terrible! It’s just like going

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up and over mountains! And that used to scare me, it really did. You remember all the things you’ve done during your life that you shouldn’t have. . . . Out there you feel pretty small and insignificant.” By that time, some of the deer had returned and were quietly feeding about thirty feet from the house. Somewhere behind them, across icy Lake Superior, was the springtime green of Isle Royale. Ingeborg had been looking outside. “You know, I think the most exciting part of being on Isle Royale is being out on the water. It’s a terrific feeling.” She could not express it fully, yet her face glowed, reflecting her pleasant memories. “But I’m just so glad to have had the opportunity to be on Isle Royale. Other scenery around here doesn’t compare. It’s not that scenic. See,” her head raised in mock haughtiness, “we’re really snooty about it.” The scenery was—and still is—spectacular, but practical problems first had to be overcome before it could be fully appreciated. One of those problems, now faced to a lesser degree by campers, was storing food without refrigeration. “People say, ‘Gee, no refrigeration, you poor thing.’ I didn’t mind at all. We kept eggs in barrels of salt, kept them all season, and they didn’t spoil. But the Malones didn’t bother buying eggs; they ate gull eggs. Those poor frustrated seagulls. Once my sister made angel food cake out of gull eggs, and she baked it for nearly a whole day. When she took it out of the oven, it went down like a pancake. I suppose it was too full of moisture, the fish oil. And we had barrels of apples. By the end of the season they were like witheredup prunes.” They also had boxes of dried fruit—prunes,

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apricots, peaches, pears, and raisins. These, plus a garden and a butchered cow provided food for the summer. “Oh, but I think what I remember most was the great big wooden tubs of butter, all those drops of saltwater coming out of the butter when you sliced it. That would’ve made a beautiful picture.” She nodded to herself, “I think we ate better in those days than we do now because we had all natural foods—no preservatives.” One family solved the problem of fresh dairy products in a natural way. The Gilbert Leonards at Malone Bay brought their own cow every year. At first, they rowed her from island to island looking for good places to graze. “She stepped into the skiff and stepped out by herself. That’s true, I saw it.” Ingeborg still seemed surprised. Then, perhaps tiring of boat riding, the cow started swimming by herself. “I was at Malone Island visiting the Malones when this cow came swimming over. At milking time she swam back to the Leonards again.” Ingeborg’s capacity for remembering unusual events intrigued me. With her sense of humor, she’d be just the person to ask about the sometimes boisterous celebrations on the Fourth of July. When I’d asked some other fisherfolk about their July Fourth activities, there’d be hidden smiles, nervous chuckling, or vague references to “parties.” But most wouldn’t go into details. Ingeborg didn’t hesitate. “At Caribou Island we had a dance platform. They put up a pavilion too. And that was during prohibition days— but!—you could get ‘near-beer’ and you could also get some forms of alcohol. They used to call it ‘white mule’ in those days, which they put into the near-beer. And my brother did that one time, but Mother didn’t know about it. She was

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very much against this. And this Fourth of July it was really warm, and everybody was indulging in this near-beer. I’ll never forget that; I think I was school-age. And they were dancing and shouting and singing and playing all those schottisches and waltzes and polkas. And an old fellow, Mr. Sawyer, he thought that this barrel with the near-beer was flat. He said he knew what to do about it. So he went down to the beach and got a log, and he was going to hit the barrel—I don’t know why. Of course, he didn’t know why either. And there was ‘something’ kneeling and being sick near the barrel, and Sawyer mistook this poor old gent for the keg. But as he raised it to swing, he staggered and dropped the log, thank goodness. “Another time, a fellow from the end of the bay stopped by on the way home from a Fourth of July celebration. He was feeling pretty good yet, and he didn’t see why the Fourth had to come to an end. And I remember Ed got a wicked look, and he put on a long-playing record. Ed said, ‘Why don’t you dance?’ So I was asked to dance, of course. And the old fellow was a good dancer, but, boy, he was getting so tired his poor old legs were flapping around like a loon. Ed kept on playing records. Pretty soon he got real tired, but he wasn’t about to take me to my seat because a gentleman just didn’t do that. And so he finally yelled to Ed in Norwegian, ‘Stop the damn thing!’ Oh that poor guy.” Ingeborg’s images and stories had increased my desire to see Wright Island, a place of much joy and hard work. That summer my wish was fulfilled: Ingeborg gave me permission to camp at her place. As the sun sank below the blackening outline of Isle Royale, ranger Jerry Case dropped

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me off at the well-protected harbor of Wright Island. That evening was a special privilege that I won’t forget. I was alone. Ingeborg, who now only came a few weeks each summer, was not due for another week. I looked at the small buildings surrounded by tall grass growing in the large open area. It was one of the best-situated fisheries I’d seen. The harbor blocked all forceful winds but allowed easy access to the lake. Near perfect.

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Old-time fishermen had discovered this place too. In 1929, an eighty-year-old Indian told Ed Holte that he’d fished off Wright Island for siskiwits in 1860. He had tended the fires that were used for rendering oil from the fatty fish. Once every three months, a three-masted schooner would come to pick up the barrels of oil. Now, fishing is over. I try to see what a fisherman might’ve seen a hundred years ago. Twilight coats the sky with salmon-colored orange, subtle blues, and purples. It is acutely quiet, so still you can hear a seagull’s wings whipping the air overhead. A loon sends a message bouncing across the harbor. There is only a minute trace of breeze, just enough to move a supple piece of grass. Breathless silence. I’m waiting for ghosts to appear, sails of a schooner to spear the sky. Whose presence to appear? Ed Holte’s? I try to laugh, then hunch into my arms against the cold. A trout breaks the onyx surface—into our world and gone again. Mosquitoes mingle about my ears. Cow parsnips, stalks thicker than fingers, glow white along the open shoreline. The moss-decorated fish house, its red and green tarpapered roof sagging, waits slump-shouldered with me. Other signs of the busy past are quiet too. A wooden Mackinaw boat, curved on both ends, is slowly being swallowed by the earth. A rusty cobwebbed gas barrel rests on the punky wooden dock. A once straight net reel is warped, grey splinters poking out from the strain, while its counterparts, small net buoys, lie over a six-cylinder engine block— none of which will ever be used again. And as the spokes of the sun withdrew, the timeless night shrouded the black water and the wicker chair on Ed Holte’s tiny porch, soothing them in eternal peace.

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There was a gusty westwind gale when I next met Ingeborg back in her real home on Wright Island. It seemed as if her energy had brought along nature’s company. A white towel on the porch snapped crazily. She paraded three of us into her compact home. It was built in a practical way, not

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over-constructed, almost doll-like, but with enough space for comfortable living. It had the feeling many old homes evoke, one of calm and satisfaction. We talked for a short time. All the while the feeling of belonging, of acceptance, surrounded me. When we left, we walked unhurriedly over the porch. I looked around. Gone were most of the net-reels and the net-filled boxes, a fish tug tied to the dock. And gone too, was Ed Holte. In 1971, sitting on this porch one afternoon and viewing the open expanse of his breezy harbor, he had a fatal heart attack. His body was taken aboard the Voyageur, but the boat made it only to Fisherman’s Home before a violent wind prevented them from leaving, as if the island did not want to let him go. We got into our boat and left Ingeborg, hair blowing sideways from the hard wind, as she waved from the aging dock. We cruised away, across the same waters that the Holtes had traveled so many times before. The wind kept blowing, blowing from the west.

Einar Ekmark

E

inar Ekmark once grabbed a fellow fisherman with a boisterous hug and cracked two of the poor man’s ribs. Imagine what he could do if he were angry. Spending an afternoon with him on Washington Island, I had no opportunity, nor did I want one, to see him in an agitated state. At seventy-three, with piston-like arms attached to a hunk of snow-capped mountain, he still appeared impressive and imposing. I had nothing to fear. Though shy at first, Einar was open to any approach. “Just ask me what you want to,” he said with a Swedish accent, a slight smile breaking through his thick features. I wanted to know what it was like being a commercial fisherman on this once-bustling island, which was now a cemetery for rotting boats and sparsely maintained buildings. Only five buildings stood when I was there, and only one young fisherman, Clint Maxwell, puttered out of the harbor in his lone search for chubs, ciscoes, and herring. Before Einar told me what that tough life was like, he told me about his background. At twenty-four, knowing nothing about fishing nor intending to learn, he left Sweden and was bound for Minnesota. That was in 1929. He found little work in America, but like so many others, he endured 26

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the Depression. Marrying into a fisherman’s family opened up the world of Lake Superior to him. In 1943 Einar came to Isle Royale with his brother Karl to begin the life that he had grown to love. The fishing in those years was good. They used to make $3600 to $4000 working from April to November. They earned every bit, the lake making them pay with bruises and cuts, blisters and calluses. “I cut this,” he said, showing the useless last joint of his right middle finger, “just before closed season in the fall. Cut the cord off, see?” He wiggled it with his other hand, showing that he had no control over it. While caulking cracks in the boat with a jackknife, he slipped and cut the finger, severing the tendons. He looked down at his hands, studying them as if they were tools and not part of his body. “I had calluses so big that I couldn’t close my hands. I had to cut them off with a razor blade.” Many times his hands were blistered so badly that they bled. The need to sometimes work from four in the morning until two the next morning didn’t help. They’d get home from the lake in the afternoon, but there was always “shore-work” to do—mending and cleaning nets, fixing the engine or net-lifter, and maintaining the net-house, net-reels, and fish house. Einar adopted the housewife’s lament for himself: “A fisherman’s work is never done. Never. There’s just so much to do.” Bleeding hands, hard work, and long hours are hardships for fishermen. But shrieking storms can pose the ultimate threat—death. Fishing one fall near McCormick Reef, he was nearly swallowed by the lake. Einar did not over-dramatize the

story. It’s not hard, however, once you’ve seen a wild storm wallop the cliffs, to imagine an open boat crashing fearfully homeward. “A big southwest came up. And we were down lifting nets at McCormick’s [fourteen miles away]. Everybody was leavin’ [five other boats], but there was quite a few fish in the nets, so we figured maybe we’d lift another ‘gang.’ “The sea was so big already; it would come up way high.” Sitting on the couch with one hand in his waterfallwhite hair, Einar looked way up, moving his other arm up and down like a roller coaster. “A big sea like that, then we slapped down. Whack!” He slapped his leg, making me jump. “And the keel let loose off the boat. See? Course, we didn’t know that at the time. And my brother said, ‘Ahk! We might as well forget it and go home.’ We were the last

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ones down there; the rest had gone home already. So we came to Long Point—Jee-sus, started to get a lot of water in the boat. My brother said, ‘Take the pail here; bail some of it out.’ It come in faster than I could bail. . . . So we turned back around Long Point. There was a sand beach there, see. So we ran that boat full speed up on that beach. “We found out that the keel was loose. So we put gunny sacks in there, grease in there—lubricating grease—filled it full of that, and nailed the boat all along the keel.” “How big of a boat was it?” “That was 26-foot I think. Open boat.” “Who else was with you?” “Just my brother Karl. . . . He died last fall. He had cancer of the lungs.” There was an intense silence. “I didn’t want to go back, but he said, let’s go back because they’d all be worrying about us. Maybe something happened to us, you know. “We had to buck against the southwest wind. Way up,” his hand sliced up at a forty-five degree angle. “Gee, I never seen a sea like that in all my born days. They were so big, you know,” he looked me straight in the eyes, “when you were down in the troughs at Grace Harbor, coming in? You couldn’t even see that high pole, the wireless tower [on Washington Island]. We couldn’t even see it. The sea was that big.” A Coast Guard cutter happened to be in Washington Harbor that day, and Einar’s friends, seeing the long overdue fishermen grappling with the sea, went to ask the ship if they would go out to help. But it would have taken too long to rig the cutter for heavy weather running. Einar and Karl had to make it themselves.

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“Lucky we had a spray hood, or we would’ve drowned. There were rollers breaking, white foam you know. I was scared. That was the worst one I’ve ever been in.” As we spoke, a northwest sea was raging, shaking the trees. Leaves rippled like green lightning. And all across the harbor, whitecaps crested in random patterns. “We’d go way up, way up, way up then all of a sudden down. “When we finally got into the harbor, everybody was cryin’. All the women were cryin’, they were so happy to see us.” Einar’s face opened to a satisfied smile. I learned later that some of the “stoic” fishermen had tears on their wind-cracked faces as well. Life was not all hard work or fear of the crushing forces of nature. “We worked hard, and we played hard too,” Einar said, a grin on his big face.

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“I heard that on July Fourth, the fishermen had a party,” I prompted him. “Oh yes. That’s the time we used to get free beer from the Christiansons.” He laughed. The Christiansons ran the boat that picked up their fish. “Everybody got together then. Some of us were drunk for about three days. We used to go out on some beach for a picnic, get thrown in the water, and get wet.“ Einar laughed, stopped to think, and laughed again, images flickering before him. “There wasn’t one Fourth of July that someone didn’t get wet. We’d have our bottles and beer, get half goofed up—pretty soon someone would fall in. We’d go on the north shore or maybe Grace Harbor depending on the wind. The drinking people would go one place, and those that didn’t went another place.” Einar said it in a casual way, revealing that people’s choices didn’t matter to him.

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There was a long period of silence. I stared out the window at the wind-fuddled lake, summer leaves twirling and making rushing sounds like rivers. “We were young then anyway. We could enjoy life a little bit.” The fisherman’s routine would return to normal after the festivities of the Fourth. But hook-line fishing was thankfully set aside in favor of nets. “That was a lot of slavery, that hook-line fishing. Get up in the morning at breaking daylight, go up towards Windigo, and pick them [herring bait nets] in the bay. Had to push the ice away from the nets to get the herring.” Then, with bait secured, the actual fishing would begin. It was an all-day process. No wonder the fishermen favored nets. Some of Einar’s favorite memories came from the late forties, the years of huge catches and good pay. “We were hitting it good then; they was comin’ like bananas. They were big ones, too. The smallest were about seven or eight pounds, and we got ’em up to twenty, twenty-five pounds.” These were all lean trout, not the smelt-eating, fat-bellied lunkers of the present. Their biggest catch was a ton and a half of trout while a normal catch ran from seven hundred to one thousand pounds a day. Einar said that they fished with eighteen 500-foot nets of six-inch mesh. “We floated the trout nets near the top of the water, only three or four feet below the surface.” Floats on the surface held the nets up, and the depth of the net was controlled by the chosen length of line from the float to the top of the net. Their best fishing usually occurred during November in shallow water off the reefs. “We didn’t dare set them too shallow, because if it gets too stormy you’ll lose your nets.”

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Einar quit fishing in 1974 when he was sixty-nine. I asked him if he missed it. “I’d kind of like to fish,” he said. “If my legs would take care of me, I’d still go fishing.” But even he was surprised that he didn’t have arthritis. “So many years with cold water.” He shook his head and studied his hands. “But I don’t have any. Just a little stiffness in the knees.” “Do you get lonely here?” He spends most of the summer on the island. “Lonely? I never got lonely in my life. I’m used to being alone; it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, I just had two visitors from Knife River.” Apparently he gets plenty of attention. We talked on, moving to the kitchen table for a drink. He told a few more storm stories, and I added some of my own. In the midst of our ramblings we heard some people approaching. Four sport fishermen, Einar’s friends, clomped into the small room. They were on their way home to Minnesota and came to thank Einar and to pick up some gear. “Tank you A-nar. Dis waz a goot time,” a short man said in what I took to be a blend of French and singing Norwegian. I got up and said in my own peculiar accent, “Thank you Einar. I enjoyed it.” But I shook his hand, not wanting any part of his hug. My ribs and feelings were perfectly intact and in tune. Good-byes were said through the softly whining screen door. Outside, even the wind was calming. I roamed around the unused boats and the comfortably old houses and docks until the sun settled beneath the white-flecked skin of Lake Superior.

Stanley Sivertson “

O

h, there are so many stories, so much history,” said Stanley Sivertson, captain of the 65-foot Wenonah and former commercial fisherman at Washington Island. I soon found that his Isle Royale life encompassed an engaging part of that history. I also discovered that he wasn’t afraid to express his views on a topic that some others had hesitated to speak about—the oftenstrained relationship between park personnel and residents during the early years of Isle Royale National Park. But first, as always, the problem was where to begin, what to ask. Stanley solved that for me. Almost before I sat down aboard his ship on the Windigo pier, he spoke about the beloved ship America, a subject that all island residents will readily discuss. “My dad had broken his leg that year [in 1928], and the doctor didn’t want him stumbling over the rocks on Isle Royale. ‘Besides,’ the doctor said, ‘you can’t go to Isle Royale. What if the boat sinks?’ “‘Sink!’ my father said, ‘that boat’s been going for twenty years.’ “‘Oh, all right then, go ahead.’ Well, it was two days later when the doctor heard that the America had sunk.” We both laughed. 34

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When the America had stopped at Washington Island, the gangplank had been too slippery and steep for Stanley’s father to get off, so he had decided to go around the island on the America’s regular run and try it again the next day. Stanley was already on the island. “About three o’clock that morning, I heard my father shouting from far away, ‘The America is sinking! The America is sinking!’ I thought I was dreaming.” Even with a broken leg, “old man Sivertson” was rowing across the channel from the North Gap to Washington Island, shouting as he pulled the oars. “When we got within a half mile of the America with our boat, I thought it was a joke. It looked all right. It was just sitting there. I can’t remember much more; it was a shock.” Minutes later, the stern lurched under, leaving the bow protruding skyward. Only Dr. Clay’s dog died, and the next day the island residents recovered what they could. People dug out cherries, strawberries, barrels of oranges and apples, and enough bananas to fill an entire room from the wreckage. To this day, John T. Skadberg can barely look at a banana without getting nauseous. That year, close to one hundred people from Booth, Barnum, and Washington Islands were living in Washington Harbor, and over thirty buildings stood including a two hundred-guest hotel called Island House, a dance hall, and bowling alley. Clara Parker had many recollections about her days working at the Island House. “We had gangsters there from Chicago. I remember one man’s first name, Jack, because I went out with him. But we didn’t know they were gangsters until we cleaned their cabin and found that they had forgotten to leave their suitcases closed. We saw the machine guns in there. But the Singers [who owned the

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resort] knew that they were hiding out. They were goodlooking, that’s the only thing that we went for! They were really gentlemen, really wonderful. They stayed for a week, and I served them in the dining room. When they left, they gave me a very generous tip. “I served Edsel Ford and his gang. They wanted an all-family style breakfast. And I got a forty-eight dollar tip. But of course, they could have anything they wanted. They could have their bottles on the table. The rules were open to them. “We had a klondike room because Washington Island used to have a gambling room once upon a time—years ago. I was told that. And still in the old klondike room, they had a big machine, orange with stripes, that you could get money out of, and slot machines, gambling tables. You could still get money out of the slot machines. They had orange bars, green, and yellow.” Stanley also had memories of the resort. “Oh sure, the resort had slot machines. In fact, when they tore the hotel down I bought a roulette wheel. It turned vertically, like a Ferris wheel. But it was a little different than the normal ones. You’d select a card—get three of a kind, three aces three kings—poker hands actually. They had pool tables and some kind of a game where they shot these balls up— the forerunner of pinball, only larger. And they had their own barbershop too. The place was completed before 1906.” The America took about an hour to sink, but its bow remained above the water for a few seasons before sliding into the North Gap. Today, the bow of the America is still visible from the surface resting only five feet down, and is a popular ship for divers.

