Agawa Canyon Park

Posted on August 22, 2023 by admin

Been a fairly mild summer so far, at least here in northern Illinois, but we might actually hit 100 degrees F. later this week. Topped 90 today.

I spent two nights in the Canadian Sault Ste. Marie early this month. My goal during my single day in town, August 4: ride a train away from town, through scenic parts of the Algoma District of Ontario to Agawa Canyon Park, nearly 130 miles round trip. I’ve known about the place for over 20 years, since I read this 2000 article by Chicago Tribune staffer Toni Stroud.

The Agawa Canyon Tour Train leaves from a station in Sault Ste. Marie early in the morning. To be exact, 8 a.m. I was there to catch it.

I’d booked in advance, concerned that it would be a full train. Turns out I could have shown up, at least that Friday, and bought a ticket. My car wasn’t empty, but it could have held several times as many people without issue.

The light load meant that I had a four-seat section all to myself, which made for a comfortable ride, especially when I felt like propping up my feet.

The ride to the canyon is about four and a half hours. The thing to do on the way is watch the countryside roll by.

And listen to the periodic narration, which offered information about the lakes and rivers we passed, the forests around us, and the trestles the train crossed – as high as 130 feet in the case of one that’s about 1,500 feet long, an arc that makes it seem like the train’s tonnage is gliding over tree tops.

We also heard about the history of the region, and the line, the Algoma Central, which was built as a working RR to facilitate mineral extraction and other commerce. The line goes all the way the Hearst, Ontario, well beyond the Agawa Canyon, and indeed is still a working line, though I understand the tourist run is a separate entity these days.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find out that Stompin’ Tom Connors recorded a song about the line, “Algoma Central 69.” I’m beginning to think that if it’s distinctly Canadian, he did a song about it.

I’d read conflicting opinions about whether the right or the left side was better for watching the scenery. Conflicting, I decided, because there didn’t really seem to be a better or worse. Each side had its share of sights. I’m sure the couple across the way from me had just as good a view as I did. They got to put up their feet, too.

Contrary to what I expected, the train doesn’t pass through total wilderness. There aren’t any towns along the way, but there is a scattering of houses and cabins, and the tracks cross a number of roads, paved and unpaved. You also come within sight of this bit of infrastructure.

Still, most the region is undeveloped, rugged and tree covered, especially the further you go, and watered by a variety of rivers headed for Lake Superior, such as the Batchewana, Chippewa and Goulais. There are many lakes, including the amusingly named Mongoose Lake. No definite reason for the name is known, according to the narration, which pointed out that the Group of Seven came to the shores of Mongoose Lake and many other places in the region roughly 100 years ago to paint landscapes.

Tourist officialdom in Ontario promotes the Group fairly extensively. I started seeing memorials at some of the locations they painted soon after entering Canada – signs resting on an artist’s easel, with folding seats next to them, as seen here.

“The group presented the dense, northern boreal forest of the Canadian Shield as a transcendent, spiritual force,” the Canadian Encyclopedia avers. “Their depictions of Canada’s rugged wind-swept forest panoramas were eventually equated with a romanticized notion of Canadian strength and independence. Their works were noted for their bright colours, tactile paint handling, and simple yet dynamic forms.”

Toward the end of the outbound journey, the train drops some hundred feet into Agawa Canyon, carved by the river of that name. Once the train stops, out you go. You have about an hour and a half to look around the canyon, with the option of walking along the river or climbing some hundreds of stairs on a trail for an overlook.

I picked the riverside trail. It’s a pretty place.

But more than that.

“The packed dirt of Agawa Canyon’s Talus Trail is level most of the way,” wrote Stroud, and it’s still true. “It is interrupted at intervals only nature understands, by tree roots here and there. Rocks that crumbled once upon a time from the canyon walls — 575 feet above in places — are all but submerged by an undergrowth of ferns, saplings and moss.