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Stanley was more involved with another ship that sank five years later in 1933—the George M. Cox. “My brother Art and Tom Eckel heard this boat blowing distress signals in the fog out toward Rock of Ages light. They thought they’d better do something.” The men went out and after circling for a while, finally found a freighter, not the Cox, lying still, undamaged among the surrounding reefs. “There’s a lot of reefs out there.” Stanley looked at me as soon as he said the word reef, a dirty word to a captain. “Art and Tom told the captain to anchor and to wait until it cleared up. ‘No sir!’ that captain said, ‘you gotta take me outta here!’ But Art and Tom had already lost their bearings looking for the ship. ‘I demand! I got the right!’ that captain said.” Then the stranded captain said something about a gun. “Well, then Art and Tom managed to get the freighter out of there. “Two weeks later we heard distress signals again.” As Stanley spoke, a typical June fog bank rolled down the harbor, shrouding the hills with bands of twisting mist. The foghorn blew periodically, and I thought that this was a great coincidence. “The thick fog made it sound like they were coming from the Suzy Islands near Grand Portage.” And thinking that it was “that same fool,” the fishermen went about their business. “In the morning it cleared up and when we went out to our nets, we saw this big white thing out there—couldn’t believe our eyes.” The Cox had been caught in “ground” fog. When the Rock of Ages Lighthouse keeper had seen its two masts just above the fog and heading directly toward the reef, he frantically blew the short repeated blasts of distress. It was futile. On its maiden voyage to Port Arthur for its new owner, the Cox slammed into the reef and came to rest at a

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precarious angle. Luckily only two people were hurt, but the 118 passengers plus crew spent an uncomfortable night packed sardine-like in the lighthouse. The 308-foot Cox was open for salvage, and nearly everyone in Washington Harbor made trips to that beached white whale. “We found two nice sides of beef, and there was a rumor that there were 150 cases of beer on that boat. We tried to find them. Well, right on the main deck— we didn’t notice it before—was an elevator. It fit so flat it looked just like the deck. We envisioned all kinds of things down there, treasures I guess. So we got hacksaws and chisels, and we chiseled and hacksawed on that threefourths-inch cable for about five hours. And finally the thing dropped. The boat was on an angle, so when the elevator fell, it got jammed. I was the skinniest so they gave me a flashlight. I climbed down, and there was not a thing except oakum, old paint cans.” He laughed softly, just like he usually speaks. “I’ll tell you one strange thing. One day, Gust Bjorlin saw these white things near the Cox about thirty-five or forty feet down in the water. When we looked closely, we saw that it was canvas that had been used to cover the lifeboats. We needed some for our boats, so we moved our boat back there and grappled up a couple of these canvas covers. And, by golly, it was just dead calm. All of a sudden we hear a big roar and this mast, this big mast, fell right down just where we had the boat tied a minute ago.” “And it was a dead calm day?” I asked. “Dead calm day. And here that mast had stood up a long time through heavy winds.” “That’s eerie.”

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“Oh yeah. When that thing hit the water, flat like that, it sounded like a cannon.” Across the room was a picture of the Cox, leaning erratically on the rocks. Besides cargo, Stanley and friends found a few suitcases and briefcases with names and addresses. They wrote to the people, but strangely they never answered. “Maybe they were ashamed to be on that boat,” Stanley added with no explanation. “The Cox stayed intact until the week after Labor Day when a southwest storm swept it below the surface of Superior.” Fishing was bad that year, and Stanley regretted not salvaging the hundreds of life jackets that were on the ship. He said that he could have sold them as souvenirs for five dollars a piece. “We would have made more money from them than from a whole season of fishing.” “How much did you make fishing in the ’30s?” I asked. “I’ll tell you how bad it was. Nineteen thirty-three—I can pick that year out—was the first year I was going to go on my own. The Depression was on; the auto industry was flat; and everything was down. The biggest catch of fish we had on the hook-line that year was 190 pounds; we’d bait five miles of line for that. And we got five cents a pound compared to seventeen cents before the Depression. So anyway, we each made three hundred dollars at the end of the summer. We used to kid about it. When we figured it out, the four of us, we made about five cents an hour. We’d say that we only made five cents but look at all the hours we could work.” It did get better. One day in 1936 they caught sixteen thousand pounds of trout at Todd Harbor on the same

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amount of line they’d used before. They had many other catches around the thousand mark and at eight cents a pound they started to make a little money. “The high point of fishing, money-making wise, was 1946–47. But by 1957, when we had float nets out by McCormick Reef, we had seven hundred pounds of trout before we didn’t have a lamprey scar.” The lamprey nearly erased the trout population; fishing steadily declined; and by 1961 lake trout fishing was closed. Stanley then got more involved with the passenger and supply boat business. “When we went to pick up the Wenonah [in 1964], it was the roughest trip we ever had. We got caught in a big storm outside of Whitefish Bay,” close to where the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in 1975, “and it was a sixty-mile-anhour northwest wind blowing over two hundred miles of open water. I’d never been on a big sea like that. I saw one breaker coming at us that was three hundred feet across, breaking in one mass.” He swept his arms wide, although his face remained almost expressionless. Stanley shows his energy through his hands and arms and by how he shifts his position so abruptly. “When we went up on it, whew!” He shook his head. “Whooom! We dropped down on the other side.” He pointed and leaned low toward the doors. “It filled up out there and ran through the doors. The stern was all awash. The first wave filled the bow, and the next one came right down on top of us. There was a foot and a half of water running down the whole boat. “An ore boat was out the same day on our port side about two miles away. They saw us and hollered on the radio, ‘Do you need any assistance?’ No, we were okay, but we were heading toward Canada. We didn’t want to get

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caught sideways in a trough. Well, later we saw that one freighter was steering the same way we were. We happened to hear the Cliffs Victory—she was one of the big ones in those days—tell another freighter that she had tried veering off five degrees but had to turn right back into the wind because it started twisting the boat.” There were no casualties, and eventually the newly purchased Wenonah sailed into the motionless waters of Rock Harbor. Stanley had been running the Wenonah since 1967 but, “I’d rather be fishing right now, either trawling out of Duluth for smelt or out there.” He pointed up the harbor where columns of broken fog hung like deformed phantoms. Occasionally, even though we were docked, Stanley would lean toward the window and take a good look at the surrounding water. It was a habit, a good habit, for a captain of any vessel. He was still looking out the window, noticing the passengers getting ready to come aboard. “Well, I guess I have to go.” We agreed to talk the next day when he made his daily run from Grand Portage. But just as the Wenonah glided away from the dock, a backpacker appeared, too late to catch his ride. This happens about a half dozen times a year. Stanley was contacted, but instead of turning back he asked the park ranger to bring the hiker to Washington Island, where the Wenonah had to stop that day. I went along. As we buzzed to the end of the harbor, thick fog began to smother us. After a brief mix-up as to where we should go, we were told to deliver our by now nervous passenger to some marker buoys where the Wenonah was waiting. A series of three loud blasts led us to the right spot. The Wenonah drifted into view like a reverse lapse dissolve,

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getting bigger and brighter. We transferred the sheepish passenger up, and I waved a good-bye to Stanley. The next day was blue and sunny, and as always, Stanley was unassuming and steady. This time we went into the pilothouse. I wanted to know more about the Windigo area. He put his blue captain’s hat on and told me. “Originally, this was a mining camp. And then when the mine [Wendigo] closed down in 1894, some people got together—some real estate people in Duluth, some from Omaha, some from Chicago, and some attorneys and other wealthy people. They bought the land and buildings [in 1902] and called it the Washington Club. And all they came out here for was two things: one, a hay fever haven; two, a place to fish speckled and lake trout.” Speckled trout up to two pounds were regularly caught from a beaver dam near the Washington Club. “Wasn’t there a suicide at the club?” I asked. “That was Joe Angle. Joe Angle and another guy were caretakers there. It was February [1932], and they probably had a big fire in the fireplace. The building burned down. I don’t know if he brooded about that, but he also had a girlfriend who married someone else. “It happened the next April or May. I remember one evening I was over here setting bait nets [for herring] right off that point.” He motioned across the harbor. “The Coast Guard was over at the dock taking him down. Joe had gone in the barn, and he had a big 38-55 rifle. And he shot himself.” I thought of Ernest Hemingway who died a similar death, although Joe Angle would never be so famous. “And when they were carrying him down, I always will remember the coyotes howling over on these hills.” He pointed

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north to the high ridge. I imagined how the sun had shone, painting the hills with red fire. “It was really eerie. I knew that he had shot himself. It was really eerie.” Stanley had satisfied my interest in the bizarre, but another fact was puzzling me. During my talks with the island’s longtime residents, I’d sometimes detect a hesitancy to speak about the early days of the Park Service, or at least a reluctance to go into detail about it. Stanley cleared it up. He told me of the overzealous attempts of some former national park employees to enforce the laws of nature, what another resident termed “their excessive boy-scoutism.” “When the Park Service first came in, there was a lot of antagonism. For instance, they sent a man up here from Michigan. He came in and scared the heck out of our whole family. ‘The government wants this land,’ he said, ‘and if you don’t sell it, we’ll take it by condemnation anyway.’ ‘Well, how much are you going to give?’ my father asked. Fifty dollars! That’s what he wanted to give for our whole fishing operation. “So then we went to court over it—spent all the savings we had, about twelve hundred dollars.” Eventually, the Sivertsons sold for twelve hundred dollars and a life lease, but of course, made no money on the deal. Others, scared by the tough talk, sold everything and got out. Complicated negotiations continued throughout the ‘30s as a special park commission kept acquiring lands for the as-yet-unestablished park. “At that time, we had a community ice house where the service dock is now [on Washington Island]. Right above it was the dance hall; it wasn’t used anymore because the resort had closed down. But there were bowling alleys, long

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bowling alleys, and that’s where the fishermen made their nets. The first thing they [the Park Service] did when they came in [1941] was burn down the icehouse. It was a good icehouse. Then they tore the hotel down and left all the bedsprings and mattresses on the beautiful lawn. And they’re still there! “We were so scared, the fishermen who had cottages, that we didn’t dare cut a tree. Because it said right in your lease that you could lose it for cutting a tree. Some of those houses were so dark in the summer because of the trees growing around that you had to have lights on in the daytime. The only time we got a tree cut was when a beaver chewed one down.” One year, Stanley’s brother Art was operating the passenger boat while Stanley fished. Because Art missed fishing that one summer, the park service employees told him that he couldn’t renew his lease. “So I said, ‘Let me have the lease. We used the buildings together anyway. What’s the difference?’” “Nope!” Stanley asked if he could at least have a heavily insulated and well-constructed building that he would move to his place the following spring. “We’ll see,” the ranger said. “No sooner had the last fishermen got out there past John’s Island on the Voyageur that fall, than the guy was down there with a torch. And that was the park district ranger at the time.” His family’s account was not an isolated incident. Other perfectly kept houses as well as old shacks all around the island were torn down or burned. It was a tragic loss of

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good workmanship and materials. “Then you wonder why some of those people didn’t like the Park Service.” However, some residents found that the Park Service could sometimes be quite fair. Clara Parker related a story to me during my visits to Isle Royale: “One time Charlie [her husband] and Andy, Andy Hansen, went out fishing. There were only Andy and Charlie, Andy’s wife, and me on the island. This was in October when fishing was closed for a month. But they had some nets set and,” her voice lowered, “they got a lot of fish. We saw the park service boat coming, so Mary and I had to row across and wave a white flag at Andy and Charlie. So we waved, and they went and dumped over a thousand pounds of fish on the beach. So these park fellows came—we knew them—and they said, ‘Where’s Charlie and Andy?’ I said, ‘I don’t know where they are—someplace.’ Then one of them said, ‘We saw them; we saw where they dumped their fish. Tell them to bring the fish back in again, because I hope you and Mary will make supper for us.’ There were four park rangers. ‘And we’d like a hundred pounds to take back with us! Just ice that fish and keep it until the season opens.’ So we cooked supper for them, and we sat and played cards all night.” Stanley did emphasize, and I agreed, that today the Park Service is different, guided by more intelligence and sympathy. In no way should past deeds be reflected onto the present staff. The Park Service realizes that one hundred and fifty years of modern man’s presence can’t be whisked away overnight. But there will be no new leases and as the years pass, fewer and fewer people will return. The island will revert

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back to its unpeopled past—excluding park personnel— soon enough. Yet some areas have been preserved. So far, Pete Edisen’s fishery, the Rock Harbor Lighthouse, and the Minong Mine have been listed as historic sites. Buildings in other areas will either be used by the Park Service or allowed to naturally deteriorate. “I guess that’s about it,” Stanley said. He had to go and work on the engine. A minute after he’d closed the pilothouse door, the brass-framed clock chimed six times. I felt like a student filing out of class to the signal of a bell. Indeed I was, and I’d be back to learn more. From the dock, I watched the Wenonah’s wake form a huge arrow, pointing the way home.

Roy Oberg

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aptain Roy Oberg smacked the 63-foot Voyageur into a growling September sea and decided he didn’t want to challenge the southwester. As the sun echoed pink and orange in the deceptively calm skies, he glided back down the harbor to the refuge of Windigo Ranger Station. That day the full boatload of forty passengers would not make it to Grand Portage, Minnesota. For Roy it was just another common incident in his long years of scurrying around the reefs and islands of Isle Royale. Since 1937, he’s been piloting passengers and cargo vessels. His face is as familiar to island residents as a moose wandering down a trail, though Roy, I’m told, is more handsome and appreciated. I agree. I met Roy on a sunny day on one of his three weekly circumnavigations around the island. Hurriedly transferring passengers and supplies at Windigo and taking on more passengers—me included—he throbbed up Washington Harbor. It wasn’t long before I was sitting in the pilothouse, watching him maneuver the Voyageur. He used a handle to control the hydraulic steering mechanism. I asked Roy how frequently he has to cancel trips. “Oh, not too often, maybe two or three trips a year due to bad weather. Several different times I’ve had to spend 49

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Thanksgiving out here—couldn’t get back—way back during the ’40s.” His season extends from early May to early November during which he hauls about two thousand passengers. He told me, “They [island residents] start calling me up about the middle of April. When are you going? Are you going to be ready? Where are you going? They get so used to it, it’s a way of life for them. Some have been born and raised there. It doesn’t feel like home unless they’re there.” The island circle usually takes ten hours with an overnight stop at Rock Harbor. “I started going around this island in 1937,” he said, “but I’ve been over here when I was a kid. My dad fished here in Tobin Harbor in 1918–1919.” Born in 1911, Roy used to fish as a young man. “When I was a kid we used to lift maybe twenty nets in a day, and if we got as much as seven or eight fish on a net, that was good fishin’. Now they set one net out and sometimes get forty to fifty fish. On one net! It’s the sportsmen’s pressure that’s preventing commercial fishing. They figure that if trout get thick enough, they’ll jump into the boat, and they won’t have to fish.” He soon got involved with the passenger and supply business. In 1937, he ran a nameless 26-foot boat and once, “hauled two tons of fish with it. And I towed a rowboat behind me just in case.” Roy laughs like I’d always imagined a pirate to laugh, a repetitious “heh-heh-heh.” Only Roy’s laugh is not menacing. That fish-laden trip originated in Washington, Booth, and Barnum Islands at the head of Washington Harbor, where Roy has made many trips picking up fish and delivering ice

and other supplies. In the late ’30s there were about thirty fishermen on those islands and about seventy-five on the entire island. No one took a census in the ’20s, but today many longtime residents guess that up to 150 fishermen cruised the shorelines in search of fish. Then came 1928, when the ever popular and admired ship America sank in the North Gap. We were just turning through that gap, coming abreast of a black marker buoy, when Roy got on the PA system to give a brief history of it. After he was done he said, “We have some baloney on this ship, but we slice it thinner.” His laugh was low and slow, inviting me to join.

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“The America was making an extra run to the Washington Club,” Roy said with a practiced ease. “They’d been accommodating those guys for years. The America had a new mate that year. He probably was on for a month or so. When he was steering, that’s when they got fooled. The shadows somehow fooled him because it’s such a narrow channel. At night they do fool you. You have to be extra cautious. He just cut the corner too short when he was coming out. “The boat was really getting in bad shape. Oh, she’d been on the reefs many times over the years. But they had one of the most difficult runs in the country. There was no radar in those days.” Earlier, Roy had told me about his first radar. By the time he began that story, we were out from shelter and on the big lake. “Even radar can fool you. The radar we had was made over in England on the Isle of Wight.” Roy was rolling then, speaking with the easy assurance of a man with vivid memories. “They sent a technician over named Peter Finch. He came to modify all these sets because there was one little part that was not quite right. He fixed it at Mott Island one night when we had the old Voyageur. The next morning he was trying it as we went around Belle Isle.” Roy turned the boat to circle counterclockwise. “I was watching it, and I told him, ‘Well, there’s a rock there, and that’s an island there.’ And I showed him where all the different landmarks were. And Finch said, ‘That’s the first time I was ever on a boat where I had somebody explain what I was seeing.’ Finch usually had tried to tell the guy what he thought it was.” Again, deep laughter eased out from Roy.

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Apparently, he was reminded of another passenger he once had aboard. “I had one old lady who rode around with me one time. She was a little old lady, I imagine about seventy, seventy-five. She was interested in watching everything that was going on. Of course, in those days we had the people and the fish all piled together. I thought maybe she was going to complain, you know. We didn’t have the best, but we didn’t advertise for tourists either. We just took them as they came. So when we finally got back to Grand Portage, she came to me, and she shook my hand, and she said, ‘You know, I’ve been on the Empress, Britanica, and all around the world three times, but I’ve never had such an interesting trip yet.” Roy went for coffee while I watched the coves of McGinty and Huginnin pass by, named for early unsuccessful miners. After these small harbors, the shore is barren, steep and beachless for almost twelve miles. It’s ancient, a desolate beauty. Thrumming along about five hundred feet away, the glacier-clipped shoreline seemed endless and hypnotizing. There are absolutely no harbors, no points of refuge should a sudden storm rise up. I wondered how many Chippewa canoes had been smashed against those rocks, how many ancient miners had lost their lives in their quest for copper. Perhaps none of them. Only modern watermen are haughty enough to think they can conquer Superior. And twenty-four ships have paid the price for that daring, destroyed on this rocky beast. Maybe Roy had an experience of his own. He did, and it happened only four miles from Huginnin near Finn Point. “We hit a squall in a fog. It was just like a small hurricane. I was down having lunch when it came,

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and it got real dark. There were three of us on at a time. Willie came running down. ‘You better come up there captain, it looks awful black.’” Roy stretched out the word, awww-ful. “‘Something is coming!’ So I hurried up and got up there, and at just about that time it hit. And we faced the bow into the wind. It blew real hard for just about five minutes. Then all of a sudden we were in what was like the eye, and you could see the thing all around you. It was about a half-a-mile circle. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen one like that. Then we hit the other side and in about five, ten minutes we were out of it again. We had some people in the Belle Isle campground, and they said it just whined—made a wooing noise. There’s a whole bunch of birches down on Locke Point. The birches are lying all twisted.” Locke Point was the scene of a different, near tragic incident. In 1973, Roy picked up three people there who had almost drowned. “They split their boat, and they were in the water with their life preservers on. We pulled them on board,” Roy said offhandedly, though the chilled boaters must have been elated to see that aluminum ship surging toward them. “During the summer we tow maybe a dozen boats that are disabled. But most of them are by a dock. They’re not out in the lake.” Roy helps out whenever he can. By then, we were well into the “siesta stretch.” Roy calls it that because nothing much happens—no maneuvering or big changes in scenery—until McCargoe Cove about twenty miles away. It was a good time to ask more about the boats Roy has piloted. From 1945 to 1953, Roy ran the Disturbance; this

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was replaced by the Voyageur I until 1973, when he started to pilot his present ship, the Voyageur II. While Rick Anderson took his siesta on top, Roy was perched behind the wheel, gazing through dark glasses at the familiar waterway. There was plenty of time for talk. “The Voyageur is one of the best ones I’ve ever had. Only thing is you’ve got to get used to it. When I first got it I tried pushing her too hard and too square into the sea. Coming out of Duluth in the spring, I landed right on my knees on the floor. I thought I broke both of my legs— heh-heh-heh.” We rambled on. Roy told how they only see about twenty moose per year, but once, halted by heavy seas and having to stay at Windigo, he saw two huge bulls clashing their massive heads together. Roy mentioned an old-timer, Paul LaPlante, who told him how he hauled mail from Canada by dog team in the 1870s. Now, Roy has that lessrigorous mail-hauling job. By then, I thought I’d take a siesta too. Back in the passenger section, I dozed to the throbbing rhythm of the engine until we approached McCargoe Cove. Roy was ready. “Last trip I was debating whether I should go through Hawk Island and the rocks.” He pointed ahead. “We were planing. I had to chase everybody off the bow—water was coming almost even with the deck.” Later, Grant Merritt would tell me a great story about Roy’s sailing abilities and his ability to stay cool under pressure. “Stanley Sivertson put on a real good retirement party for Roy Oberg. They blindfolded Roy and then they went around the crowd and everyone would tell a story. The object was [for Roy] to identify who it was. I told a story.