“In half an hour, this single woodland walk takes in two forest zones. Agawa Canyon lies in the transition area where the northern Boreal Forest, with its spruce, balsam fir, white birch and trembling aspen, overlaps the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence Forest of sugar maples, eastern white pines and yellow birch.”

Bridal Veil Falls, one of the canyon’s featured sights, proved to be a mere trickle in early August. For whatever reason, much more water cascaded over the cliff at the Black Beaver Falls.

At the smaller Otter Creek Falls as well.

Perhaps I ought to call this trip Ontario Waterfalls ’23, considering how many of them I saw. The appeal is aesthetic, but much more, I think – though I’m not quite sure what. The power? How a fall evokes untamed nature, even if engineers control the flow upstream? The pleasure of seeing foamy water?

After an hour and half in the canyon, the train begins the four-and-a-half hour journey back to Sault Ste. Marie. There isn’t much narrative on the return, and mostly people nap or play games or whatnot. I read, though sometimes still looking out the window.

My car was the last of 10, so I could also go to the rear and see the tracks receding as the train moved along, something I couldn’t do on the way in.

It was a little mesmerizing, that view.

Marathon to Sault Ste. Marie by Way of Wawa

Posted on August 21, 2023 by admin

I was pumping gas not long ago, and spotted what I took to be shiny penny on the pavement near the pump. A closer look told me it wasn’t a U.S. cent, but I didn’t ID it until I’d picked it up and eyed it when I got back in the car. Ten won, it turned out to be.

It’s the smallest currently circulating South Korean coin, both physically and in value. In theory, 10 won is worth 0.75 U.S. cents. A whopping seven and a half mills. The structure depicted is the Dabotap pagoda, a southeast-coast relic of the ancient kingdom of Silla, which lorded over most of the peninsula more than 1,000 years ago.

Back-and-forth between Korea and the U.S., and more specifically northwest suburban Chicago, is no unusual thing in our time, but still I was mildly surprised to find it — like I felt finding a New Zealand 20-cent piece. Made my day.

On the morning of August 3, I left Marathon, but not before a look at the one-room Marathon Museum, and a talk with a lanky young man who said he’d been hired just three weeks earlier to run the place, his first job out of college. He had grown up in the area, gone away for school, and only now was beginning to appreciate the history of the place, he said, as he read more and more.

Pretty refreshing, finding someone that young with an interest in history. That is an old man thing to say, of course, but anyway I was glad to hear a bit about the town, such as its origin as a prospective wood pulp mill whose development accelerated in the early 1940s when Canadian raw material extraction was deemed important to the Allied war effort. A postwar boom made Marathon into a genuine town; a wood pulp mill town that prospered until the crushing blow of the mill closing in 2009.

A public tank in Marathon.

Here’s a story of early Marathon: POW logging camps were built in the area after Canada entered the war in 1939, and on April 18, 1941, 28 German prisoners made a break for it, and many more attempted it, in a tunneling scheme worthy of The Great Escape or rather the real incident of the 1944 escape from Stalag Luft III. The goal of the prisoners at Camp X, Angler was to cross into the still-neutral United States. None made it. This article, which is serious need of an editor, nevertheless tells the tale of the long-abandoned camp not far off the modern road.

“Travellers on the Trans-Canada highway would not notice the dirt track leading south from the highway some four kilometres west of Marathon, Ontario,” the site says. “There is no sign to indicate where it leads, and no historical marker to record what happened along that track.”

This part of the Trans-Canada has more visible abandoned sites. Making a go of a business must be tough up there.

White River, Ontario has a claim on the origin of Winne-the-Pooh.

All well and good, but why do we see the Disney iteration and not one based on the illustrations by E. H. Shepard? Do you think Winnie wore a jacket at the London Zoo? No, she did not.

Wawa has more than its steel goose statue. There’s a pleasant lakeside path, for example.

On the relatively small Wawa Lake, not Superior. Just an everyday relic of the last ice age.

St. Mary Margaret Cemetery in the town (closed 1954) includes the remains of old-time Wawa-area miners. Most unmarked.

I sought out lunch at Philly Wawa Hoagie. A few days earlier, I’d heard the owner interviewed on a CBC radio show. Why not, I figured. I ordered the shawarma poutine.

How Canadian is that, eh? It was good and I barely needed to eat dinner.

Wawa features a bit more public art than the goose. Including figures all labeled “Gitchee Goomee” just on the other side of the visitor center from the goose.

A few miles out of Wawa, down a dirt road, is Magpie Scenic High Falls.

Not that high, unless you’re about to tumble over the edge. It’s the overflow spill weir of the Harris Hydroelectric Generating Station, which has a capacity of 13MW. Signs at the sight are emphatic about not climbing the thing, since spillway volume is notoriously fickle. (I’m paraphrasing.)

Nice falls, but the glory was getting there and back.

My goal for the day was Sault. Ste. Marie, Canadian side, so I pressed on. More abandoned Ontario.

A plaque about the road itself.

From the plaque, it was only an easy walk to Chippewa Falls, so I went.

Closer to Sault Ste. Marie, near the entrance of Pancake Bay Provincial Park, is a small complex of tourist shops on the Trans-Canada. I took a good look around, and confirmed that stores in this part of Canada offer a woefully small number of postcards. Too bad, there’s a lot of scenic raw material for postcards in this part of Canada.

Pukaskwa National Park

Posted on August 17, 2023 by admin

My old friend Geof Huth has been known to post images of figures – glyphs – he draws in the sand, and so I took some inspiration from him. His glyphs are unique, probably in the history of the world. My are a touch more conventional.

I took a similar image on my crummy cell phone camera, but one good enough for snaps, and sent it to Geof. From the edge of the wilderness in northwest Ontario to a tower in Lower Manhattan, the message went.

It might look like the wilderness.

But no. Edge it was. I might have been within the bounds of Pukaskwa National Park, but only a few miles in, with access by road.

Pukaskwa (PUK-ə-saw), a sizable slice of Ontario (725 sq. mi.) on the shore of Lake Superior, is mostly back country. Rugged is the inevitable term for its back country, so much so that the mostly wooded terrain mostly thwarted efforts to mine and even log it, back when that was legally possible. The park reportedly protects the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline on Lake Superior and, indeed, the Great Lakes.

A feature of the park: there are clusters of Pukaskwa Pits at remote locations. Wiki is succinct on those human-made structures: they are “rock-lined depressions near the northern shore of Lake Superior dug by early inhabitants, ancestors of the Ojibwa. Estimates of their age range from as recent as 1100-1600 CE to as ancient as 3000-8000 BCE.”

That’s a pretty wide range of age estimates. You might say their origin is “lost in the mists of time,” but that lacks academic rigor. Modern Canada created the park in the 1970s.

I wasn’t anywhere near the pits. At least, I don’t think so. The park’s single road leads to a few trailheads, such as Southern Headland.

It winds around some hills near Lake Superior, with a variety of under-foot topography as you walk along. Nothing that hard. This time around, I had a walking stick and water to go with my decent hiking shoes.

The trail eventually leads to a deadwood-strewn beach.

A different, much shorter trail from the beach leads to another beach. I spent a few hours there, cooling my heels and drawing a few words in the sand. That is, I did once I’d crossed a horizontal forest of driftwood.

A long stretch along Superior.

There were about ten people on the whole beach. And as few on the Southern Headland trail, where the rocks meet the water and sky. From the beach, I captured an image of hikers on the rock outcropping where I’d been earlier in the day.

Rocks meeting water and wind and sun, because the sun came out in the afternoon. The four elements all together.

Thunder Bay to Marathon, Ontario

Posted on August 16, 2023 by admin

On the first day of August, I made the acquaintance of Terry Fox. In bronze, anyway, and perhaps in spirit, since he’d been dead for over 42 years. Died very young; he’d be 65 now, had cancer not taken him away. A contemporary.