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Marilyn and I were coming back on the north shore from Tobin’s. It was a Sunday—nice day—and Merle Otto was the engineer [in] 1963. Between Little Todd and Huginnin Bay the engine started giving trouble. Roy spotted it right away. He heard the rumbling in the driveshaft, so he had to shut the engine down. So we’re floating about a mile from shore. Fortunately there was only a little wind blowing from the west. We had twenty-three passengers on board. So Roy announces ‘Well, we’re going to have to do a little sailing here, à la my grandfather. I’m going to put this piece of tarp, little piece, on the bow, and we’re going to sail. You just line up two trees on shore and you’ll see we’re going about a mile-an-hour. Meanwhile, I’ll try to get ahold of the Park Service.’ But it was a Sunday and he had a helluva time getting them. Suddenly the radio comes on: ‘Captain Roy Oberg. Your wife is in the hospital in Grand Marais and she’s going to have a baby.’ Well, finally, the Park Service did come out. They towed us all the way into Washington Harbor. Probably took us about two hours, and we transferred to the Hiawatha. By the time we got to Grand Portage it was about six o’clock at night. So we drove Roy to the hospital—he didn’t seem to be worried—and it turned out to be false labor. There was no problem that day. Roy sped outside of Hawk Island and toward McCargoe. We curved through the buoy-marked entrance much like Captain McCargoe must have done during the war of 1812 when, fearing capture, he hid the Northwest Fur Company’s Recovery at the end of this long slit of a harbor. It was a much-used area long before 1812. Around 2000 B.C., miners took extensive amounts of metal from

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McCargoe’s copper-rich outcroppings. And much later in 1875, the Minong mine employed seventy men and their families—a small town—in an unprofitable mining attempt. Fishermen from the Northwest Fur Company in the early 1800s and individuals up to the 1930s used the shelter of McCargoe for their base camp. A poor-rock pile and a campsite are the current markings left by man. “Move that sailboat!” Roy bellowed over the loudspeaker. Scurrying figures obeyed, and the sleek boat was moved just in time so that Roy could slide the Voyageur gently against the dock. Two passengers got off, and we roared back up this magical cove. My trip had nearly ended. I’d be getting off at Milford and Myrtle Johnson’s home on nearby Amygdaloid Island. Arriving there a short time later, we encountered a scene of confusion. As in days of old, when the boat comes in it’s a big event. The Voyageur swung around a long reef, and Roy expertly guided the stern to the edge of the boathouse dock. A rare commotion began. My God, I thought, I’m at the loading dock of a busy truck terminal. Ice, groceries, and mail were unloaded. Then passengers swung over the rail; hugs and hellos from the Johnsons commenced; the McPherrens greeted guests with handshakes; smiling relatives and residents filled the available space on the placid boathouse dock. Then I too joined the noisy reunion. Roy came back, smiled as always, and left when the goods were gone. Standing in the doorframe of the boathouse, I watched the Voyageur split the small harbor. I thought of one of the last questions I’d asked Roy. “Roy, I heard you were going to retire.” He’d looked up and answered quickly. “Oh, pretty soon. . . . I’ll make one

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or two trips a year though. It gets in your blood, just like anything else.” “Roy,” Milford Johnson told me, “will come out here until he drops. We’ll all be on this island until we drop. You bet.” Whether he retires soon or not, Roy Oberg will always be a remembered part of Isle Royale.

Milford and Myrtle Johnson “You’ll Never Make a Fisherman”

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he morning sun burst open like a muskmelon shattering on cement, orange light scouring the calm sea. Milford Johnson gazed out of his log cabin window and wondered if the predicted west wind gales would materialize. Weather dictates his life: Milford is a commercial fisherman. Entirely surrounded by fickle Lake Superior, he lives toward the northeast end of Isle Royale on Amygdaloid Island. Each summer he and his wife-partner Myrtle return to try their luck at probing the reefs. Milford came in 1906, and Myrtle came in 1908. Traditionally, they are among the first to arrive in early May and the last to leave in early November. Now, in September, I wait in their kitchen to see if we’d be going out. He has reason to fear Lake Superior. “We had one storm on the eleventh of November,” he said as coffee steamed up around our sleepy faces, “and my brother and I had 103 nets out. We lost every single one. We lost everything—leads, corks, buoys, everything. Did it blow!” Milford’s gravelly and deeply powerful voice resonates as it rises. “That’s the storm that threw rocks right through the kitchen door—boulders like this.” He made a melon-sized oval with his thick hands, hands that have 60

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passed thousands of nets through them. That storm cost him five thousand dollars. Three days before I arrived on that rocky spine of an island, Milford lost six nets to a raging northeaster. That merciless blow ripped away lake trout nets valued at one hundred dollars apiece. But he not only contends with wild weather; unscrupulous sports fishermen have caused trouble too. That spring he had three trout nets cut up by vandals, completely destroyed with all the trout gone. “I wouldn’t have minded if they just took a few fish,” Milford said shrugging his thick shoulders, “but to do that.” Despite these problems, Milford at seventy-two and Myrtle at seventy continue in their life’s work. Dressed trout pay seventy-five cents a pound, and besides, fishing is their art. “You have to keep going,” Milford explains, “even if it hurts a little.” The weather was holding, so we decided to get going. We walked down the trail past all the beautiful fisherman’s gear that always accumulates around their operations—old paint-peeled boats; gray net reels, unused since the advent of nylon nets that don’t require cleaning and drying like the now defunct cotton and linen nets; fish boxes strewn at confused angles; net buoys stacked like long cordwood; old nets piled in tangled heaps. These objects are statements of action now and long ago. In the boathouse we climbed aboard and roared off. Powered by a four-cylinder Gray engine, the 25-foot boat named Seagull moved nicely. But “sometimes we’ve had to stop ‘picking’ [taking the fish from the nets] and leave. This old gas boat’s getting soft. Well, it’s forty-one years old—

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can’t take too much battering,” Milford said as we puttered along, steamy clouds rising from the stern of the open skiff. Myrtle, pensive and watchful, sat in the bow writing a letter while Milford steered. Although I didn’t speak much with Myrtle—she preferred Milford to tell about their life—she impressed me with her quiet strength, her love for Milford. Later on, Milford would tell me a story about courting Myrtle. “I used to make trips from Rock Harbor to Washington Harbor with the old gas boat we had—two lung engine in it. And my dad said, ‘You’re crazy to go all that way.’ I’d make two or three trips every summer to visit Myrtle with that boat. Dad thought I was nuts. That didn’t matter to me; you know how that goes. You bet. So one time this here Bill Lively, the game warden, he was coming from Washington Harbor with his putt-putt, him and his wife. And I stopped and talked with him awhile. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you better turn back. Myrtle’s got the measles.’ He thought he was going to scare me back. I said measles or no measles I’m gonna go see her. Nope, I kept going. She didn’t have the measles, she had broken out from black flies that bit her.” Smiling broadly now, he explains their relationship this way: “She’s an old girl, but I love her.” We all had reason to smile. The predicted gale had not come, only a slight chop from the west. I’ve seen Lake Superior’s enormous storms: they’re menacing. Standing on a shoreline watching whitecaps explode upon immovable cliffs is awe-inspiring and awful. There is a continued growling sound, an upheaval, as wind scorches the tortured trees. A murderous squall raises the waves to clout the land like a heavyweight’s fist knocking an opponent silly.

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Today, thoughts of storms were forgotten. It was sparkling and sunny, the water gleaming as if part of the sun had shattered and sprinkled on the water. We rocked along to a place called Five–Finger Bay, three miles away from their home. As we moved along through the rocky channels and past the lichen-stained rocks, Milford explained how it was to be a commercial fisherman years ago. He used to run a 50-foot, diesel-powered tug called the Jeffries. “In a good day of fishing we’d get a ton, a ton and a half of siskiwits [a fat deepwater lake trout].” Leaving at about four in the morning, they’d return at four in the afternoon and get out of the fish house, where they’d clean and ice the fish, by nine or ten at night. “Then six or seven hours of sleep and back on the lake again.” He once had two hundred nets out, each five hundred feet long, that were set in deep water. These would be set in “gangs,” which are comprised of any number of nets tied together and marked by a buoy on each end of the long chain. Milford informed me, “We used to catch fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred pounds of trout. This is piddling compared to then.” He also told me a more humorous story about another fisherman’s “big catch.” “Old George Beaudry. He was a Frenchman—beard way down to here [below his chest]. He caught a lot of fish. Never seen a man with such long fingers. My god, they were long, terribly long fingers. And his thumbs too—way out. He was the fish packer on the steamer America. And they had cars full of ice on it. They’d hold two ton of trout. Each car had a layer of trout, a layer of ice, layer of trout, layer of ice. Beaudry would estimate

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how much the fish-boxes would weigh. There was a story, I don’t know how true it was, but they claim it is: George had a habit of calling out the weight of fish being loaded to the man making out receipts. ‘Seven hundred pounds, boxes and all! Three hundred pounds, boxes and all!’ So there were a bunch of tourists—a lot of tourists out there at that time—and one of them wanted to be weighed. And she was a big fat woman, and George hollered out, ‘two hundred pounds, box and all!’ Everybody just started roaring.” When trout season was closed, normally in October, herring were fished extensively. “We caught two hundred barrels of herring in a season,” Milford said as we approached a buoy, “and once we got twenty-four kegs in one day. You bet. It was a big operation, not like now.” Now, Milford sets about ten nets in scattered locations about the shallow reefs. In the fall the trout go there to spawn, but midsummer is a listless time for this kind of bottom fishing. Yet, when fishing was good, results were nearly fantastic. He and his brother caught sixty-five hundred pounds of trout in one lift off of McCormick Reef, a traditional spawning ground. Other fishermen were just as lucky. Up to 150 commercial fishermen used to fish from Isle Royale. Now, Milford and Myrtle are the last of the oldtimers, although two widely separated younger fishermen also have permits to fish. Fishing used to be fantastic; then came the lamprey. Many sportsmen believe that the commercial fishermen annihilated the trout in the late ’50s. That’s not correct. During that time the bloodsucking lamprey descended upon the Lake Superior lake trout population. Trout thinned to such an extent that, in 1959, Milford caught only one whitefish

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and one trout on fifteen nets. And at the northeast end of the island near Blake’s Point, Milford saw tons of lampreyscarred trout littering the bottom. “It was all white with them.” It’s some proof that fishermen were not the cause of the widespread die-off. “I thought trout fishing was done for,” Milford said. But in the mid ’60s, after the successful stocking of lake trout, though not on Isle Royale, and a lamprey control program on infested streams, the trout came back. Now, “it’s as good as ever, about the same per net as when we first came to Crystal Cove in 1956.” Still, a small quota system shackles any serious attempt at harvesting the abundant trout. Milford and Myrtle’s quota are only fifteen hundred trout, which they can catch easily. This limitation is their main complaint about present-day rules. One year, tiring of the routine of fishing and wanting to try something new, Milford hired out as a guide to a photographer and his wife. It was not a plush job. “I rode a moose one time; that was on Lake Ritchie. Dr. Oastler wanted to give me fifty dollars to do it. He kept on for several days. ‘You’re chicken. You’re chicken. You’re not going to do it.’ So I got disgusted and said, ‘Well, by golly, I’m going to try it.’ So we paddled up to this bull moose. He must’ve been three or four years old. He wasn’t full grown yet, but he was big enough. We got up right alongside of him, and I got on him from the canoe. He was swimming as fast as he could, but we could easily catch him. And I hopped on him, so he headed for shore. I had to lie right flat on him, because he could get his hind legs up so doggone high he would’ve touched mine if I was riding him like a horse. I was worried. Lying on my stomach, I grabbed him

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by the antlers. And boy, I was wondering how this was going to work out when he got on shore so that his feet could touch the bottom. I had to make sure that I got off before that happened. And I did. I was on him for about ten minutes, and that was long enough. So I slid off, and I was afraid of what was going to happen. I slid right back and gave him a little shove so he wouldn’t touch me with those hind legs. By golly, that moose, he kept for shore. It wasn’t far until he touched the bottom. Then he stopped. And, oh boy, I thought. Now what’s going to happen? That doggone Dr. Oastler was off quite a ways. He should’ve been closer. Wow, I didn’t feel so hot right then for a minute or two. So I started swimming for the canoe, but he didn’t follow. Then getting in the canoe was a job. Was that ever a circus! You can’t get in over the side, but I finally got in over the end. I was a crazy ragged thing. I thought I was going to rip my sock, but I got in. And then he was satisfied. He got his picture, and I got my fifty bucks!” By then we’d reached the buoy, and Milford pulled the net aboard. While he pulls the net by hand, Myrtle stands with the oars, keeping the boat in place, rowing expertly to Milford’s commands. “Move her a little off.” Then a little while later when the net became too tight, “now straight back.” Myrtle smiled. “This keeps me in pretty good shape.” While other women her age are playing bingo or riding in elevators, Myrtle keeps on going—a full partner with Milford. Every time a trout came aboard, Milford clubbed it sharply on the head with a gaff-hook handle. A squirming trout’s sharp teeth can and do slices their fingers, leaving a bloody line. Ten pounders, twelve pounders, and finally

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a fat twenty-five pounder Milford called a “cow” were pulled over the gunwale. This was the largest for the season, but his all-time record trout was a massive fifty-four pounder. The operation went smoothly. High above mare’s tails brushed the sky, and at the horizon a huge freighter cruised lazily toward Thunder Bay, Canada. There were no other boats in sight, just the persistent seagulls that swooped watchfully near, hoping for a chance to dive-bomb an injured trout. To keep them away, some fishermen, who share many similarities with farmers, used to drag dead, salt-stuffed seagulls behind their boats to scare away the crying scavengers. Our seagulls needed no such scare tactics, and we were getting a good haul. It wasn’t always so smooth. While fishing hook-lines one spring in a heavy sea, a fishhook speared Milford, pushing right through his thumb. Trying to free himself, he tumbled overboard. “I know lots of fellows who aren’t here now,” he says. Luckily he was able to drag himself back. He cut the barbs off and pulled the shank through. Another time, Milford accidentally buried the gaff-hook into his head, ripping his scalp down nearly to his face. Once he almost drowned. “Drowning’s an easy death. I know that,” Milford says. “I was pulling the stern line, trying to jump on the dock. It was icy, and I slipped—got underneath the boat. I was about mid-ship when they found me underneath. I was bluer than a mackerel. I can’t remember much. I just saw white. But there was no pain.” Today death was only a bad dream; storms a forgotten nightmare. Fishing was good, and the rest of the world did not exist. We were immersed in the moment.

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In about two hours we were finished. We caught fortyone trout from three 420-foot nets. Later, they would dress out to 330 pounds—a good lift for late September, the peak of the season. Though Milford quickly added. “We used to catch fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred pounds of trout— we didn’t even use boxes. This is piddling compared to then.” But the per net average was about the same. We couldn’t lift any more nets because we had to hurry back to their place to catch the Voyageur. The Johnsons had to prepare the fish to be loaded onto the boat. Starting homeward, we put metal tags required by state law for record purposes through the trout’s mouths. When we’d finished, we were silent, letting the crisp blue sky and healthy air stream into our thoughts. Being on a fishing boat, on any working fisherman’s boat, is much different than riding a pleasure boat. There’s a feeling of purpose, a feeling of being closer to the clever touch of nature. Small events become more meaningful. “Mackerel skies and mare’s tails,” I heard Milford say as he peered upward, “wind tomorrow.” I was lost in my own analyzing as the Seagull wandered back into the deep harbor into its convenient stall in the combination boat/fish house. In the fish house, the ritual of preparing the fish began. As Milford cleaned and put fifty pounds of trout into each box, Myrtle measured them and took some scale samples for the DNR. The giant twenty-five pounder measured three feet long. She entered all this information onto a form sheet. While they did this I helped out by spreading ice on the fish and nailing on wooden covers. Ice is a terrible problem.

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By the time it’s loaded on the Minnesota shoreline and shipped to Milford, “it’s almost like mush. About a third of it is melted.” We finished this procedure with a half hour to spare. Roy Oberg cruised in and docked up. Eggs, mail, and block ice were unloaded. I helped lift the sixteen boxes from three days of fishing over the rail. The Voyageur sped off for Rock Harbor where it would spend the night. We washed off the floor with bucketfuls of water then, satisfied, strolled up the path: another day completed. Milford and Myrtle had been gracious and extremely helpful, wanting me to see everything and always ready to answer questions. Now there was time for more personal stories, time to listen to the Johnsons mull over their island life. We sat at the kitchen table as Myrtle prepared supper, her work still not done. I want to hear more about her. Milford has an immediate acceptance of people; he is talkative and interested in his visitors. Myrtle is shy and watchful at first. It takes a little longer to get to know her, but when you do, there’s a depth of intelligence and warmth that isn’t immediately apparent. That’s because she’s a patient listener. Some say, good naturedly, that with Milford around she has to be. Myrtle doesn’t mind. She’ll listen to a conversation for a long time before adding a comment. And cook! On my visits I ate meatballs with potatoes, freshly baked whitefish, cakes, cookies, and a variety of other desserts. If I had eaten everything that was offered, I’d be a contender in a Minnesota Fats look-alike contest. Coffee was also a constant companion. In the middle of a discussion about old-time fishermen with Milford, laughing,

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I’d look down to find my cup, emptied three seconds previously, filled with steaming coffee. Although she’s proficient at it, homemaking is not her only job. For twenty-five years, since their children have grown, she’s helped Milford fish—rowing, cleaning fish, and sharing the often painful work. One of these fishing trips nearly killed her. In 1965, fishing alone with Milford, she reached down to turn a valve under the floorboards. As she leaned over, her plastic sleeve got caught in the spinning propeller shaft. “I don’t remember a thing,” she said, eyes unblinking. All the clothes from the waist up were stripped from her, the curlers were shaken from her hair, and she was jerked so viciously that she blacked out. When Milford grabbed her, her ear dropped down on his shoulder, dangling by a long bloody thread. Quick plane connections brought her to the hospital in Hancock fifty miles away. “You’ll need plastic surgery,” the doctor said after sewing the ear back on. “And you might as well accept that your arm will be stiff.” Myrtle was not alarmed. “I’ll let nature handle it,” she told him. Ten days later she was back on the island. Ten weeks later she was back by Milford’s side, fishing again. Once while traveling fifty miles an hour down a highway, she opened an old Plymouth car door—the kind that open the opposite way from today’s cars—to let her sick son vomit. Whoosh! The wind yanked her out. “I looked out the rearview mirror and saw her tumbling,” Milford said, “then she got up.” “Oh, I only skinned my knee,” Myrtle said matter-offactly. She was six months pregnant at the time.

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There is no question that Myrtle is tough. Once a kerosene stove exploded at their home on Star Island. She happened to be mending nets outside when it happened. Along with another woman and some children they managed to put it out, but she was blackened with soot and all wet when she met Milford at the dock that evening. Still another time, a gas stove was leaking in their Two Harbors, Minnesota, home. Myrtle went to light it and luckily happened to be standing to the side when it blew. There was a loud explosion and many windows were blown out, but she was uninjured. “I’ve got nine lives—but I’m using them up pretty quick.” Milford, though a little tired, laughed. Memories started to leap from him like burning maple leaves strewn by a northeaster. One colorful story he told concerned a fellow fisherman, his brother-in-law Pete Edisen, who was visiting a girlfriend. While Pete was away, Milford and another culprit turned over Pete’s skiff and hammered a spike into the keel at about the center of the boat. Then they tied a heavy rock to a short piece of rope and attached this to the spike, so that when in the water, the rock would hang from the boat without touching it. They put the skiff back into the water and waited. When Pete tried to row home a few hours later, the swinging, pendulum-like rock prevented any progress. A fisherman’s language can be quite explicit. Milford didn’t go into detail. “Here was Pete, trying and trying to row for a long time—he couldn’t move.” Even now a smile swept across Milford’s face. Relaxed, with the ever-present coffee before us, we ate a magnificent dinner of whitefish and potatoes. “Put a

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whitefish and a trout on the dock when a mink’s around, and he’ll take the whitefish,” Milford said between bites. “I once had boxes of lake trout and one box of whitefish piled up and iced, ready to be loaded onto the boat. That mink chewed a hole in the side and took away a hundred pounds of whitefish. In four days. You bet.” I ate a privileged meal. Looking across the table at that big man with the perceptive eyes, I remembered another story he once told me: “I was with Dad picking herring in the fall. And we’d be still, then roll, then okay, then roll again—talk about get sick! And throw up. And I begged him to take me to shore. He never would. He’d just say, ‘go up in the bow and lay down. You’ll never make a fisherman. You’ll never make a fisherman!’” Milford looked at me knowingly. He didn’t have to prove anything now. Now, the fish were cleaned and packed, nets reset and ready for tomorrow. Kerosene lamps were lit, shadows prancing about the beams. The fruitful day was over. And Milford Johnson, durable Milford Johnson, was still a commercial fisherman. “Yeah, by God,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “it’s some life.” Milford The first time I’d visited the Johnsons on Amygdaloid turned out to be an evening of magic. A young fisherman who’d fished for Milford a few years back was visiting with some friends. Spontaneously, a little party started. Five men sat around a table as the kerosene lamp glowed orange, shooting off huge shadows on the walls and the hewedbeam ceiling of the cabin.

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Milford was speaking, spinning intricate tales in his grizzly bear voice. We younger folk listened, not only out of respect but also with fascination. The orange glow chiseled the high points of Milford’s thick, overly built features. We poured out some brandy all around, and he began. “I was three months old when they first brought me out here, eight years old when I started helping dad. He’d pull the nets into the skiff, come into the dock, and he’d sit on the dock and pull them across a platform. My brother and I went down into the skiff and picked off the pile whatever we could get a hold of. And cold! There was night ice in the nets, skim ice, but we had to help. Then we had to learn how to salt in kegs. And we were so short he had to make a platform for us to stand on. A hundred pound keg was just about so high,” he motioned level with his big hand. “And we’d salt those ten kegs as little as we were. “We had a hired man that had a cork leg. Carl Gilbertson, old man Gilbertson. Yeah, peg leg Gilbertson. He used to scare us kids. He’d take some shingle nails on the Fourth of July when he was feeling pretty good, take a hammer and drive them right into his leg. And we would holler and run up to mother and say, ‘Boy, he pounded those nails right into his leg, Ma. Right through the clothes and all.’ So we tried it, pressing a nail into our legs. Oh boy! We wondered how he did it. Anyway, a couple of years later, Fourth of July, and he had a helluva hangover. Ma had breakfast about nine, not too early because everyone was pretty well shot. Sure. And Ma asked me to call him for breakfast. He lived in a little log cabin right behind Pete’s [Edisen] house. When I opened the door, oh boy, there was

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a leg lying on the floor. Wow! Did I get out of there in a hurry. Run down to Ma and I said, ‘Gilbertson’s leg is laying on the floor.’ And she started laughing, you know. From then on we knew. He was with Dad for many years. He was a faithful old rascal.” Milford’s powerful hands, big brawny tools, cut the air in appropriate patterns. Sitting there in that cabin, living that moment, seemed almost too dramatic. But I listened. Nothing else existed but his low gravelly voice and the orangish glow. “We used to stop by the lighthouse,” he continued after refreshments, “and listen to see if a freighter was coming from the west. This time we didn’t hear a sound, so we started off. Well, we ran into one, right alongside of one. We were so close the cook could’ve fed us pancakes. That’s for sure. And we had a hard time to get away from her because the suction from that big boat held us. Boy, we were just about twenty feet from her before we saw her, and it was just like a big island. Cold and pitch black. That’s the way it looked, like a big island, and we could hear the guys on deck hollering. Going pretty fast too. If they would’ve capsized us, it wouldn’t have made any difference. We would’ve been there all winter. We just spun around like a top when we got back to the stern. The night became a blur of voices as I remembered other stories from other times. Laughter and light filled the room and I thought, “God, this is one of those moments, one of those precious events you never forget.” Then I stopped analyzing it, wanting to just be there, sitting at a table, all of us fishermen—young and old. It would be impossible to date that scene—1918? 1938? 1978? Then Milford began

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to tell us a sobering story, a serious story that in the eerie flickering gave me a chilling jolt. On December 7, 1927, the 250-foot ship Kamloops disappeared off of Isle Royale. In 1977, it was found off Twelve O’Clock Point near Todd Harbor. Milford had intimate knowledge of her fate. “It was before Christmas when the Kamloops went down in a snowstorm. Everybody was off the island except that one man, Ralph Anderson. He heard them blowing for about two hours. Ralph was on the south side, right across from Caribou Island, and he heard it blowing. You bet. “He didn’t know, of course, where it really was. I don’t know if he could’ve done anything, but I suppose he could’ve snowshoed over—brought matches, food, and stuff. But his food would’ve only lasted for a week, and they would’ve all been without grub. No radio either. But he didn’t have any idea where it was, so he stayed put, all alone like that. So, they all perished. John Linklater, the old Indian, found them the next spring. And he asked me to go and help him. And there were seven of them in a lean-to. One was sitting on a log with his storm clothes—that was the mate—just like he was alive. In his hand he had one Life Savers candy pinched tight, still there. They were just like they were petrified, stiff. They weren’t spoiled, except those on the beach that had drowned before they got ashore. They were nothing but rags of course, bones. Boy, I’ll never get over that.” Milford paused to think. “There was a lady cook, and she had a helper, a relation of hers. And of course they never found her. They only found her false teeth. Evidently . . . I don’t know. And the

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young girl. They just found the trunk of her, the rest of her body was gone. Yeah, that was terrible. “We notified the Canadians. They came over with a tug. We just showed them where they were, not far from the shoreline. They had made a lean-to of old logs and brush to crawl into. Just like a teepee but up on an angle.” “How did John Linklater feel?” I asked. “Oh no. He didn’t say much. Pretty quiet. Yeah, that was tough.” Milford became pretty quiet himself. He sat there, thinking it over, then added as an afterthought, “If the boat had gone ashore about 150 yards further west it would’ve set up on level ground above water. They would’ve all been saved.” Who knows what time it was when we finished and went to sleep? The orange glow of morning came soon enough, and that natural lantern took over for ours, radiating life through the entire Superior-surrounded island as we slept on in the midst of no-longer-remembered dreams. Another Night with Milford There were five of us around the beaten kitchen table— five of us and an old whiskey bottle. Milford, like a slowmoving barrel, went to the cupboard and magically produced another fifth. He took the cap off and with practiced dramatic flourish, tossed it into the garbage. He poured a couple of two-finger shots all around. We began. Nothing else existed but that guesthouse room, the flickering lantern and laughter. After a few warm-ups, the two younger guys slowed down. Scott, the youngest, lied down on the couch, just listening. All night he said little, probably wondering why in hell people pour this stuff into

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their babbling mouths. The orangish lantern light shimmered off our faces. It was calm, reassuring. “Oh you’re a nice boy, Beaver,” Milford said. “I love you. You’re like my own son.” Milford poured it out, not ashamed and not afraid to say anything. “And Scott too. You bet.” We drank to this good life as his words flowed through the dark room. The potbellied stove crackled in the corner. “You know the Emperor wrecked because the Captain was drunk. The wheelsman knew they were on the wrong course and told him. But the captain said, ‘You stay on course!’ He was in his quarters. Everyone got drunk. In that case the wheelsman should’ve changed anyway. They didn’t and wrecked.” Milford talked on, staring straight at the person he chose to tell the story to, unblinking. Sometimes he’d wait for the nod of understanding. We drank. “Captain went down with the ship. Hatch-covers came loose. They took on water.” Milford lit a cigarette. “A moose caught us in the outhouse once. It would’ve been a hell of a place to spend the night. He kept us there a long time. October, that’s the worst time. Well, finally I saw his rear turned to the side of the door, so we ran for it—nearly crashed through the screen door. But he still kept us prisoner. He stayed around. Well, I wondered what I should do. So I started up the chainsaw, by God; I could’ve cut his snooze off.” He laughed. “That scared him off. But if I had a thirty-odd-six, I would’ve dropped him right there. What a nuisance!” We drank and laughed, polished off the bottle and polished off some stories. Unremembered words. Laughter. “Another one? Sure! Sure! Why not?” Until he, or Scott, got

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another bottle of something. Another shot and someone decided we should quit. Scott, the only sane individual, led Milford out the door to his bedroom in the main house. I stumbled about ten feet to the beautiful couch and flopped down. Morning came too soon. Summoned to the house, I walked into the kitchen to see Myrtle cooking. Milford emerged slowly from his bedroom to find me slumped on a kitchen chair, poking at pancakes. “We caught a lot of fish last night—at least two tons.” I looked at him and let out a long sigh. “A sailor’s life is hard, hey Pete?” In the bleary-eyed, low-drag morning we were still able to smile.

The McPherrens

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ayne McPherren once climbed the spar of the wrecked steamer Emperor, which smacked into the Canoe Rocks in 1947, to salvage the running lights. Dangling precariously thirty feet above the water, he held on with one hand and managed to free them. That light now hangs on his boathouse at his summer residence on Captain Kidd Island, a typically long island on the northwest shore of Isle Royale. Since 1934, when he and his wife first came to Isle Royale, “Mac” has continued to cruise the shoreline. One year he found a heavy wooden platform dock formerly used in logging operations that had drifted into Little Todd Harbor. He towed it home and jacked it up where it still functions as a sturdy dock. Along its edge is a thirty-foot long hardwood handrail from a very old freighter. Also taken from freighters are many thick wooden hatch-covers that he uses as walkways outside of his four cabins. Wooden palettes and pulpwood logs, along with smaller pieces, were found in the coves and bays. Nearly every home on Isle Royale has a hatch-cover or driftwood timbers used for building or burning. But beachcombing wasn’t the reason the McPherrens first went to Isle Royale. It was because of Marge’s hay fever. 82

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“I came here because I had hay fever and asthma in Omaha—terrible,” Marge explained as we sat in their cabin on the end of the stony island. “Mac would come up early and open up. Then I would come with the children.” Mac would leave for his job as a CPA and join them later on his vacation. It was idyllic but isolated. The first year Marge and the children had no boat and no means of communication. “We didn’t think anything about that,” Marge said, even though her daughter Sally had gotten sick during a storm, though not seriously, and no one had come to check up on them. Ed Anderson, a nearby fisherman, was concerned about the situation. He brought over an old skiff with a big twelve-horse engine and, “with blisters [from pulling the starter cord] I managed to learn to run that motor.” Marge let out a short laugh. Since that first summer they’ve been staying up to two months each year. They were eager to tell me about their beloved Captain Kidd residence. They explained that the fifteen-by-thirty-foot one-room cabin we were in had a beachstone fireplace that was still standing from a burned down lodge when Mac and his father rebuilt the cabin in 1936–1937 as well as a sink, propane stove, refrigerator, and generator-run lights. They used to cook in the fireplace at first, but now, compared to other summer homes, it’s a luxurious place. Why, another building actually had flush toilets! Along with an indoor tub and a washing machine, it was the most elaborate setup outside of park accommodations I’d seen on the island. It wasn’t always so “civilized.” In the past they kept a crate under the dock to refrigerate milk and butter. “We had a lot of sourmilk pancakes,” Marge said, the ever-ready

smile flickering on her face. “And,” Mac added, “the mink would sometimes chew into our milk cartons. The eggs and butter too.” There are no such problems now. Three times a week mail arrives on nearby Amygdaloid Island, and groceries can be ordered from Roy Oberg. “Roy is so great,” Marge said, “because if he sees a moose swimming in the water, he’ll alert everybody on the boat. And I’ve known him to even take time and circle so they can take pictures of it. He’s done that down in Amygdaloid channel.” Sentiments seem to be the same about Roy all over the island. The McPherrens are well-liked too. Mr. McPherren is a tall and precise gentleman of eighty-one. He presents an air of accuracy—no dramatics or wild gesturing from him.

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Mrs. McPherren, seventy-two, is more outgoing, leaning toward the other end of the teeter-totter. She can get quite involved with her explanations, laughing and letting out emotions. Together they make a charming couple, people who are easy to get along with. Over coffee, they told me about the history of their island. “Mr. and Mrs. Schofield homesteaded this island along with Belle Isle,” Marge said. “And one day she was reading a story about Captain Kidd, so they decided that that would be a good name for this island. At that time the Belle Isle resort was going full-force.” An old ad I’d read concerning the Belle Isle resort run by the Schofields promised a nine-hole golf course. Looking at that tree-ringed campsite in 1978, it seemed impossible. Mac nodded knowingly in that slow and easy manner of his. “It was a mini golf course. There were several little greens around there, but they were sand greens, about as big as half of this room. He [Schofield] had shuffleboard there also.” Marge kept the conversation going when Mac paused to think. “And other games. His wife was awfully good at thinking up games and entertainment for the guests. Mr. Schofield used to have a salt lick down in Pickerel Cove. He had a blind where he’d take his guests, so they’d be guaranteed to see a moose. They had about the same guests every year, and most of them would stay all summer—at least all the hay fever-ites. August through September.” “Was it a lodge or cabins?” I asked. “There were cabins strung all along the shore, from where the dock is all the way up to the first little bay.” “They had an eighty-five-person capacity there,” Mac

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said, “and ran full all summer and through September. They advertised it as a hay fever haven.” The resort closed in 1946, after Mrs. Schofield had passed away and the Isle Royale National Park had started. Housekeeping cabins did remain for a few years longer before they were dismantled by the Park Service. Many of the furnishings were then moved to the only remaining resort at Rock Harbor. “More coffee?” As usual, that tradition was present here. She brought out some cookies too. “Have you developed any of your own recipes?” I asked, biting into the delicious molasses cookie. “She has a reputation,” Mac said. “Good or bad?” Both of them laughed, but Marge told the story about her nephew who once introduced her by saying, “This is my aunt who can make a meal out of nothing.” I believe it. “You learn to improvise quite a bit, to get along with what you have, especially when you get one or two, or six or eight guests unexpectedly.” “Guests don’t come just overnight but sometimes for a week before they leave,” Mac said. “And some people expect to come to this island and buy food.” Marge gave me a they-should-know-better frown. For some reason, the conversation turned to the famous fire of 1936, when eighteen hundred men fought the twomonth blaze. “There was smoke hanging over the whole area like fog. And we had ashes fall on us. Every morning it was just like dust. Ashes all over.” I recalled Pete Edisen telling me a story about that great fire. “I was fighting that fire from beginning to end.

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I came from Siskiwit and went to Chippewa Harbor. The Coast Guard had two boats there, and they wanted me to go in, ‘because there’s some men in there, and you’re acquainted with the area.’ So I went in there and tied up. And we stood there waiting for the men until the paint started to blister on the boat. The fire was going right over us; you could see birch bark going over you just like flaming torches. And we hung on. ‘And how long do you think we can keep this up?’ the lieutenant says. ‘Well, we’re going to stay until the boys come out,’ I says. Then five of them came out, and they wanted to go right away. I says, ‘Yeah, we’ll go when you’re all here.’ And then they counted noses and found that two were missing. The boys got into the boat, because it wasn’t quite so warm there. But outside it was tough. Our faces got scorched. And finally, two of them come out of the woods with handkerchiefs on their mouths—couldn’t hardly see. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘well, now we got them all.’ Later when I brought some hoses into Lake Ritchie, the moose were walking around just like the rest of the guys that were there, like a bunch of zombies. It was really a tough battle. And the boys were tired. The moose walked around there for a while. Then one of them walked right back in the fire, and pretty soon we smelled burnt hair and burning meat. It killed him. He walked right back into the fire.” Though no live fire ever made it to the mainland near their island, it did eventually burn about 20 percent of the main island, cutting a fiery southwest to northeast swath from the Siskiwit campsite to Moskey Basin, and almost to Little Todd Harbor, mysteriously jumping over a ten-mile section in between.

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During one particularly smoky day, the McPherrens, Andersons, Nixons—no relation to the famous—and others were having a picnic at Amygdaloid. A criminal lawyer, a man named Fisher, who kept to himself and was rumored to have connections with “the syndicate,” didn’t know about the gathering. “He was out fishing. He led his own life and didn’t know what was going on. Of course, the smoke was blowing around. When he found that everybody was gone, he thought we had all deserted, left the island.” The Andersons met Fisher heading away from his place in a panic, so they quickly informed him what had happened. “But you know what he had on his boat?” Elna Anderson was reported to have said, “Two cases of toilet paper!” This touched off a spark of memory from Marge. “Fisher was the one that whenever he went out in the evening to the john he’d shoot a couple of shots off.” He did so because he was scared of moose. Gunshots sounded nearly every day, and their absence or frequency gave the surrounding residents, whether they wanted them or not, clues to Mr. Fisher’s intestinal health. Other residents during the McPherrens’ early years included the Clays, Andersons, Nixons, and before them, fishermen such as Scotland, Anderson, and Hill. Fryette and Horner were other names mentioned. Marge talked about the social events they all attended— a regatta in Tobin Harbor and picnics around August fourth when fishing had dropped off a little. Emil Anderson would bring fish for the picnic, and everybody would bring pies and cakes. A special treat was ice cream made by Elna Anderson. During my bantering with Marge, Mac had been sitting back, quietly listening. Now he was ready. “One incident

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I remember quite well that might be of interest to you happened on the Fourth of July, when we had a fishing expedition.” Emil’s helper, Dave Lund, along with Mac and his friend George Dill went trolling. “Emil was having trouble with his water pump, so we had to use a hand bilge pump on the side of the boat. And the floor was bad on his boat, had a loose board in it. It flipped up if you didn’t watch your step. “So we caught fish, played around, came back, and sat by the fire a little while before they left for home.” Mac looked at the birch logs tossing out orange heat. “Emil said, ‘Well, Elna will be worried about me. We better be getting home.’” Water had seeped into the boat while the fishermen were inside, so Dave Lund went to use the hand bilge pump. Just as they were turning in the channel, the loose board flew up and smacked Lund into the water. “Well, Lund kicked off his shoes, and Emil started to back up, but he killed the engine. Here was old Dave out there trying to swim in this ice water.” Mac’s voice lowered. “And he went down.” Emil got back to where Lund was and with a long pike-pole, a pole with a pointed and barbed metal end, twisted Lund’s shirt and drew him in like a giant trout. By that time Lund had gone down for the second time, and it looked fatal. “He was as drowned as a rat could be. We’d gone back from the dock to the cabin when Emil left, then we heard Emil coming back. He came back calling, ‘McPherren!—McPherren!’” Mac’s normally quiet features took on a new, excited form. “I can hear him yet, shouting as he came around. So we all ran down to the dock. We laid Dave down on the dock, and he wasn’t breathing a speck. He was as drowned as could be. But George and I both knew lifesaving methods, so we pumped the water

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out of him and got him to breathing. We carried him up and stretched him before the fire.” Mac nodded slightly toward the fireplace as if he were acknowledging an old friend. “We cooked him in front of that fire. “So we took turns, an hour apiece, sitting up watching over him. He came to about two o’clock in the morning. He says, ‘My God, I’ve been on this lake thirty years. This is the first time I ever fell out of a boat.’” Dave Lund had a bad heart. Still, stubborn as fishermen can be, he was back working the next day, content to be alive and wanting to prove it. We decided to take a look around the premises. They took me up to a rocky outcrop, the highest point from which the surrounding waters could be viewed. From there they can scan to nearly 270 degrees. Canada’s Sleeping Giant, the Three Paps due north, and Passage Island were all visible. At night, freighters lit up like horizontal Christmas trees rumble past. And it is one of the few homes on Isle Royale where you can get an unobstructed look at the sunset. From there, I could see their log buildings, all having a feeling of restful age, of comfort and not the antiseptic suburban atmosphere that covers so many communities. Here houses seem unique, real, not showcases. They don’t have to compete with neighbors. What neighbors? When we started to go back inside, I sighed. “You sure are lucky people to be able to live here.” Mac smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. “I know, I know,” is all he could say. I understood.

Glen Merritt

I

was introduced to Glen Merritt with a joke. Even before I stepped out of the boat at Tobin Harbor, one leg on his dock, he began a story: “Do you have any Cornishmen where you live? Well, did you ever hear of Harry Hicks? ’arry ’icks as the Cornishmen would say. This ’arry ’icks considered himself a good bass singer. He was visiting with his friend Bill one day and telling him about a dream he’d had. ’arry said, ‘hi dreamed hi went to ’eaven and was singing in the ’eavenly choir. There were a thousand sopranos, a thousand haltos, a thousand tenors, a thousand baritones and one bass—me, ’arry ’icks. Saint Peter raised a baton and started us singing, ‘’oly, ’oly, ’oly.’ Then he stopped and rapped the music rack. ‘Mr. ’icks, a little lighter on the bass please.’” There would be no problem talking to Glen Merritt. When I asked him to speak about some of his experiences, he warned me that he’d have to interrupt us to go and meet the Voyageur, just a short island-hop up the harbor to Hotel Island—Minong Island on some maps—where it stopped to deliver mail and groceries. We had a little time before that. Glen started at the beginning of the Merritts’ longtime ties to Isle Royale. His father, Alfred Merritt, came to the island in 1866. “He told 91

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me about how he came into Washington Harbor on the schooner Pierpoint, and there were fishermen there even at that early date. One thousand five hundred empty kegs were unloaded from that Schooner. Five weeks later, they were picked up full. “Then in 1873, he came down to Siskiwit Bay with eleven men to build two miles of road up to the ridge where they [the Island Copper Company] planned to sink a shaft to mine copper. My father said, ‘We worked all summer until after Thanksgiving, and for some reason the boat that was supposed to take us off never showed up.’ It was two hundred miles to Duluth from Siskiwit Bay. So he said, ‘We managed to get a hold of a mackinaw boat. I put my men in there and all of our luggage. Well, we had a mast in it, and we also had two sets of oars. When we got down to Grand Portage it started snowing, getting cold, so we laid there for three days waiting for the weather to clear. When we finally left, we got caught in a snowstorm. One of the men down in the bottom of the boat started praying.’ My father said, ‘I was going to join him, but someone had to steer.’” With difficulty, they made it safely to Duluth. Glen also told about another time when adventuresome Alfred’s schooner sunk outside of Ontonagon, Michigan. He had to jump into a skiff with a rope to try to bring a line ashore. “‘I got into the skiff,’ he said, ‘but it capsized, and I had to swim a long way to shore with a rope in my mouth.’” Despite his attempt, the schooner sank—almost a total loss. “But they salvaged enough off of the rigging to make a few dollars.” Dates, names, and places sparked out of him in a factual barrage. He spoke clearly and easily. Judging from the deep

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timbre of his voice, he could join ’arry ’icks to form half of a barbershop quartet. “Captain Sam Hill and Father went prospecting in 1874. They made several test pits around Isle Royale. Father said that Sam Hill could swear a string of O’s a mile long.” Sam Hill’s reputation for cuss words generated the famous expression, “What in Sam Hill!” in recognition of his legendary ability to cement together a series of creative swear words. Two years later, Alfred Merritt sailed to McCargoe Cove to visit the Minong Mine. Because a sailboat could not maneuver through the reef-fringed mouth of the narrow harbor, supplies had to be rafted to the mine. Glen could have gone on about his father, but I wanted to know more about him. Born in 1894, Glen came to Isle Royale in 1902 with his father and five other children. They camped on the island across from the present site of Merritt Lane campground. It wasn’t until 1908 that land at Isle Royale became available to the public for ten dollars an acre. For eighty dollars the Merritts bought four islands in Tobin Harbor. Later, they bought many other islands around Isle Royale. Then, in 1911, they erected their first home on their island across from Merritt Lane campground. Most summers after that included visits to the island, even though Glen had a busy schedule. He was postmaster in Duluth from 1933 to 1963, when he retired. He also mentioned meeting Will Rogers during the Democratic Convention of 1932 when Glen was elected as delegate to represent Minnesota. Through those years he continued to return to the Chippewa’s “floating island.” I interrupted to remind him about the Voyageur. “Don’t you think we should get going?”