Apparently every Canadian knows who he was. Ignorant as I am, I didn’t, but I learned some remarkable things about him after seeing his memorial, which is just off the Trans-Canada Highway not far east of Thunder Bay.

It was a foggy morning in northwest Ontario. The memorial features Fox as a runner, which he was. But not just any runner.

He had only one leg, the other amputated to prevent the spread of osteogenic sarcoma, bone cancer, from his knee.

“In the fall of 1979, 21-year-old Terry Fox began his quest to run across Canada,” the CBC says. “He had lost most of his right leg to cancer two years before.

“[He] hatched a plan to raise money for cancer research by running across Canada. His goal: $1 for every Canadian. Fox’s plan was to start in St. John’s, Newfoundland on April 12, 1980 and to finish on the west coast of Vancouver Island on September 10. With more than 3,000 miles (5,000 km) of running under his belt, he was ready.”

So he ran almost every day early that year, gathering attention as he went. By the time he got to Toronto, the nation was watching. But he didn’t make it all the way to the West Coast.

“As Fox headed towards Georgian Bay, his health changed. He would wake up tired, sometimes asking for time alone in the van just to cry… On August 31, before running into Thunder Bay, Fox said he felt as if he’d caught a cold. The next day, he started to cough more and felt pains in his chest and neck but he kept running because people were out cheering him on. Eighteen miles out of the city, he stopped. Fox went to a hospital, and after examination, doctors told him that the cancer had invaded his lungs… He had run 3,339 miles (5,376 km).

“Terry Fox died, with his family beside him, on June 28, 1981… Terry Fox Runs are held yearly in 60 countries now and more than $360 million have been raised for cancer research.”

My goal that day was much easier: drive to the town of Marathon, Ontario, from Thunder Bay, about 300 km as things are measured locally. I actually like having road distances measured in kilometers on lightly traveled Canadian roads, since they seem to go by quickly. For example, 50 km to go? Ah, that’s only 30 miles. The conversion is easy to do in your head – half + 10%.

Though I have to stress that kilometers should have no place in measuring U.S. roads. Miles to go before I sleep; You can hear the whistle blow 100 miles; I’d walk a mile for a Camel. There’s no poetry to the metric system.

(The conversion of U.S. to Canadian dollars is pretty easy these days too: 75%, or half + 25%. That way a $20 meal magically costs only $15.)

East from the Terry Fox memorial is Ouimet Canyon Provincial Park, which I visited as an alternative to Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, which is highly visible from Thunder Bay but which looks like an all-day sort of place. I preferred to spend the day on the road, stopping where the mood struck.

Ouimet Canyon is striking. A easy walk of 15 minutes or so takes you to the canyon’s edge. Foggy that morning but worth the stop.

There was another place to stop in the park: a pleasant river view seen from a bench not far from the road, but tucked away behind some greenery, so that the road seemed far away. There was virtually no traffic anyway. I sat a while and watched the world go by not very fast. Or at all. I had to listen carefully to realize just how quiet the place is.

Also, the fog had started to burn off. Temps were very pleasant, whether Celsius or Fahrenheit.

The Trans-Canada is King’s Highway 11 and 17 at this stretch. Highway 11 eventually splits off and goes way around to Toronto, including Yonge Street, while highway 17 hews closer to Lake Superior, and is the longest highway in the province. It is the one I eventually drove all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.

Much of the roadside is uncultivated flora. I took this to be fireweed, which meant I was far enough north to see it. I saw it in a lot of places in this part of Ontario.

But sometimes fauna, of the non-wild sort.

I found lunch in Nipigon, pop. less than 1,500. I could have had my laptop repaired, if it had needed work, or bought worms and leeches, if I were in the mood to go fishing. I never am.

Nice church. The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church. Closed, of course.

Nipigon has an observation platform just off the highway, free and open to all, and completed only in 2018.