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Glen glanced at his watch, jumped up, and hurried down toward the dock. I tagged along with he and his grandson, Brian. We pushed off in his sixty-year-old rowboat. Old boats have a quality, a feeling of preciseness in the water that many new boats cannot match. This little one was a beauty. “You’re pretty spry for—for an old geezer,” he completed the sentence. When he tugged on the oars, the boat responded crisply. “Isn’t this a nice harbor,” he asked, as we started our mini journey. “Best harbor on Isle Royale.” I heard similar sentiments expressed about almost every other area where people have lived. Isle Royale is a shimmering diamond: it just depends on what face you live on. “Here comes Roy now, Grandpa!” Brian yelled. A faint, rumbling growl danced down the water. “Okay.” Glen seemed unfazed, even though we were directly in the Voyageur’s predicted path. But the engine thrum was getting very loud, so Glen sped up the tempo. To our right Art Mattson, long-time commercial fisherman and friend of the Merritts, was navigating his skiff across the narrow channel. I could only wonder about the island’s rejuvenating effects—here were two men in their eighties, easily gliding their boats along with hardly an extra breath. When we were almost to the middle of the waterway, we heard the Voyageur’s toot. We hurriedly curved around the old pilings, tied up, and just managed to scamper across the dock to receive the Voyageur’s line in time. Curious passengers lined the rails. They saw a man 5 feet 10½ inches tall, dressed in shorts and wearing an odd straw hat adorned with seagull feathers, looking back at them.

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“Wah-hooo!” is what I think Glen yelled in his traditional greeting. “This is Tobin Harbor,” Glen informed them. “You’re in the best harbor on the island.” Whimsical smiles formed on some faces when he repeated this information for those who might not have heard. “Tobin Harbor—best harbor on Isle Royale.” Deckhand Rick Anderson handed over some mail and groceries—cottage cheese for Glen—while Roy Oberg poked out of the pilothouse for the customary exchange of pleasantries. “Do you have any mail going?” Roy asked, probably for the ten thousandth time in his career. “No, no.” The stop took only a few minutes. Lines were quickly hauled in, and the Voyageur sped off down the water-road, bound for her overnight stay in Rock Harbor. Art Mattson, who had been silently waiting, retrieved his mail and wasted no time in leaving. After a brief introductory handshake, he climbed down into his boat. He seemed to be an inward-dwelling, hard-to-know man. You often see him rowing down the harbor at dawn, a solitary silhouette going out to troll. Even though he was retired, a lifelong morning ceremony is a hard habit to stop. As Art rowed away, I asked Glen about him. “Can you tell me what you know about Art Mattson?” “Art Mattson was born in 1897. I think he came down here as a baby in his mother’s arms. His father, Louie Mattson, had been fishing here.” Art, along with his brother, soon learned the art of commercial fishing. There should be a better name; commercial has such a negative connotation, making it sound as if fishermen had concern only for

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money, for exploitation. No, most fishermen I’ve met are hardworking and caring individuals. Art, Glen told me, was no exception. Even in retirement, Art was still the harbor’s handyman just as he’d been for most of his life. He has built docks, repaired roofs, and done any carpentry work asked of him. And though he is not open with strangers, if he’s your friend, he remains one. That day I was a stranger. Glen was talking again. “Art’s wife, Inez, was a fisherman too. She fished with her father in French River near Duluth. In fact, I stopped there in 1945. I drove to his home in French River. The old man was sitting outside, so I spoke to him. ‘I bring greetings from your daughter Inez on Isle Royale.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘she was the best man I ever had here.’” Our business on the dock done, we lowered ourselves back into the rowboat. As he rowed, he began to cast off facts as if he’d pushed a tape recorder button in his head. “That island,” he waved his arm toward the island we’d just left, “we call Hotel Island because it used to have a hotel on it—the Minong Lodge. Some people call it Smith Island or Minong Island. Smith came here in 1912. He bought the island from a saloonkeeper by the name of Martini; that’s a good name for a saloonkeeper. Gus Mattson had it originally when he built sleeping cottages in 1902.” Glen remembered other resorts that many of today’s Isle Royale visitors have never heard of. “About 1915, Fred Schofield bought Fish Island [on the north shore] and renamed it Belle Isle. And he built a resort there. He’d travel the boat [America] in the summertime back and forth from Duluth to Isle Royale as a business venture. He was a good

salesman, and he’d talk the people into getting off at Belle Isle.” Competition for tourists was fierce, but since the America stopped at Belle Isle first, Fred Schofield, a good “front man,” sometimes got most of the tired visitors to stop. That resort ran until 1946. Glen mentioned another “resort” that I had heard nothing about. “Eric Johnson started fishing at Davidson’s Island in the early 1900s. He turned his fishing station into a hotel [called Tourist’s Home]. He was the one who said, ‘Vell, I tink I go build myself a ten-by-twelve.’ He built a string of little ten-by-twelve sleeping cottages along the shore.”

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Almost back to the Merritts’ Island, we passed some baby mergansers, splashing in the sun. They made their own tiny boatlike wake. Glen soon had the rowboat back to the dock, completing the mailboat meeting ritual that is such a main event in the islanders’ lives. Then we went up to the brick-lined open fire. From that vantage point, you could see water on three sides—another remarkable view. We sat back and relaxed. As the sun hid behind green hills, a loon sounded a lone wolflike cry from far away. Still fainter the Passage Island lighthouse sounded its own soothing message. I wondered how many people in this harbor had once enjoyed this tranquility. Birch bark crackled and smoke spiraled above us. Although Glen didn’t know exactly, he guessed that there were at least forty and possibly up to seventy-five people who once lived in Tobin Harbor. He counted twenty-five people in three families. Tobin Harbor, with the possible exception of Washington Harbor, was probably the most populated area on Isle Royale up until the Depression. In the late 1800s, three town sites at Island Mine, McCargoe Cove, and Washington Harbor were built to accommodate miners, but low or zero profits caused these towns to be abandoned. “What’s on that hat?” I finally blurted out. That weird straw contraption had been bothering me. He took it off. “That’s a fish, that’s a hook, that’s a bumblebee, here’s Nixon. There’s a button here says, ‘What’s wrong with me? Must be something wrong with me.’” He laughed. I shook my head. Here was a living character of the island. Others like Cap Francis, bushy Cap Hart, and Linklater existed before him, remembered now by only a handful.

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Yet, I believed there’s little worry of Glen Merritt’s image fading. That seagull-feathered ambassador for Tobin Harbor, whooping to the boat, once seen, can hardly be erased. “Captain Hart had a lingo, you know.” Glen was saying. I sat back and listened as the dark spruce blended into the surrounding night.

Grant Merritt

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first met Grant Merritt in Tobin Harbor at camp “Dig Inn.” I was there to see his flamboyant father, a man not noted for long silences. After talking to and photographing Glen, Grant approached me. “Let’s go and get supper.” “What?” He waved for me to follow. “We’ll get a fresh fish.” “Just like that?” No one can be that sure of catching fish, I thought. I’ll have to see this. We took a 16-foot boat and roared up the harbor, past Mattsons’, Kemmers’, Edwards Island, and other places Glen had mentioned. Near Blake’s Point, Grant dropped a line over the side and started trolling. I settled in for a typically long wait. It was a fine warm evening, so it didn’t matter. Within ten minutes, Grant smiled. “There’s one.” And he pulled in a beautiful five-pound native redfin trout. “Perfect!” Before an hour passed, we dined on the freshest fish you can get. I never had a better meal on Isle Royale.

Twenty-nine years later, surrounded by freeways, I met Grant in his law office in Minneapolis. The dichotomy 102

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between the two places couldn’t have been greater. I gazed out of huge glass windows from the fifth floor of steel and glass. The office was not ostentatious. A huge painting of a moose, the symbol of Isle Royale, was behind him. There were a few plaques on the wall and a signed good-bye poster from his days as director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency from 1971 to 1975. “Well, let’s get started.” I turned the tape recorder on. Grant was completely comfortable. I could tell he’d done this before. “Can you tell me about the families who lived on Isle Royale from Tobin Harbor?” In his deeply resonant voice, he recited his knowledge of people and places on Isle Royale. “Edwards Island was named after the Edwards family.” Edwards Island is nineteen acres, the largest in Tobin Harbor. “They’re descended from Jonathon Edwards, a famous pre-revolutionary theologian. They came in the late 1800s. Dr. Morris Edwards used to row and fly-fish for brook trout up and down Tobin Harbor, as far as Blake’s Point and the Palisades. Richard Edwards is a retired professor of art. Son Larry is a professor of geology. His sister Joan is a professor of biology.” Grant also talked about Edwards family connections to J. Pierpont Morgan and John Foster Dulles. “We moved a cabin from Bailey’s island to ours. Banker Bailey was the president of the First National Bank of Saint Paul. He was standing on the dock in the summer of 1929 with my father, waiting for the Winyah to come in. ‘You know Glen, the stock prices have gone too high. The stock of my bank is nine hundred dollars. So I sold it all.’ This was before the stock market crash later that year started the Great Depression.”

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Grant pauses, but not for long. “Then there was Mrs. Kemmer, of course—schoolteacher from St. Paul. The Savage family. They made a lot of money in lumber, I think. Tom, the son, I knew very well. Tom Savage financed student researchers to investigate the Reserve Mining Company. Reserve was polluting Lake Superior at Silver Bay. Those students wrote the book Superior Polluter. “Then there was the Gale family who came in the thirties—just before the Park Service took over.” Tom and Kendra Gale wrote a book entitled Isle Royale: A Photographic History. “An insurance man named How had a tiny island, maybe a third of an acre. Across from How Island is another large island we call Hotel Island. That’s where we went to get the mail. “Moving to the mainland, at the very tip of Scoville Point were the Dasslers. We call it Dassler Point. That’s where the artist-in-residence stays. The original Dassler was a judge from St. Louis. His son was an engineer. “I remember the Dassler family inviting Lou Mattson and me to go over to Copper Harbor in 1948, when we were teenagers.” In a strange reversal from today’s tourists, they went from wild Isle Royale to golf and tour Fort Wilkins. “But what I remember most was coming back. We had fog. We had a compass and a radio direction finder. So we blew the whistle every minute because we were going across the steamship lanes. You couldn’t see one hundred feet, and at that point I was steering.” Suddenly, they saw an ore carrier charging out of the fog Grant whipped the wheel to the south to go past the stern. The freighter’s captain started blowing his horn. It

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was then that they noticed a long log-line trailing behind the freighter, a line used to record the freighter’s speed. They managed to steer clear and eventually made it back to Tobin Harbor. Grant, using his sharp memory, named other owners as he followed the shoreline. “There was Charles Parker Connolly from Rockford, Illinois, who built about forty feet up on a perch. Then Seifert’s—Dr. Sturgis used their place. Sturgis was a PhD, a chemist, but apparently didn’t know the chemistry of Isle Royale’s winds and waves.” Dr. Sturgis had a 16-foot boat with a 100 horsepower engine. After having a lady friend over for dinner he decided to bring her back to Rock Harbor outside of the protective Tobin Harbor. “That was his first mistake. His second mistake was he didn’t have enough gas. And his third mistake was he steered too close to shore.” A series of breaking whitecaps smashed their fiberglass boat into the rocks at Scoville Point. The two had to leap for their lives, Dr. Sturgis’ friend hurting her back in the process. The boat was crushed and sank. “Despite her injury, she was able to walk two miles back to Rock Harbor [on the current nature trail] for help.” “She ultimately sued him,” Grant chuckled. “But Michigan had a guest statute, which simply means that if you go out with someone you assume ordinary negligence. She would have had to prove gross negligence in order to recover. I always thought his mistakes were gross, yet he won the case.” Grant then listed five commercial fishermen, all who lived close together—Andrew Carlson, Art and Emil Anderson, and Art and Ed Mattson. “The Park kicked Art Anderson

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off the island because he was trapping beaver. He was a real character. “Then there was R. J. Snell. I have two [of the] most unforgettable characters: Roy J. Snell and John Voelker.” Grant went on to explain how Snell wrote eighty-five children’s books including two based on Isle Royale. Snell wrote for the famous radio show Jack Armstrong, the AllAmerican Boy. “He lived across from us,” Grant said, handing me a copy of an original manuscript, “and he came to the island about 1929 or ’30. He grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, and went to Wheaton College. It’s an evangelical college—Billy Graham went there. But when he went to Alaska, he became an agnostic; he didn’t last with the religion. The reason I call him an unforgettable character was the way he fished. He had one of the old 16-foot Thompson rowboats. He always rowed this way.” Grant demonstrated how Snell used the unorthodox method of alternating rowing strokes, first one arm, then the other. “He’d go out and row all day and fish. By himself.” “I did go out fishing with him. One day he took me out when I was sixteen years old. And we went to five-foot reef. We hit a school of fish. In half-an-hour we caught fiftyfive pounds of lake trout. I caught the biggest one—seventeen pounds. That’s still the biggest I’ve ever caught. Well, we went around to Blake’s Point—had no luck there— so we decided to have lunch on one of the beaches. Bear in mind I was sixteen, and he was about seventy. He says, ‘Now Grant it’s time to cogitate on the realities of the absolute.’” Grant broke into deep laughter. “I never knew what that meant. Still don’t.”

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Grant’s other unforgettable character was writer John Voelker, who used the pen name Robert Traver. His most well-known work was Anatomy of a Murder. The novel was made into a movie by Otto Preminger and starred Jimmy Stewart, George C. Scott, Lee Remick, and Ben Gazzara. Charles Kuralt of CBS, who interviewed many people for his On the Road series, also called Voelker his most unforgettable character. “In 1970, I got a letter from John Voelker. He understood that I was a lawyer working on the Reserve pollution case. Voelker [a Michigan Supreme Court judge from 1957– 59] said, ‘I’d like to exchange some legal opinions with you, and I want to see if we can’t stop this company from pissing in our lake.’” Grant grinned. “Voelker was a very charismatic character.” The Reserve Mining Company at the time was dumping 67,000 tons of iron ore waste tailings into Lake Superior daily. Bright, unnaturally green water—even miles from the dumpsite—was a common sight off the Silver Bay shoreline. State and federal lawsuits eventually stopped them in 1980. Grant, in his role as director of the PCA was instrumental in winning that long battle. “I tried to get him [Voelker] to be the judge at one of the hearings. I had the power to appoint a judge. But he didn’t like to travel much.” He never even visited Isle Royale. “John lived to be eighty-seven, you know. He died [in 1991] in his jeep, driving down the streets of Ishpeming [Michigan]. He had a heart attack and went into the snow bank. Died right there. That reminds me.” Grant stopped to phone his wife, Marilyn, reminding her to pick up Voelker’s favorite drink—scotch. “Voelker’s drink recipe finishes with this

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final instruction.” Grant looked at the ceiling. “Add whiskey ‘with a charitable Christian heart.’” Grant waited for me to stop laughing. “Now, we didn’t mention Musselman’s, which is a real little island next to ours. And, I forgot Bob Greene on Greene’s island next to ours. We used to go over and listen to his radio. I always coveted his Zenith Oceanic battery operated radio. I still do!” “What about your own family on Isle Royale?” “Grandfather [Alfred] built a beautiful cabin down by Blake’s Point called Camp Comfort.” This was on the original island where Alfred first settled in 1911, “which the Park burned down.” The Park Service had purchased the cabin for $1400, the island for $12.50. In 1956 an overzealous superintendent ordered many structures destroyed, as if that could erase the long human history on Isle Royale. Some families saved their homes by obtaining life leases or temporary use permits. Many simply moved away, unaware, uncaring, or fed up with government bureaucracy. “How many life leases are left?” “There’s five, all in Tobin Harbor: Snell, How, Gale, Edwards, and Connolly.” Grant explained that others, including he and his sister, have special use permits. There were nineteen families still involved around Isle Royale. Alfred bought camp “Dig Inn” in 1915. Before that, Alfred Merritt made history. In 1890, he and four other family members found the first large body of iron ore on Minnesota’s Mesabi Range. They named the place Mountain Iron. At the time, the property was isolated with no way to move the ore to market. So Alfred formed and became president of the Duluth, Missabe & Northern Railroad. In

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this capacity he also directed the construction of Duluth’s first iron ore dock, the world’s largest, in 1893. Due to financial entanglements with the unethical John D. Rockefeller and his organization, the Merritts lost their entire Mesabi mine holdings. Grant even found some incriminating evidence, a letter that showed the Rockefeller organization’s dishonesty. A full and accurate account of this scandal can be read in Land of the Giants, a book written by Don Larson. Since those days, the Merritts have visited the island every summer, and the years have rolled past like waves. Grant’s father, Glen, “went to the great beyond” in 1991. Grant and family continue to visit their island every July. I’m always interested about what these island folk have seen. Every resident has some special memory of encounters with wildlife; Grant had several. During his visits to Isle Royale, he’d been close to one wolf. It happened in 2005. “It was near twilight. We were down around the dock. Royce Yeager of the National Trust for Historic Preservation from Chicago was there. A wolf came out of the woods just west of the Snell cabin chasing a [moose] cow and a calf. That wolf grabbed onto the right flank of the cow. Linda [Grant’s daughter] yelled out, ‘Look at the wolf!’ The cow shook free and, along with her calf, swam close to Merritt’s island. Then, the visitors who rushed down to see scared the moose back to the mainland. Apparently, the wolf was scared too and loped off, abandoning the chase. I didn’t actually see the wolf, but here’s Royce Yeager, first time on the island, and he sees one.” Grant just shook his head. “We do see a lot of moose and some fox. An otter came up on our dock one day. It acted like a zoo animal. Somebody must’ve tamed him. Marilyn got a grape and

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threw it to him. My god, that otter put it on his nose and went bobbing through the water, showing off. He came up and nuzzled our feet. We even gave him trout caviar, but apparently he wasn’t hungry.” That wolf very well could have come from the zoo, or at least it could have been a descendent of some wolves Lou Mattson remembered. “I forgot exactly when, but back in the early 50s somebody in their great wisdom decided to send four wolves from a zoo over to Isle Royale. Once the wolves got here they took them over to Locke Point. They thought it was an out-of-the-way place to turn them loose. But after the wolves heard the sound of people in Tobins within a few hours they came right over. The closest I came to a wolf were these semi-tame ones.” One late July morning a cow and calf wandered onto Merritt’s island. The cow found a pail full of water that was used to clean fish and started to drink. “Oh, she likes that. Yum—tasted good.” But the calf was still trying to nurse and got kicked by the mother. “She was trying to wean him. And we were only about six feet away.” The calf went down to the water, and eventually both ambled away. The next morning, “I had a hunch that they stayed overnight, and there they were. I saw the calf taking a drink—nursing—so I took a picture.” Joan Edwards, who was working on a PhD about moose, told Grant that the picture was the latest known evidence of a moose nursing a calf. “They’re usually weaned much before then.” Lou Mattson had also shared a moose encounter with me. “My mother came back to Tobin’s Harbor to take care of my grandfather who’d been stomped by a moose. There was a moose down by the net reel. So my grandfather went

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down to scare it away before he got his antlers tangled up. The moose went after him! Grandfather was badly hurt, and he survived only by rolling underneath the edge of a log pile. He was laid up for much of the summer. My mother married my father the following year, so that worked out pretty good. The pleasant afternoon wore on. We talked of people we knew, stories of old-timers. But even the most interesting conversations have to end. Finally, the building nearly deserted, we left too. We decided we needed to do further research on John Voelker. It was a brilliant idea. Voelker’s Recipe: • Begin with a sugar cube. • Add bitters—not much—on cube. • Cut thin slices of orange and add with a cherry and ice cubes. • Add whiskey with a charitable Christian heart.

Elizabeth Kemmer—E.K.

B

ursting white water forms a jagged line along the sheer grey rocks northeast of Rock Harbor. Beyond these, turning past Scoville Point and into Tobin Harbor, past the aging cottages and wind-whipped shacks and shanties, you’ll find a fine ol’ gal named Elizabeth Kemmer—“E.K.” as she’s commonly called. “Hi!” I shouted from the boat that brought me on that route to her dock. “I’d like to talk to you!” Emerging from the door, she looked like Mrs. Claus. “Well, come on in!” She yelled. When I stepped into the small home, she seemed a little uneasy. Who was this man barging into her house with a bulging bag of equipment? It didn’t take long for her to get over it. After preliminary explanations as to who I was and what I was doing, I spread out my junk, and she jumped into the details of her background. She’d taught in St. Paul for twenty years and first came to Isle Royale in 1928. She’s made it back every summer to get away from the crazed bustling of the big city. “Believe it or not, I wintered in Hawaii for six years. And in the summer, where do you think I went? Here.” She let out a jolly little laugh. “So you see, I’m a nut. I’m sort of islandcrazy, I guess.” 113

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“Well, I love nuts. Am I allowed to ask when you were born?” “Ohhh! A long time ago.” She started to sing, “Longlong-a-go. . . . When people ask me that I say, ‘I weigh 168.’ Pretend I didn’t hear. That settles it.” Living alone on a small rocky outcrop of land with very few modern conveniences might strike someone to be a tough and lonely life. The tendency for some people, at first glance, is to ask, “What is there to do here?” So I took a first glance and asked her. “I used to chop and saw wood. I made a little shed and did a great deal of carpentry. But I injured my knees [four years before], and now I have to be very careful. I was carrying a big log up on the rocks,” she indicated the sloping rock in front of the house, “and the log and I fell. Arthritis sets in when you have an injury.” I told her about my badly sprained ankle. “Well,” she looked at it, “when you get old, arthritis will set right in there.” She said it straight-faced then burst out laughing. I had to laugh too. “Did you hike at all?” I asked. “There isn’t much of the land here that I didn’t hike. Inland to Monument Rock, Mount Franklin. I would mark the trail with rags as I went along. We picked blueberries, strawberries, thimbleberries, and I still make my own bread.” She told of her many visitors, seventy-six in 1977 who all signed a book she keeps. These include Harbor residents, park personnel, people who work at concessions in Rock Harbor, and tourists. Besides spending time with visitors, she paints, writes letters, and reads. “If I should get lonely, I can go over to the hotel. I know

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the people there.” She also goes to Rock Harbor to see the boat come in, to do her laundry, or to go to the coffee shop. It is a simple life. “I don’t even read many newspapers anymore. They don’t concern me,” she said. I admired her selfcontained, take-it-as-it-comes life. “Did you do anything else with your time before the island became a national park?” “Oh, I used to collect flowers and butterflies and everything that existed. We had a great deal of sociability and ‘come-on-overs.’ We had what we’d call a harbor picnic. Rock Harbor would have it over there one time, and all of us would gather. We’d have regattas and all sorts of races. Or it would occur in Tobin’s Harbor here. But we were very sociable—still are.” One time during World War II when the men were all gone, five of the women went around the island in a boat called the HMS. Mrs. Gale’s son showed her how to start and stop the boat. “Now would you like me to tell you about some of those people and the islands?” she asked. “All right.” She took out a piece of paper and drew the two long lines of islands that split the harbor. She listed the owners, past and present: Edwards, Smith, Green, Newman, Gale, Emerson (reported to be a distant relative of Ralph Waldo), Savage, Pollack, Wheelock, Bailey, Merritt, Musselman, How, Stack, Snell (Roy Snell wrote books for young people, and she heard, was the creator of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy), Mattson, Connolly, Seiffert, Underwood, Dassler, Tallman, Sigismund, and others. “Some were from Omaha, others from St. Paul, Duluth, and St. Louis. For a good many years we were clannish. I didn’t know other people that

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[were] St. Paul/Minneapolis friends until the wartime when we women had to—” Suddenly the sky ranger float plane zoomed almost directly overhead, banking as it swooped toward the mainland. It must’ve reminded her of the present. “Do you want to see the kitchen?” she asked. We walked past her watercolors and into the narrow room. She pushed down on a sturdy-looking hand pump to get water for coffee. In years past she’d just go to the dock and dip up buckets of water. A hand pump is a great convenience. She cooks with a gas stove, while a sixty-year-old Franklin stove is always ready for the unpredictable weather. The whole house was set up simply. In the living room was a reed rocker made in China and other furniture bought from people who’d sold their cottages to the Park Service. Along the wall were five watercolors and further down shelves of old books. In the corner were flowers, vibrant colors erupting from the vase. Although it was small, the room had a feeling of airiness, light flowing in from a series of long windows on two walls. It was one of the finest views from any house on the island that I’d seen. The closeness to water was soothing. With two boats gently jostling alongside the small dock and flowers swaying from a caressing breeze off the water, the feeling of peacefulness encircled me. No TV, telephone, or stereo shattered the serenity. The only things that could interfere are seaplanes, boaters, or maybe a moose. “Have you ever been chased by a moose?” I asked, knowing that some people claimed to have been treed. “No, but a cow once went around and around the cabin looking for her baby.” She smiled to herself. “One summer

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when I arrived, a moose came at nine o’clock, and I could hear a sound that didn’t seem familiar to me. I looked, and he had his nose right up against the kitchen window. Huge nose, enormous one, and his antlers were way up over the roof. So I got up against the window on my side.” She leaned over the sink, pushing her nose up against the glass to show me. “I knew I was safe, and we were just about three inches apart. He left an imprint of moose-breath against the window, and I left it there all summer. His breath was rather thick.” She traced a huge roundish outline on the pane of glass just above the sink. “That was as close as you could get. “Would you like a piece of dill bread? I just baked it this morning.” Slicing it, she explained the main ingredients— minced onion, cottage cheese, and dill seed—and apologized beforehand in case I didn’t like it. She needn’t have worried. Along with a “man-sized” cup of coffee, she sliced off three pieces of that marvelous bread. So with my mouth stuffed with fragrant bread, I asked if I could take her picture. “Oh, I take a terrible picture. I look like a cabbage. Really, you may if you want to.” I posed her in front of her watercolors; then we sat down as I continued to click the camera. Finally, she seemed a little annoyed. Why did I need so many pictures? “Well,” she said, “this is one ordeal I didn’t expect. I should take some of you. Why don’t you sit over here? The light would be better.” We got up and exchanged positions. I suspect she was getting even. E.K. hunched forward and squinted into the camera. I showed her what to press. “Put your cup nearer to your head a little. That’s it—get it up a little

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closer.” She snapped the picture. “Now start drinking.” She clicked it just as I sipped, and she laughed, thoroughly enjoying putting the photographer through the same ordeal. “I had a Kodak box camera that I dropped in the lake. I took it apart, dried it out, put it together, and it worked,” she explained as she handed me a photo album. She has a large stack of them, which is her way of collecting the island’s history. Looking through the albums, we became quiet. We sat there, perfectly comfortable not having to constantly fill the air with words. As she gazed out onto the harbor where boats had been whining their way around all afternoon, one huge cruiser came very close and its binocular-faced passenger zeroed in on the house. A little later the Sky Ranger rumbled overhead again. Even though these intrusions are infrequent, I see why late summer and fall are her favorite times, a quiet interlude before departure. Besides the photo album that I’d been browsing through, she keeps a small brown book that contains fragments of the island’s history told to her by past and current residents. She picked it up and started reading in that same deliberate unwavering voice: “Siskiwit Mine, 1870. They had mail by dogsled [and] a church, school, store, houses, and courthouse. It was the county seat of Isle Royale county. They had a fire in 1875. There was a settlement at McCargoe Cove in 1875 [of] seventy men and families.” She turned a page. “Gus Mattson started the hotel on Hotel, also called Minong, Island in 1891. He was a fisherman. They had a hundred guests in 1892. . . . Davidson’s Island, 1890. A fisherman had a place for guests.” She had many pages of jottings.

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E.K. put the book down and told about a longtime friend who won’t be back. “On March ninth I received word that she’d arrive in July, but on March nineteenth I got word that she had died. So I’m very sad about that.” She stated it clearly, with no hint of emotion, but you could sense the underlying sadness. “And she was just going to retire and have a happy life.” E.K.’s old friends are becoming scarcer. To visit her island friends she travels about in a 14-foot aluminum boat that has a 7 ½ horsepower engine. “I’ll tell you what,” she said after checking the time. We’d been talking for nearly three hours. “We could go over to the mail boat in my boat, but the motor isn’t working. Trouble is, too, there’s no definite time it’ll be here. It’ll come 4:30 to 8:00; you’ll never know until it comes around the corner.” Roy Oberg on the Voyageur delivers the mail to Hotel Island, the site of the former Smith Lodge, three times a week. At that moment her tranquil lifestyle seemed very appealing and romantic. I wanted to stay there indefinitely, but from down the harbor a small outboard motor buzzed busily, heading toward us. It was my ride. E.K. accompanied me to the dock. Then, almost as if she had planned it, a hiker came around the house, her high voice calling, “Miss Kemmer? Miss Kemmer?” The young girl smiled at young Miss Kemmer. “I just walked from Rock Harbor,” she said. E.K.’s attention shifted to this new bright-eyed visitor as I clambered into the boat. “Oh, you’re a toughie,” E.K. told her. Arm in arm, they walked up the wind-burnt rocks.

Westy and Bylo Farmer “

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t seems as though everybody who drew their spiritual nourishment from Isle Royale’s early days has become an achiever,” Weston Farmer said as he leaned back and looked out over Lake Superior from his home a half-mile down the shore from Rock Harbor Lodge. “Hugo Johnson down at Star Island became a vice president of Chevrolet. Our number three son is chief engineer for International Harvester. Milford and Myrtle Johnson’s boy, Bobby, is the skipper of the coastal ferry Matanuska in Alaska. . . . Others are professors and executives.” Westy didn’t include himself, but he is one of the best examples of his statement. Westy is a writer, engineer, and talented naval architect. In 1919, at the age of sixteen, he sold his first engineering article to a magazine. “It was a story about propellers—technical stuff. At that time I had to sell eggs for pocket money. Well, I quietly sent the story off, and about three weeks later I opened up an envelope, and there was a thirty-five dollar check in it. That would equal the profit of selling about thirty-five cases of eggs.” “Keep that kid writing,” all the aunts and uncles he’d besieged to buy eggs told his mother. He did keep writing. Westy went on to start Modern Mechanics and Inventions, now Mechanics Ilustrated, in April 1928. He was the editor 121

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for five years. Though he kept writing on marine matters, his main interest shifted to designing and flying light airplanes. Even today, one of the most popular home-built plane designs is one he published—the Pietenpol monoplane. Later, Walt Disney used a photomechanical technique Westy developed for making the animated movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He is well-known as a naval architect. Boats designed by him are being used all around the world, yet he had a simple beginning in that field. “I used to go to bed in various cottages around our lodge,” Westy said with a growing smile. “At the head of my bed was a pencil—I drew boats on the walls. Ha! I finally ran out of cottages.” To this day there are rumored to be still visible “designs” drawn by an energetic six-year-old. On the wall behind him was a photograph of a sailboat he’d designed. She was bent to the wind with sails riding above the surf, partial evidence of his hardworking life. I thought then that a man with this background, with seventyfour summers of tenure on the island, must have thoughts as vivid as a sunrise in September. I wasn’t disappointed. “I’ll give you my spiel,” Westy said, lighting a cigarette with sturdy hands that, like so many Isle Royale people, might have pulled nets instead of operated instruments of precision. But with all talented people it’s a question of focus and where they put their attention. Westy focused in on the past. I listened along with his wife, Bylo, who’d been preparing the inevitable coffee. “My grandfather Kneut Kneutson came here and built cottages at Snug Harbor in 1901. When he had first heard about the legend of Angelique and Charlie Mott, he had

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sailed down to see Mott Island.” Kneutson got caught in a storm and was blown into the bay he named Snug Harbor, the harbor that the present-day lodge dining room overlooks. “The wind was increasing,” Kneutson wrote, “and the heavy wind coming through the Smithwick Channel came near to being my undoing, filling my little boat with a quantity of water that made it too logy for sailing. Nor had I any opportunity for bailing. . . . I headed for the mainland, intending to strike some favorable spot and jump for it, expecting to lose the boat.” To his “great surprise” Kneutson sailed into the calm water of Snug Harbor, safe from the clutching northeast wind. Because Kneutson found complete relief for his hay fever there, he decided to build a summer home at Snug Harbor. The Homestead Act required people to occupy land for six months a year or to make one hundred dollar per annum improvements for every forty acres, so Kneutson made a deal with friends to construct several cottages and then take turns occupying them for at least two weeks a year. Unknowingly, the roots for a lodge had begun. Soon Kneutson and family had a log dining room and private cottages. He called it Park Place. “It was a family enterprise that grew.” Westy explained how Kneutson joined other entrepreneurs around the island who catered to tourists. “All the early resort places were muscle camps—you had to have muscle. And the best hosts got the most guests, what we called ‘stayers and payers.’ So there was a clique or coterie that would come every summer for years.” Competition for these visitors was fierce. An old ad about “picturesque” Washington Harbor boasted that “the

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remarkable clearness of the water makes it possible to see bottom at forty-five feet.” They promised that any guest would be able to see moose and caribou as well as “red deer and bear.” There were no deer or bear: at least the methods of the advertising business haven’t changed. Competition was so fierce that a few harmless squabbles ensued. Westy was not forthcoming about the graphic details. The owners of the various resorts “got along like snarling bulldogs,” Westy said in his resonant and clear voice. “But we were the only outfit with modern improvements,” he stated, showing his pride in his mother’s, Mrs. Matt Farmer, Rock Harbor Lodge. Kneutson had turned Park Place over to his daughter in 1922, and she’d renamed it Rock Harbor Lodge. “In 1922 we put up a wireless in the corner of the dining room, and we got Schenectady. So Fred Schofield [from Belle Isle] loaded up thirty people, and they came around and listened to it. Everybody went out into the new guest house and flushed the toilets. Biggest deal on Isle Royale!” Westy puffed out some smoke and smiled, intelligent eyes glowing. “There’re some funny stories about the old nine-holers that used to be out back. Mrs. Tooker was involved with one of them. There was a momma and a papa out there. They were dandies—nine-holers with two boards and a little canvas screen between each of the holes for privacy. I remember we were standing out front near the birch trees and my uncle, Earl Kneutson, came sailing around the corner of the dining room one day and hollered to my granddad, ‘Mrs. Tooker’s fallen into the can, and she’s got a nail in her tail.’” Chuckling, Westy revealed the scene of a plump woman squatting jack-knifed in an

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aroma-filled hole. “She was a big woman—split the boards apparently and folded up in the can. They pulled her out, caught in ‘fragrant delecto!’” Westy’s deep voice cracked with laughter. “That’s been one of the tales around here for years.” I wondered if he had made an intentional pun. “Toss me a smoke, would you please, Bylo?” Westy asked. “Thanks.” Bylo had been quite quiet. Now, apparently having heard enough and now at ease, she told what she remembered about the resort. “The resort was like a marine dude ranch. It was run by the whole family. In the dining room we had long tables instead of all the little separate tables where people eat by themselves.” “When guests came,” Westy added, “Mother would make little birch bark napkin rings with their names on them. My sisters, Theresa and Edith, would help.” Bylo nodded. “And she’d always have candles and wildflowers on the table—very attractive. But guests joined in the things they did too. The kitchen had wood ranges, and when the men would go out logging [along the shore for driftwood] half the guests would go along with them. We’d put up a big lunch—baked beans and sandwiches, fruit, and cookies. Then we’d have a great big coffeepot over our beach fire. Usually there’d be a fisherman along, and we’d get fried trout for lunch. We thought that was more fun.” Westy summarized it: “She [Mrs. Matt Farmer] gave them a cottage, three square meals a day, and a rowboat for $28.50 a week. How could you lose? “I suppose I’ve had the loveliest boyhood any fellow could want. Gramps Kneutson gave me a lapstrake launch, and the rule was ‘just be back by supper.’ Free gas and free

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grub. But I had to do the chores—split my share of wood— and as I grew they handed me the dirty work around the lodge. Getting up at two a.m. and starting the fires for hot water, knock on the door and yell, ‘Hot water! Breakfast in half an hour!’ “We had some very interesting people around here, these moneyed men who’d cotton more to Rock Harbor Lodge. Count von Luckner was the skipper of the World War I German privateer—the Seeadler—that sunk all that Allied shipping.” “He was here?” I was surprised. “Sure. After the war. I’d wake him up when I poured hot water for him.” Westy imitated a German accent, roaring, “Vot der hell iss diss?” Westy also acted as a guide for Jim Birdseye, the man who discovered the flash frozen food process, as well as for many other men. “What else would these guests do when they were here?” I asked. “Masquerade parties, berry picking, and greenstoning. Greenstoning was a big treat. The fishermen had a nice summer business in greenstones.” However, by 1943 this style of lodge life had ended. After obtaining title to the lodge, the Park Service gave Mrs. Matt Farmer a five-year contract to run the lodge. After this period the lodge operation was taken over by National Park Concessions. “They wouldn’t have any horseshoe games, no croquet games, nothing like that.” Thus the old-time lodge era ended. Commercialism set in. Westy was filled with torrents of other information, fragments of Rock Harbor’s history. He told about how a

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man named Longyear burned off a portion of the northeast end of the island in 1875. The ridge where the housekeeping cabins now reside was bare rock, burnt stumps, and small aspens when Westy saw them in the early 1900s. Westy added another tidbit on how Daisy Farm got its name. Kneutson bought forty acres at the heart of the old Ransom town site—now Daisy Farm—in 1903, paying $8.38 for the title. Because Mr. Kneutson could raise only poor crops of radishes “with roots over a foot long” and poor potatoes, he named it Daisy Farm. The main crop was black-eyed Susan daisies. Sometime during our talk, dinner arrived. Again, as in other homes, the offerings were delicious and varied, the hosts’ conversation making the food taste even better. “Don’t you get bored?” I asked Bylo as we ate. It’s a common question asked by those who have no eyes, who don’t understand the pace of island life. Bylo looked directly at me. “The wind changes; the seasons change. Sometimes there’s fog, waves, animals. It’s new, different every day.” She said it intensely, wanting me to feel it too. Mostly, though, Bylo projects a humorous personality. When I asked what year they’d gotten married, Westy looked at her. “Nineteen twenty-four, wasn’t it, Bylo?” “Don’t ask me. What year was Wes born [their oldest son]? It was the year before that.” Her raspy enjoy-alongwith-me laughter warmed the room. Westy joined in. “When we first came down the harbor here we didn’t have anything but a pair of pliers and an alder bush.” They had first stayed in tents until, Bylo said, “One morning I went to pour out milk for the children’s cereal,

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and a little dead mouse fell out. That did it. Then Westy put up this cottage [in 1932].” Like other cottages, the Farmers’ “Coffee Pot Landing” grasps the shoreline, a small but exceptionally cozy place with no frills and full of peacefulness. Finished with dinner, we moved to more comfortable seats. Westy told a story about one of the old-time characters: “There was an old fellow who lived on what is now Davidson’s Island that used to work for Alf Merritt in the 1870s when they were working the mine down at Siskiwit Bay. His name was Cap’n Hart. He was a tugboat captain— skinny old Cornishman with a red neck and a couple of snag teeth. He made a business out of greenstones. He had a velvet vest with greenstone buttons, and he smoked a corncob pipe. He’d come in here with a straw hat cocked like this,” Westy tilted the imaginary hat and put on a proud look. “All he needed was to sell five stones, and he’d have his week’s grub. He’d charge two, three dollars a stone, giving them away. “This ring that Bylo’s got, I found.” (Picking greenstones is not allowed in the park at present.) She showed a beautifully polished greenstone that looked like a waxed turtle’s back. “It took twenty-five years for us to get someone to grind it.” It would take twenty-five years to relate all that Westy remembers. He’s been a greenstone picker, storyteller, lodge worker, engineer, writer, and naval architect. He’s made many choices; he’ll make more. “What are you going to do in the future?” I asked. Westy didn’t hesitate. “Usually every year has brought its own cargo of things to do.”

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And if he did accept boredom or falter for an instant, Westy—or anyone—can follow the good advice of Gramps Kneutson: “Keep your fists shut, your eyes open, and keep swinging!” If I know Westy Farmer, he’ll keep swinging away until his skiff sinks—and then he’ll design a submarine.