Naturally I climbed to the top for the vista. I need to do that kind of thing while I still can.

The Trans-Canada crossing the Nipigon River. Elegant, but with a troubled recent history.

The bridge was also completed in 2018. Or rather, it was reopened that year.

“[The reopening] comes nearly three years after the bridge, described as the first cable-stayed bridge in Ontario, failed in January 2016, just weeks after it opened,” notes the CBC. Oops. Apparently no one died as a result, so there’s that.

“Engineering reports found that a combination of design and installation deficiencies caused the failure, which effectively severed the Trans-Canada Highway. Improperly tightened bolts on one part of the bridge snapped, causing the decking to lift about 60 centimetres.”

Further to the east: Rainbow Falls Provincial Park. Another short walk to a nice vista. Another thing to like about this part of Canada.

All together, it was a leisurely drive, but even so I arrived in Marathon, pop. 3,270 or so, before dark – long summer days are a boon up north – and took in a few local cultural sights.

Just the exterior of the curling club. Wok With Chow, on the other hand, provided me dinner that evening, inside and at a table. Good enough chow, and demonstrating just how deeply ingrained Chinese food is in North America.

Fort William Historical Park

Posted on August 15, 2023 by admin

On the last day of July, I stuck up a conversation with a tinsmith. I’d wandered into his shop, a structure he shared with a blacksmith, but the blacksmith wasn’t around, his furnace cool. Tinsmiths don’t need as much heat for their work, so his space was missing a furnace and bellows. The shop was cluttered with tinsmith work, laid out for me or anyone to examine: cups, funnels, pots, candle holders and other items.

“The North West Co. always had tinsmiths working for it,” said the tinsmith, a sandy-bearded and -headed young man in a smock, who went on to share some of his knowledge of tin working with me: the raw tin sheets, actually thin iron sheets with tin coating, the various tools, how the cool shaping was different from shaping hot iron. You only really needed heat for soldering joints, when you’d put an iron soldering rod in a charcoal brazier. This thing he had on hand.

Why made goods here, at a post on the edge of Lake Superior? he asked rhetorically. I guessed the answer before he said it.

“The tinsmiths made trade goods to trade with First Nation peoples for fur pelts,” he said, using a term that is unlikely to have been used 200 years ago.

“Bet they were in high demand,” I said.

“That’s right. Very much so. You know how they heated water before they had tin pots? They’d put heated stones into a leather bag. Tin pots were so much better, but they couldn’t make them themselves.”

Heated stones in leather bags probably hadn’t changed much since the Ojibwa ancestors were new to North America, or more likely well before that.

Then it was my turn to teach the tinsmith something. I asked where the tin came from.

“Cornwall,” he said. “That’s in England, but I’m not quite sure where it is. I’m not too good with geography.”

“You know the peninsula sticking out from the southwest of England? As far southwest as you can go? That’s Cornwall. Devon, then Cornwall, out that way.”

He still looked a little uncertain, but never mind.

“There’s been mining in Cornwall since before the Romans came,” I said. “That’s more than 2,000 years ago. One reason the Romans wanted Britain was for the tin.”

He expressed mild amazement at that.

Not long before our conversation, I’d come to Fort William Historical Park, at the southern edge of modern Thunder Bay, Ontario, where the tinsmith shop and many other buildings stand.

As an open-air museum, Fort William opened a little more than 50 years ago. As an actual North West Co. fur trading post, a major one, its heyday was more than 200 years ago. I understand that the target year the museum is trying to evoke is 1816, not long after the NWC moved here from Grand Portage, and as far as I can tell, it’s spot-on.

The museum and its 42 reconstructed buildings, Ojibwa village and small farm aren’t in the same place as the original. That is several miles (OK, kilometers) away, mostly occupied by a rail yard these days, an interpreter told me. Some, but hardly all of the buildings featured one or more costumed interpreters who were more than happy to talk about their character and his or her times.