Clint Maxwell

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nder the orange glow of a brilliant dawn I hummed along Washington Harbor in a 14-foot boat. I was going to rendezvous with Clint Maxwell, the last big-boat commercial fisherman on Isle Royale. We approached Washington Island just as flaming orange rays skipped across the harbor. We docked alongside the old grey-board fish house. Sagging buildings and wave-worn docks were the norms here just like in other areas of the park. Down the path, thermos in hand, sleepyeyed Clint strolled toward me. Fishermen, on shore, never seemed in a hurry. “I’m glad you came,” he said, and walked off to load more gear in the 32-foot Nor-Shore. At that time cell phones didn’t exist, and he had no radio. He wasn’t sure I was going on the lake with him. I waved the park service boat good-bye and went to talk. I learned that twenty-four-year-old Clint and his girlfriend Aileen were working for Stanley Sivertson, loading their catch on the Wenonah like so many others from the island had done before. Soon, Clint motioned me aboard, and we cast off in search of fresh fish. We’d be hauling nets from sixty fathoms, or 360 feet, fishing for ciscoes or “chubs” as south shore 131

fishermen called them. I’ve never tasted a better smoked fish, especially with my favorite beverage. Some may call them chubs because they’re pulled up from such a great depth that the pressure differential of the trapped air in the fish makes them bloat upon surfacing. You have to poke them with a hook on a nail-ring to let out the excess air before you “choke” or squeeze them through the nets. We thrummed onto open Lake Superior, past the Rock of Ages Lighthouse and into the just-beginning lick of a west wind. The September air was clean and fresh, and the freedom of cruising the open blue was wonderful. The amazing fact about Clint’s operation was that he usually fished alone. The large fish-tug kept him constantly

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moving, but on shore Aileen, who didn’t like to go out on the water, helped with cleaning the fish and other general shore work. That year Clint fished three “gangs” of nets, enough to fill six or seven large net boxes. Even with a mechanical netlifter, that’s a lot of work for one man. We ran a compass course—no GPS back then—for a little less than a half an hour before he spotted the black-andwhite-striped net buoy. We cruised alongside. Clint reached over, pulled the long buoy inside, and wrapped the rope around the rattling net-lifter. Up came the anchor and lots of empty net. Finally some fish arrived, but the catch was sporadic, very poor. “I guess I put the nets in the wrong place,” Clint said, smiling away. We filled only two sixty-pound boxes, but what interested me was that he didn’t keep any of the incidental lake trout. Because of the PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) count in that part of the lake, the license didn’t allow him to keep or sell any. I learned later that testing the whole trout instead of just the edible fillets may have been the reason. PCBs are more concentrated in the offal. We tossed the dead trout outside to the wildly flapping and screeching seagulls. Hundreds of them scurried around, fat and lucky. Not us. Foot after foot of empty net curled on board. Once, the net tangled around the lifter, stalling it. My fault, but that was minor. Clint said in the sudden quiet, “I know what’s going to go next—the clutch. It hasn’t been adjusted in four or five years.” Yet he overhauled the engine last year, fixed a portion of the wooden canopy, and replaced some cracked ribs.

He had better keep it running smoothly. Sometimes Clint is out for twelve or thirteen hours. That day, because of the low catch and my help, we were done taking fish in just a few hours, but the net still had to be set back into the lake. Normally it’s a two-man job. Fishing alone, he uses the net separator, a metal roller device with a long arm. “Something I saw on the Lake Michigan boats.” As the net passed over the roller, it separated the floats from the sinkers, keeping them from tangling. But the tangles from older, ripped nets made them slip off of the separator. “This is where I lose my sense of humor,” Clint said, untangling yet another twist. His face was tinged red from sun and exertion. Finally, after fighting the increasingly rocky boat and the nets, he let go of the marker buoy at the end.

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Since it was still early, he decided to pull another gang of nets to the northwest. Clint scanned for the buoy with binoculars. As he searched, he told of another visitor he had aboard. “I once had a guy on here who got real sick. The wind was really increasing, and we were rocking. The guy just sat on a chair with his head down.” The everpractical fisherman thought, “I could use his chair as a post to help set the nets. I asked him if it was okay. ‘Uh-huh.’” Clint hung his head low in pantomime. “Boy was he sick!” I checked myself for that awful feeling of queasiness. Not today, even though the lake was waving long white towels. Clint spotted the buoy and increased our speed, water occasionally spraying through the net-lifter window. That was not unusual, but Clint has experienced much worse conditions. “I was fishing with my uncle [on the Minnesota shore]. Some waves must’ve been twenty feet. He opened the side window. ‘Look at that Clint!’ It was dramatic, like watching a movie. There was a nearby island, and you couldn’t see it—the waves were that high. I didn’t want to look at anything.” Clint had an even more dramatic experience, one of the most terrifying a fisherman can go through. One December in the mid-’70s, he went out to check a net in a 16-foot aluminum boat. There was a prevailing offshore wind. “The motor stalled. I couldn’t get it going, so I tried rowing back in. On the first pull, the oar-lock broke.” He laughed now, but there were no smiles that day. The temperature was close to zero, and the wind blew him offshore into the still larger waves.

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To get out of the wind, he lay down in the middle of the boat. When he got too cold, he’d pump his legs furiously. Throughout the night and most of the next day he drifted across Lake Superior. Finally, he spotted land: Devil’s Island, one of the Apostle Islands off the Wisconsin mainland.

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Search parties had been sent out, and when one of them finally spotted the bobbing boat, it dropped a bottle nearby with a note in it: “Wave your arms if you’re Clint Maxwell.” “There were camera crews and reporters who interviewed me when I got back home. I didn’t care what I said; I was so happy to be home.” By now we’d careened up to the second net buoy. Clint wrapped the rope around the net-lifter and started hauling the buoy and then the anchor. About a third of the way up a large maverick wave jerked the boat and snapped the line. Immediately, he scrambled for a marker buoy, kept for just this occurrence, and tossed the anchor overboard, playing out the rope. He looked at the increasing waves, then pronounced, “Oh forget it! I’ll find it next time.” The wind was picking up even more, and I was glad for the decision. All morning we’d seen no other boats, and as we chugged and twisted home I stared out across the whiteplumed lake. Seagulls flying in waves soared behind, following our progress. Lost in a trance of wind and whitecaps, I barely heard Clint shouting and pointing from the opposite side of the boat. I followed Clint’s arm. There, flying low and gracefully, were six great blue herons. Their slow-moving wings seemed to keep them just barely aloft. Just when we expected them to drop into the surf, another majestic stroke kept them aimed toward Minnesota. I’d never seen herons flying in formation before or since. We watched them slowly melt away into the western sky.

Howard “Buddy” Sivertson

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ore than anybody I know, Howard “Buddy” Sivertson has captured the spirit and emotions of Isle Royale and its people. An award-winning painter, he has also written and illustrated five books. All of them have Isle Royale ties, but the gem and most inclusive is Once Upon An Isle. In it, the island’s uniqueness and great people come alive. His detailed renditions of welland lesser-known events on Isle Royale are not only historically accurate, but they also stand alone as excellent works of art. His other books are Illustrated Voyager; Tales of the Old North Shore; Schooners, Skiffs, and Steamships; and Driftwood. When I visited Buddy in Grand Marais at his studio, his great energy and humor were infectious. I liked him immediately. We went up to his studio where a picture of the stern-wheeler Illinois delivering supplies was perched on an easel. I turned on the recorder. “Buddy, are you considered a historical painter, or maybe hysterical?” He let out a loud laugh. “There should be some classy term. But I guess that describes it.” Narrative artist is his common designation, but this doesn’t describe his creativity. “Have you entered your artwork in any competitions?” 138

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“How does anyone judge artwork?” His arms punctuate the air, and he speaks assuredly. “When I first started out I won first place somewhere, but I stopped doing it because I thought it was pretty foolish. How does anybody tell what is the best art? Ridiculous. So I thought that I’m not going to get involved with this foolishness anymore. I do enjoy going to the exhibits, but I don’t pay any attention to the red, blue, or pink ribbons—whatever they are.” After viewing his paintings, I know that he could’ve won a lot more competitions if he cared. He paints for the love of his craft and to keep memories of an old way of life alive: an artist without artifice. “I think two or three of my books won awards—two of them for sure. The Ben Franklin Award . . . I can’t recall.” “What’s the Ben Franklin award?” “Beats me.” And he laughed in that appealing join-me manner. “I think publishers get together and sponsor contests to promote each other’s books.” Buddy explained that the award was a regional prize handed out in Chicago for best of category. “How often do you get to go back to Isle Royale?” He suddenly got very serious. “I don’t get to go out there much—maybe once or twice a year. My son Jeff has a place. But the scene has changed over there. The people I used to enjoy, the old-timers, are all gone. Their way of life has gone, and I’ve lost interest.” When he did fully enjoy Isle Royale life, Buddy went out on the lake to fish “nearly every day.” In 1930, he took his first trip to Isle Royale when he was just six weeks old. “By the time I was eight years old, I started to help my dad. By the time you were twelve, you were considered a hired

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hand. So you spent from five o’clock in the morning sometimes to nine o’clock at night with your father. That was called ‘togetherness.’ All the kids had to go fishing with grandfather Sam Sivertson. We had to row to his nets after he retired. We’d use his 18-foot rowboat to set and lift what he called his beach nets. All the grandchildren had to go row for him, whoever was available. And if we weren’t available, grandmother had to go. “We used 24-foot open boats that were called Mackinaws when they had sails in them. But they took the sails out and replaced them with engines. Then they were called gas boats. They were about 8-feet wide, very seaworthy and stable.” “What kind of fishing did you do?” “We used hook-lines in the spring. Then we used nets from midsummer on. When fall came along it was all nets and lots of them. We fished over halfway to Canada with hook-lines, ten miles out on the lake.” Once, fifteen miles from home, they were caught in a storm off McCormick Reef. His father had to help another fisherman and leapt into his boat. Alone, Buddy had to face up to 20-foot breaking waves. In a chapter from Once Upon An Isle he later wrote: “The boat was awash with water; floorboards were floating; and the engine was very close to drowning out. A couple more of those breakers would have ended my twelve-year-old life.” Storms weren’t the only hazard. All of Lake Superior, especially Isle Royale, is known for its dense, obscuring fog. “Have you ever been lost in the fog?” “Oh yes. Almost every time you were caught in the fog it was like you were transplanted into a different world

thousands of miles away. You can’t believe that there’s land just back there where you left a few minutes ago. Of course you did travel by dead reckoning. If you know your position you can set a compass course and run out your time. You usually come in about a mile or two of where you were heading.” Without GPS or Loran C navigation was often even more basic. “You could recognize individual trees or rocks. And of course there’s even the smell of beach roses in certain bays. The smell of seagull guano, or when you heard them you knew you were near the gull rocks. The sights, sounds, and smells pretty much helped you in a fog.” His fishing life went on “for four or five years with my father and my uncle Stan for a couple of years. But both my dad and I realized quickly that I was not cut out for commercial fishing. I was a dreamer, more interested in scenery

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and seagulls than hard work. He wasn’t disappointed when, in my late teens, I announced my intention to become an artist.” Howard graduated from the Minneapolis School of Art in 1950 and went to the University of Minnesota for “a couple of years.” He’s had a long career as an artist including two years as a Navy illustrator and twenty-five years as a graphic artist in Duluth. After these endeavors he finally achieved his dream: “to tell the story of the fishermen and their families who gathered the rich harvest of life on Isle Royale.” Today he lives in Grand Marais but has a place on his beloved Lake Superior in Canada. “It’s about as good a substitute for Isle Royale as I’ll ever find.” There is no substitute for Howard Sivertson. He’s a unique artist whose presence will live on in his wonderful paintings and memoirs. We are all far richer for his dedication to his art.

Pete Edisen

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hite-haired Pete Edisen held the pencil in both hands, slowly scrawling out the message that he wouldn’t be returning to Isle Royale, where he’s been a commercial fisherman for over sixty years. “What? Absurd! Never!” his galaxy of friends have said. “Pete will be back. He won’t stay away. He can’t stay away.” No one could believe it. Neither could I. Since the start of the park, he has been the most visible symbol of man’s presence on Isle Royale. Many people have images of him with a seagull perched on his head or of boy scouts circled around him, listening with open-mouthed awe. “I just don’t know if I’ll be back,” he said, cutting me some headcheese in his Two Harbors, Minnesota, hotel room. “My arthritis is kicking up. I don’t know.” Although stiff with that crippler, his mind keeps working. If anyone loves to talk to people, he does. One question and he was off: “I left Norway in 1903. I was born in 1897. My dad used to roll me up in a blanket and take me out into the fjord. We caught red snapper.” Economic conditions forced their family to leave Royso, near the Arctic Circle, and come to America. Pete’s future 144

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was patterned on that early Norwegian experience. From 1916 on, except for a nine-month episode during World War I, he evolved into Isle Royale’s best-known commercial fisherman. He fished mostly near Middle Islands Passage just southwest of the lighthouse in Rock Harbor. Lou Mattson also remembered the fishing success of the Edisen family, especially relating to its Norwegian roots. “ My mother’s father [Louis Mattson] and his partner John Anderson were the original fisherman in Rock Harbor at what is now known as the Edisen Fishery. Pete Edisen was the last fisherman there. Now, my grandparents were Swedish-speaking Finns. Can you imagine, the fishery that was started by a couple of good Swede-Finns is now named after a Norwegian?” While Pete may have been the best-known, he “never fished on a big scale,” making only enough to live on. Anticipating one of my questions, he said that the biggest lake trout he caught “was forty-six-and-a-half pounds with the head and guts taken off. It might’ve been sixty pounds round.” Obsessing again about the dangers of a fisherman’s life, I asked him about encounters with those fog-phantoms— freighters. As usual, he had a quick answer. “We were out east in the fog [with Milford Johnson], and we were going by compass. Doggone it, the compass got crazy, started to act up. All of a sudden there was a cable that shot up out of the water, right in the air like that,” he cut the air with his arm, “and it sliced down again. It was a freighter that was pulling another boat. And if we would’ve been on top of that cable, we would’ve capsized and gone down, never

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heard from again. It wasn’t twenty feet away from us, but we never saw the freighter and never saw the barge.” I was caught by his strong word-pictures. It seemed that if Pete Edisen hadn’t been a commercial fisherman, he might’ve been a poet or an actor. He gets intensely involved with the moment, his lilting accent drifting in a singsong pitch. Pete is a performer: passionate and immersed in his stories. He could be on a stage, sitting on a bar stool, the houselights dimmed, one spotlight illuminating his energetic hand motions and head-tiltings. The lights dim. “I’ve been in a storm one hundred miles an hour.” He pauses. “And that ain’t kidding. That was the warning we got from Port Arthur. I was up near the Pallisades, and I had Mr. Cooper and one by the name of Velton. He was about 280 pounds—good ballast. I says to them, ‘Pull in your hooks, and get them in as fast as you can.’ Of course, I said something worse than that. “So I started for Blake’s Point.” Pete’s timing is perfect. The way he soberly stated it, starting for Blake’s Point seemed like an impossible task. “You know, if I had all the water in the boat that passed over us, we would’ve sunk like a rock. Up in the Pallisades there, it looked just like Niagara Falls coming back down again. So I got in around Blake’s and started into Merritt Lane. And I couldn’t get in! Of course, I seen trees that big [eighteen inches in diameter] jerk right off the point and blow over the hill into Merritt Lane. You could see them whirl around up there. They probably went one hundred feet or more up in the air and then down. I’ll tell you one thing, it scared us all right. It puts the fear of God in a person when he hits that kind of weather. You couldn’t face it.

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“We looked into the channel, and all the brush in there reminded me of Norway when the reindeer were swimming across the fjords. The whole harbor was full. So after it calmed Cooper says, ‘Let’s go to Passage Island.’ I says, ‘No you don’t. Not today, because they come in pairs, and we got another one coming.’ Just about twenty minutes later she come again. But she wasn’t quite so hard, only sixty miles an hour. Yet there were trees flying off the point and coming down. Then it was over, and I said, ‘Now it’s time to go home, fellas.’” Once you’ve listened to him, you won’t be startled by the fact that stories, anecdotes, and pictures of Pete have appeared on TV as well as in many magazines and newspapers. “Don’t you ever get tired of visitors?” He leaned forward. “I tell you one thing. I never get tired of visitors because they’re interesting. Everyone’s got something to contribute. I love them. They’re nice people.” Even though he’d worked as a park aid for the Park Service for seven years, it wasn’t a public relations put-on. He truly meant it. He does love people, yet sometimes you get the suspicion that he’d rather be around animals. Even mosquitoes, though he’s quick to remind me, “There’s not a single mosquito on Isle Royale. They’re all married.” He gets even more excited when he talks about his experiences with them. If Pete isn’t a poet, it’s for certain that he’s a naturalist. He can talk for hours about fox, moose, wolves, and eagles—and he did. “I tell you, we had some they called naturalists out here. Well, I wouldn’t exactly call them naturalists, because

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they tried to get too close to the eagles. That’s no good. If they had telephoto lenses and took pictures that would be fine. I’d love that, but when they’ve got to stand on their wings to take a picture, that’s no good!” Pete had told some naturalists that a nest with two young ones was at Rabbit Island. When he checked it later he found that the young eagles had hurt themselves by falling from the nest. “They were scared and couldn’t fly. I never told anyone where the eagles were again.” Pete also had a soft spot for the ducks that frequented the island. “We used to use twenty sacks of grain every year to feed birds, and I’ve paid as high as seventeen dollars for one sack of cracked corn. I thought it was too much, but the ducks didn’t think that at all.” Questions didn’t have to be asked now. Pete Edisen— storyteller, fisherman, naturalist—had the stage. “One eagle used to come down and beg me for fish. She’d come within twenty feet of me. Ohh, she was a monstrous bird, a beautiful bird! And when she’d put those feathered claws down like that, they were thicker than my hands. If I didn’t notice her when I was busy picking herring, I’d hear her right above—EEECK! Right above my head. ‘Oh, there you are.’ And I’d take a herring and throw it to her. “You know, if a bird or animal looks you right straight in the eye, they’ll see what you’re thinking. They’re smart.” I imagined that Pete was looking at me too intently, straight in the eye, but he broke off and started in on the fox. “This big red fox and a silver fox, I seen them breeding. I wish I had movies of that. It does a person good to see those things, to see what’s going on.”

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Another time, Pete was going up his path to the lake to see if it was calm enough to set his nets. “I seen something glisten through the trees just like one of those Christmas trees with bangles on it.” Pete stood still, and when the silver fox got close, “I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. So I said, ‘Hello pal.’ He was no pal of mine.” Pete clapped his hands and made a quick swoop with his arm. “Whoosh! He was gone. I couldn’t have shot that animal for five hundred bucks.” I asked if he’d ever been close to that famous nocturnal howler, that chill-bringer the wolf. “Yes, I’ve petted one. Oh sure, I had four of them in a pen in back of the house. They said that Pete likes animals, so we’ll send them to Pete.” They were brought from a Detroit zoo in 1952 for eventual release on the island. “But I like to stay clear of them. They could take your hand off.” The four wolves escaped their pens and went on a playful rampage, ripped up a fish net, and bothered tourists for handouts. Eventually, two were shot, one was deported ,and the fourth, Big Jim, escaped. “Do you want some coffee?” he asked abruptly. “Sure.” But I almost wished I hadn’t agreed. He got up stiffly from the table, wincing from the pain in his legs, and I had to wonder how much of it he didn’t show. He poured coffee and continued. “We didn’t have wolves back then,” before 1948, although there were a few scattered sightings. “We had coyotes. Oh, they used to sing real lullabies. I liked to go out and sit on the bench and listen to them across the way. They would answer each other, and it was echoing and echoing.” Besides coyotes, eagles, foxes, and wolves, Pete has seen lynx, caribou, and white-tailed deer. None of this last group

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now lives on the island. “I never saw a caribou after 1920. But boy, are they a regal animal.” While going to Chippewa Harbor, he spotted one off of Saginaw Bay. “He was a big one, and he had a white collar like he was dressed in his Sunday best. He never paid any attention to us at all.” He shook his head. “When they spread those cloven hooves, they looked big—almost like frying pans.” The caribou may be gone, but one island inhabitant that Pete is intimate with has always been there—the seagull— or correctly, the herring gull. One of the most common sights for people visiting his fishery has been Pete standing on the dock, a seagull perched on his head as he fed herring and fish guts to those swirling and squawking masses. “I don’t have to call them; they’ll come and sit down on my head. It’s so soft you can hardly tell the weight. If you could see the herring I gave to those seagulls, you’d say I was crazier than heck. Sometimes they’ll sit on my head and reach down, nibble on my ear, trying to be nice to me. That’s just the way it looks.” He went through the actions of imitating the seagull’s almost purring sounds, a soft high-pitched chortling. Once he rode four miles along the shore of Rock Harbor with a seagull poised atop his cap like a masthead. The people on shore were yelling, “Look, the seagull’s on his head! The seagull’s on his head!” “One woman says to me, ‘Did you ever have them dirty on you?’ I says, ‘Yes, it’s happened. It can happen in the best of families.’ “One question the tourists ask all the time is, ‘How did the moose get on Isle Royale?’” Pete pantomimed a curious questioner. “Well, some of them might’ve swam, because I

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have seen a moose swim from Isle Royale toward Minnesota.” Captain Smith of the steamer America reported seeing a moose swimming ten miles from shore, and the late Emil Anderson, a commercial fisherman from Belle Harbor, saw one six miles from the island. Moose are excellent swimmers, and it’s only fifteen miles from Amygdaloid Island to Canada’s Sibley Peninsula. Pete doesn’t believe the popular theory that they crossed over on the ice, as one of his experiences has shown. “I’ve skated from my place,” where he spent three winters in the ’30s, “to Rock Harbor Lodge many, many times. Six-and-a-quarter miles. And I remember one time I was skatin’, and there was a moose that was crossing over to Mott Island. He figured I was goin’ so fast on that glare ice that he’d try it too. By gosh, when he got out on that slick surface his feet went out, and his chin hit the ice.” “Was it tough to spend a winter there?” I asked. “It’s beautiful. Finest thing a man can do is to stay a winter on this island.” For one winter’s stay they brought one-half of a cow, a hundred-pound pig, twenty-five pounds of pork chops, and peaches and pears by the case. Supplemental trapping and some fishing under the ice provided extra food. He said that twenty-three below zero was the coldest he’d remembered, and that one winter he had to dig a tunnel between the buildings. Everything he’d told me up until then seemed like a powerful affirmation of the “rightness” of his life: his amazement and fascination with nature and the island. He’d made the right choices. It didn’t seem like that joyful, high-cheekboned face could ever get sad. But he’d not talked about his wife, Laura, who must have fulfilled a

strong need in his life. She had died in 1974. “Do you miss Laura?” I asked, even though the answer was obvious. “Laura was a beautiful woman.” His wavelike accent fluctuated up and down, emphasizing “bea-u-ti-ful” as if he were singing the word. “There’ll never be another like her. Never.” Pete got quiet as he thought about his wife.

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“They didn’t know what Laura had. She was in the hospital for a month. When I held her hand there by the bed, she told me she wouldn’t be coming back.” A pained expression now tortured his face. Pete bowed his head and rubbed his eyes. He was on the brink of tears, and an uncharacteristic silence scoured the room. I did not know what to say. I thought that maybe I’d opened the wrong door. But he had suffered her loss long before, so it was a short-lived scene. Soon he was back again, letting his speech jump to whatever subject surfaced. “Ralph Anderson was attacked by an owl when he was going over the ice to my place. And if he didn’t have a cane he would’ve had trouble. He knocked it down two or three times, but it came right back at him. . . . And during the time they had the lumberjacks up in Siskiwit Bay [in 1936], the owls were so bad that one man had to holler for help. There were two or three men that had to chase off the owls. That man was cut in the head so bad that they had to take him out with the Crawford [a Coast Guard cutter] all the way to Superior, Wisconsin, to get him fixed up.” Another lumber camp worker, Arthur Ruohonen, lost an eye when an owl with a fifty-three-inch wingspan attacked him. After rescuers killed the owl, they found its stomach empty. “When you were a young man did you know any of the older fishermen—someone like Ralph Anderson—who were good storytellers, who told stories about their lives?” Pete laughed. “No-no. I done all the talking.” His energy remained high. We talked on and on throughout the warm afternoon. When it was evening, I was ready to leave.

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I was standing near the door, nearly exhausted by hours of intense listening. Even he seemed to be a little tired, but I just couldn’t leave. There seemed to be something left undone, something left unsaid to this sensitive man. I went over and grabbed him by the wrist with both hands. “You’re a beautiful man, Pete. A beautiful man.” I will never forget the look on his upturned face. Pete did make it back to Isle Royale, but it wasn’t to fish. He came to be honored with a VIP plaque presented by the Department of Interior “in recognition of his generous contribution to the volunteer-in-parks program.” He also received a plaque from the Isle Royale Natural History Association. Clutching the awards in front of the audience and beaming with joy he said, “Well, I’ll remember this for the rest of my life, but I don’t know how long that’ll be.” It was said with a smile, but it made us think, made us realize just how much history and insight are stored behind those blue eyes. Still, Pete was in his glory, alive in the moment. The next day we went to his fishery where interested visitors can regularly take tours to view a commercial fisherman’s set-up. When we pulled up near the dock, Pete showed little emotion. Then as I helped him up out of the boat, he looked around and pronounced, “Well, I’m on my own property now.” The group walked off with Pete stepping a little stiffly, cane in his hand. But if he was shaky, his mind remained fish-knife sharp. It wasn’t long before he was talking: Pete Edisen, home again. “Mike Johnson [who fished at Pete’s place] hired a man here by the name of Gilbertson, and Gilbertson had one leg.

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He had gotten run over on the railroad somewhere. He was a good rower. They didn’t have no gas boats or sailboats then, and they’d row all the way to Chippewa, lift nets and come back. Well, he didn’t have any place to stay, so he goes to work, and he numbers all the logs [on a house at Cemetery Island]. Tore them down, and rowed them from Cemetery to here. He finally got it here—got the roof on and fixed it up. And then he had a housewarming. He’s standing here smoking a “Turk” of tobacco, and nobody else could stand it. You’d stick your head near him, and it was just like in a cloud. I’ll tell ya his mouth looked just like it had a potato in it. Well anyway, he was here for a long time, but at last he got so shaky, sitting like this,” Pete imitated a nervous disorder, “you’d think his head would fall off. Mike had to leave him at the poor farm in Two Harbors.” Talking as we strolled, we approached his old home. The door groaned open, and someone said, “You’re home now, Pete.” He seemed unmoved, almost aloof, but when the touring party—eight of us—crowded into the small room to listen to the returning hero, the valve to his past opened up again. One sympathetic ear is all that Pete needs. “One winter night we were lying here sleeping, and Laura woke me up. ‘Sounds like somebody dying.’ It was a moose, and he was havin’ trouble. Oh, he was gruntin’, and he was raving you know . . . so I pulled my pants on, got dressed. It was cold out there too. So I went out. And I met a moose over there, just in front of that boat.” He leaned and pointed out the window. “And he turned around and looked like this at me,” Pete stared malevolently. “And he upped on his hind legs and swung with his horns. He come right for me. And I ran for the house and I got in. . . .

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I says to Laura, ‘Get me a cup of coffee.’ And she said, ‘Did you see if he had broken a leg?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘but if he would’ve gotten me, he’d of broken both of mine.’ Oh, he was rarin’ to go. He ran right up to the door.” The group laughed appreciatively, waiting for more. This reminded me of an earlier moose story Pete had shared. “Oh I love a moose! I’ve fed four slices of bread to a moose, a great big cow, and she came and took them out of my hand. She stood four feet away from me. You see, I knew her twelve years before that, and she hadn’t forgotten what happened. She’d been just a calf at the time. I was up on a hill, and I heard something. Well, here was a mother with a beautiful calf, and she was just jumping on her— because a cow wants to get rid of a calf that’s been with her, to make room for the one that’s coming. They don’t kill the calf, they just want to get so nasty with them that they have to leave. So I called the calf [Pete made a bellowing moose call], and she came running down. I’d swear she would’ve run right into the kitchen if I didn’t have the screen door closed.” Next Pete started to talk about fog, inevitable and unpredictable on Isle Royale. “One night I came to Smith’s Island [in Tobin Harbor] in the fog. One of the new tenants asked me, ‘Can you tell me, do you smell tracks?’ If I could make it in, in that fog, he figured I had to be smelling tracks.” He talked for a long time about moose and birds, Laura and friends. Some were stories that I had heard before, but they had just enough twists to keep them interesting: a thirty-five-and-a-half pound pike in Duncan’s Bay; numerous two pound perch that he used to fry; filling 225 kegs of

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herring in only eight days, but only getting twelve herring on twelve nets another time; catching just two whitefish on an entire trout net. We visited two other buildings before we came to the fish house. “Let’s be quiet, just for a second,” Pete said, stopping by a door in the floor. “We’ll see if there’s any beaver around—eeeEEEeeeEEE.” He made a high-pitched sound that he used to call them with. There was no answer. “No, I think he died of old age. He used to always answer me all the time . . . he’s been in my lap many times.” He went to a bench that overlooked the familiar harbor, a seat he’s spent many hours on. However, this time, instead of his fisherman’s duds, he was dressed in his finest—new shoes, trench coat, hat jauntily tilted to the side. Above us, seagulls tested windy pathways.

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We had a picnic lunch while Pete went on, thoroughly enjoying his return, talking and laughing—the king of Rock Harbor. He told about different colored nets and how they made a difference as to where you set them. He told about his wolves, about living in the lighthouse, about the Fourth of July. It went on for hours. Finally, time captured us. We had to leave. Pete hung back and was the last to get up. While we waited near the boat, two young women walked arm-in-arm with him, away from his home, away from sixty summers of memory. A lifetime of fishing finished, he showed no sadness. At eightyone, loved and respected, Pete Edisen was a very lucky man.

Elaine Rude

E

laine Rude used to hate Isle Royale. She married a quiet fisherman, Sam Rude, in 1935 and two years later moved to Fisherman’s Home on the southeast shore of Isle Royale. At first, she felt isolated and disappointed with the place. A young bride of twenty-two needed some socializing, and Sam could provide little of that. He was a fisherman, sometimes working from four in the morning until late at night. And keeping the nets, fish house, nethouse, and cottage in running order left the couple scant time for freewheeling visits, picnics, or berry picking. Love and work sustained them. “We didn’t have company,” Elaine explained shortly after I’d been dropped off at Fisherman’s Home by the park service boat Beaver. “They were always careful of their Model T and Model A engines and didn’t use them more than necessary. . . .We didn’t go anyplace, very seldom. A couple of times to Wright Island, and that was about it. For a young person it was very boring.” It’s obvious why visits were scarce. Fisherman’s Home lies on a baby finger of a peninsula, exposed to the often treacherous insanity of storms. Visitors must cross massive Siskiwit Bay or come around the harborless south shore from Washington Harbor. 161

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Storms can well up unexpectedly, but the day I arrived it was calm, a rubbery swell the only hint that the lake was not made of glass. Although she had two other guests, Elaine invited me up to her house, one of eight structures that clustered about that serene place. Fishermen’s homes such as these have an atmosphere that only the unperceptive or hurried fail to notice. “Slow down,” they whisper to you, “slow down.” Within minutes seagulls barked at the sky; crows called far off in the hills; and two trout cracked the surface in search of flies. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you can feel the presence of a past way of life superimposed on the now. It’s as real as the splash of spring water on your face. Just as rain is real, or as Elaine Rude is. She is upfront, direct, and wants you to be the same. Her wavy grey hair and penetrating, unwavering gaze gave her an air of quiet reassurance. There’s a depth of serenity about her, like a still lake reflecting trees at twilight. Yet there was shyness. At first she was unwilling or unable to let out her sensitive nature, but we later got to know each other a little better, dismantling part of the brick wall that stands between any new acquaintances. When talk turned to Sam, she broke the barrier. “You should’ve talked to Sam. He could’ve told you stories. He was robust. He’d never, never walk—he’d run—and he did everything very fast and efficiently. When I was in the boat I just had trouble keeping out of his way. So it was better not to go. Sam. . . . He knew exactly how to tie a quick knot; he knew exactly when to drop the rock [anchor]. Nobody,” she said proudly, “would ever keep up to Sam. He was like that all his life.” I had heard similar statements from others.

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“When did he die?” Her voice dropped. “He died in 1975. Those last couple of years he was slowed up by cancer. He fought it for eight years.” Sam fished with pain until the spring of ’75. Then his strength dwindled to the point where he couldn’t start the boat motor. Still uncomplaining, he quietly asked a friend to bring him to the mainland. He did not return to the water. Elaine did not dwell on it. Instead, she talked about prosperous days when Sam fished with his father, Andrew. They fished together until 1944 when Sam took over. Much of their fishing was done in an open 19-foot boat. McCormick Reef—a traditional spawning ground for lake trout—was probed, while whitefish were sometimes taken at Hay Bay, where three other fishermen had homes. “In the fall Sam would always get up before it was daylight, have his breakfast, and then go on the lake. He used a flashlight to go down to the dock.” Many times he used the same flashlight to come back. “So what would you do when Sam was on the lake?” She hesitated, and I thought, “How can anyone describe a lifetime existence merely with words?” She gave a few examples anyway. “Well, I’d do chores, cut the grass. . . . Then I made that rock garden.” She pointed out the small window to a partially destroyed wall, broken by a 1977 storm. “Then there was mending to do, reading magazines and books, and I used to weave rugs. There was always something to do outside.” She still keeps active. Elaine paints, makes greenstone jewelry, plays the accordion, collects driftwood, and creates

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“junk” sculpture. One sculpture, a strange and twisted baffler that begs the question, “What is it?” is made of three net floats, two oarlocks, a copper fuel line, copper nails, and a universal joint from an old engine. She uses what’s available. “Part of that bedroom,” she said, indicating a smaller room, “was built from an old fishboat in 1946. We ran out of lumber and had to make do with anything we found.” She pointed to another building that she uses to do her laundry. “Ole Berg fished from there years ago. Then he became captain of the Winyah [a supply boat]. That building has to be seventy-five years old.” There was another fisherman’s house with the name Seglem scratched deeply in the grey wood that was just as old, plus more buildings on the two docks—one for the sauna, the other used as the fish house. I asked if other fishermen lived nearby in those early days. She gazed thoughtfully at me, unblinking. “This fellow, Hans Mindstrom, who was a mile down the shore, used to have a one-cylinder boat that practically shook him to pieces getting over here. His harbor wasn’t very big—in fact it’s gone now—so if there was a certain wind he’d have to dock his boat here and walk a mile through the woods to his house. And he’d always come over here to ship his fish [on the Winyah]. I used to feel sorry for him. Both his feet were clubbed feet. He had a terrible time walking. He moved to town and finally was put in a home where he died.” Many of these old-timers followed the same pattern, alone all of their lives. Now, in 1978, only three fishermen continue. Oden Alreck, a relative to Sam, is one of them. He still fishes

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out of Fisherman’s Home and uses Elaine’s license in the spring and fall. However, this license puts limitations on the amount they can catch. In 1978, they were allowed one thousand lake trout or five thousand pounds, whichever they got first. Herring, whitefish, and ciscoes also have quotas, but once the trout limit is reached, all fishing must stop. Elaine helps Oden with the tedious ritual of taking scale samples, weighing and measuring fish, and recording the information as required by the State of Michigan. Getting a supply of ice is another problem. “Ice is very precious, and it’s expensive to buy. It’s carried on a truck to Grand Portage then put on the Voyageur. It’s two days before we get the ice. Then it’s mush. We did try cutting ice off the islands in the spring, but that was too hard to do. Now we freeze our own ice for the summer.” She went on to explain how they had set up some unique ice bins, fourby-six-foot forms lined with polyethylene sheets. Water is pumped into them and left to stand for the winter. In the spring these giant ice cubes are cut with a chain saw and stored in sawdust. “Fishing alone here,” I asked, “did you ever have anyone get sick?” “For one thing, people very seldom get sick out here. You can have an accident of some sort but you don’t get sick. . . . I used to be pretty good at giving first aid. One time Sam chopped his leg right to the bone. You could see the bone. I put in some butterfly stitches, and it healed fine.” Later, a doctor said that he couldn’t have done a better job.” “Did you have anything to dull the pain?” “Not at that time I didn’t. Sam never said anything.”

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In the ’60s, Elaine had an attack of appendicitis and just made it to the mainland in time—a near rupture. “But we never had anything that we couldn’t handle.” We decided to go outside and have a look around. It occurred to me then that in thirty years or so most of this would be in ruins, just like part of her sandstone-fenced rock garden. The year before, a terrible blow battered the wall and lifted huge sandstone rocks a hundred feet from the rocky shore. Some of them would be difficult to carry by hand. Water, built up by the bursting waves, had run a hundred yards over the peninsula. She even showed where the wind-fired rain shot through cracks in the door and where it seeped into the house. “In town sometimes a windy day is very pleasant. Out here it means storm-onthe-lake. In town you don’t even realize it.”

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Susceptibility to the weather makes island residents very conscious of even a slight change in wind direction or temperature. As we walked to the dock, the grey clouds seemed to be darkening. A light mist, flowing as if it were squeezed from a giant atomizer, began to descend. As small raindrops sifted down and the grey clouds moved lazily along, we sat in the cool mist drinking coffee. I asked her about the tornado they’d had in the ’50s, an event quite rare for Isle Royale. “All that was left on the dock after that tornado was a bathtub and a stove. The whole sauna, the walls and everything, was gone. It missed the house, but one of our windows blew out. And you could hear something like cannons. I suppose those were the trees that snapped off. I never was afraid of a storm before, but now I am. All our net reels were smashed to pieces and blown into the woods. There was a lot of damage.” As we sat and talked, a breeze wafted in, clouds departed, and soon the glorious sun burnt away all traces of rain. The sudden changes would keep a mystic perplexed. Within hours the air became fly-buzzing hot. Throughout the transformation birds kept singing; chimes from Elaine’s doorway rang in rhythm; and restless seagulls occasionally went on maneuvers. Elaine and guests had gone to the house to prepare supper. There would be a five-pound trout, along with corn, tomatoes, lemon, strawberries, and a salad. I would not have to use a can opener tonight or sleep in a tent. I looked over the timeless void of calm water, the surface flicked only slightly by a hungry trout’s tail. So this is what it felt like back then, I thought. Suddenly, two ducks

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chased each other with splashes and raucous flaps. There was a harmonious movement filling this sphere. I smiled. Alone, I strolled calmly past the grey fishshack sentinels toward muted laughter and accordion music. Philosophers have stated that there is a thin line between hate and love. Elaine Rude crossed that line early. “I love it here,” she says softly. For her and all who’ve touched this land, Isle Royale’s bewitching magnetism will never disappear.

Appendix A Typical Herring Net Setup

In a typical herring net setup, the depth of the net was controlled by varying the length of the float-buoy lines. Starting in May, Milford Johnson set them about five fathoms deep. When the weather warmed in June, the net was raised to three fathoms, and in July, up to two fathoms. The depth could vary from two to sixteen fathoms depending on where the fish gathered. Currently [1978], few herring are sought because of low market prices—from twenty-five cents to forty cents per pound. Clint Maxwell, a fisherman on Washington Island, sets herring nets only sporadically. He usually sets herring nets in the shallow bays in the fall, sometimes tying one end 169

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to an overhanging tree on the shore. Milford Johnson, wanting to find out if there were still a lot of herring in this area, had an excellent catch of nine boxes on only two short 240foot nets. That was in the spring. Lake Trout, Whitefish, and Ciscoe Nets

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For lake trout nets, the main difference from the diagram is that no float buoys are used. Only the end marker buoys are visible on the surface. These four-and-a-half to five-and-ahalf-inch mesh nets are set directly on the bottom in either deep or shallow water. In the spring and fall, they are set on the fish-rich spawning reefs. October marked the closing of lake trout fishing and the start of the whitefish run. Nets similar to trout nets were used. The location of the nets and the time of the season determined whether lake trout or whitefish were caught, although incidental catches of whitefish were taken throughout the year in lake trout nets. Similar smaller mesh nets were, and are, used for ciscoe, or chub fishing. In the ’60s and ’70s, ciscoe fishing has been the main source of income for most Lake Superior fishermen. A quota system for lake trout and siskiwits, or fats, is now in effect, and small amounts of whitefish are caught in these nets. A Typical Hook-Line System

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This system of lake trout fishing was used from the late 1800s until the coming of the lamprey in the late 1950s. After this period, only nets were used. The buoy lines were set about four fathoms deep so that freighters wouldn’t tangle them, although these floats were sometimes cut free by sheet or “night” ice. Fishermen say that more trout were caught when waves jostled the floats, bobbing the herring-baited hooks. These lines were set and hauled using open skiffs from four or five in the morning until late in the afternoon. Sixteen-hour days and more were not uncommon. The catch ranged from an excellent eight hundred pounds down to a mediocre one hundred or two hundred pound haul. This method was usually used from mid-April through June when the water was colder and the trout deeper. July Fourth generally marked the end of the hook-line season, when shallow water trout fishing with nets began.

Peter Oikarinen is a freelance writer and photographer who lives along Lake Superior on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. He is the author of Armour: A Lake Superior Fisherman.