The Fort William reconstruction isn’t quite as elaborate as Colonial Williamsburg, but the original settlement wasn’t either, and even so is quite impressive.

Looks empty, but there were a scattering of visitors, along with costumed interpreters, as such the tinsmith, who also happened to be an actual tinsmith. Who better to interpret?

At one moment, another interpreter played his fiddle and yet another one, a woman, led four or five visiting children in a vigorous dance in the main courtyard. Entertainment before electronic gizmos.

Well-stocked interiors, too. Best thing is, you can wander around inside and touch pretty much anything. That’s an advantage of faithful replicas, rather than artifacts.

That last one is the hospital. I also had a chat with the resident early 19th-century doctor, who showed me many horrific medical instruments of the day, such as a bone saw or mechanical leech. Advanced items for such a remote outpost, the doc assured me. Medicines were on hand as well. He discussed several, but the only one I remember now is calamine lotion. Much too expensive to use on itchy bug bites, he said. You just lived with those. Calamine was for serious rashes.

I popped into a large barn-like building to find it stocked with canoes, many hanging from the ceiling, some on the floor, with two interpreters working on building one. A third interpreter, a woman who introduced herself as a member of Ojibwa Fort William First Nation, told me at some length about canoe making as it would have been practiced in 1816. More than I’d ever heard or known before: The raw materials, the sizes and other varieties, how long they lasted (a few seasons), the possible individual markings – figures on the sides.

“This is the most important place in the fort, isn’t it?” I said. She agreed that it was, and the men working on the canoe sounded their approval of the idea (they didn’t talk that much).

You could easily make that case: how could you facilitate pre-modern trade across vast territory connected only by rivers and lakes? No roads, no airplanes, no communication devices. What you had were canoes and muscle power.

More artifacts in more buildings.

Some obsolete currencies I’d never heard of — the Halifax pound and the Halifax livre, for instance.

The reproduction detail is remarkable all around. I don’t think anyone’s buried here.

But I’m sure the original Fort Williams had a small cemetery, its occupants now lost to time.

Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park

Posted on August 14, 2023 by admin

The old real estate saw stresses the three important aspects of a property: namely, location repeated three times. That’s something I thought about at the glory that is Kakabeka Falls on the Kaministiquia River, which passes through part of Ontario and drains into Lake Superior. A drop of about 130 feet in two parts.

The closest city to Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park is Thunder Bay, Ontario, which is only about a 20 minute drive to the east of the falls. Thunder Bay’s population is about 108,000, which is nothing to sneeze at, but also not one of the larger cities in Canada.

If Kakabeka Falls could magically be moved closer to a larger city, even something on the order of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA, I believe the sight would have been several times more crowded than I experienced on July 31 (a Monday) and the entrance fee would be more than the reasonable $5.25 Canadian I paid (about $4). Good thing that kind of magic isn’t real. It would be easier to build a city near the falls.

Back in the fur-trading years, the Kaministiquia River had been a route for voyageurs until the North West Co. decided that the Pigeon River (Grand Portage) was better. That was before the American Revolution. After Grand Portage became part of the U.S., the NWC returned to using the Kaministiquia as a main route.

We see natural splendor at Kakabeka Falls. The voyageurs no doubt saw a pain-in-the-ass obstacle to their forward motion, a place they needed to portage around.

I arrived mid-morning after spending the previous night in Thunder Bay, stopping on the way for breakfast at – where else? – Tim Hortons. The falls were the first of a number of grand sights I’d see in Canada on the drive around Lake Superior. If you can’t see those, why drive such a circuitous route?

Once you’ve had your fill gawking at the falls, which I’d say are in almost in the same league as Niagara, the park offers some hiking trails downriver. I headed off on an easy one.

That one soon connected with a “intermediate” trail – the Little Falls Trail — leading to a small waterfall on a creek that feeds the Kaministiquia. I decided to take that trail, even though I didn’t bother to go back for water or a walking stick, both of which were in my car.

That was a mistake. “Intermediate” means many tree roots, lots of uneven rocks, and some change in elevation, though I’ve been on plenty of steeper trails. I don’t believe I was in any real danger, but it was slow going and I got pretty thirsty along the way. At least I had decent hiking shoes.

Still, I enjoyed the feel of being the Ontario woods. A very small slice of them, considering the vastness of the province. Twice the size of Texas, but a lot more empty.

Eventually the trail led to a pleasant little waterfall.

Then it loops back to the banks of the Kaministiquia, and heads back toward the falls.

With a few vistas along the way, after you’ve climbed a bit.

I might have been thirsty at the end of the trail – and I’ll note here that the small shop near the falls run by Parks Canada sold no cold drinks (and I’d have paid a premium) – but better, I believe, to be a casual walker along this river in our time than a voyageur in a much rougher century, with a voyageur-sized load to carry.

Grand Portage National Monument

Posted on August 13, 2023 by admin

So far since taking office, President Biden has proclaimed five new national monuments under the authority granted him by the Antiquities Act of 1906, including one only last week, with the lengthy name of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, which is in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. (For those keeping score, his immediate predecessor proclaimed five over four years.)

How can we keep up with all the new ones? For now, there are 133 national monuments, with more coming, I’ve read.

Grand Portage National Monument has been around a little longer. Longer than me, but not much, being one declared by President Eisenhower. It occupies land very near the tip of the arrowhead region of Minnesota, within a few miles of the Canadian border, which happens to the Pigeon River at that point.

I arrived fairly late in the afternoon of July 30. The U.S. flag, Minnesota and – what’s the other one?

The flag of the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa; the national monument is entirely within their reservation. More about them is here. Gichi Onigaming = The Great Carrying Place.

“Grand Portage was a fur-trade depot and route of the voyageurs at the western extremity [sic] of Lake Superior,” says the Canadian Encyclopedia. “It was the first and most strenuous of the 29 portages from Lake Superior west to Lac La Croix, requiring that each voyageur carry four loads of 80 kg over some 14 km of rocky trails around the cascades of the Pigeon River.

“The North West Co. (NWC) established an extensive post at the mouth of the river, which by 1784 was the wilderness capital of the fur trade, providing a meeting place for the voyageurs bringing supplies from Montréal (porkeaters) and the traders bringing furs from the North West (winterers). Within the post, which was protected by a 5-m high palisade, reinforced with a bastion and a heavy gate, were the Great Hall, living quarters, shops, warehouses and a stone powder magazine.”

The NWC packed up and left after it was finally determined that, according to the Jay Treaty of 1794, the site was in the United States rather than British North America, though it took some time for the company to actually leave (1802). In more recent times, the United States reconstructed the Grand Hall and the wooden palisades.

Along with Native structures of the period outside the palisade.

Inside the palisade, work still seems to be under way, or at least renovation. The Great Hall wasn’t open.

The North West Co. flag still flies.

As you’d expect, the Great Hall faces Grand Portage Bay. Once upon a time, it was a busy place in the short northern summers. Now, not so much.

Another view of Grand Portage Bay from the edge of the national monument.

Way off in the distance – though not really that far, about 20 miles – is Isle Royale National Park, a large island in Lake Superior, which was more distinct with the naked eye than in the digital image.

Still, I was a little surprised that it is visible at all. Except for some of the Alaskan properties, it’s pretty much the definition of remote among national parks, with only a few more than 25,400 visitors in 2022, according to the NPS. The fifth-least visited park in the system.

Since getting there and staying there is an involved process, I couldn’t make Isle Royale work logistically as a destination. This time.

Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison

Posted on August 9, 2023 by admin

I spent the first night of the drive in Madison, Wisconsin, ensconced in a motel room as a late evening thunderstorm, a powerful one, blew through. Little is so pleasing as the sound of wind and thunder and strong rain outside while you are comfortably in your bed – in a rented room.

The next morning dawned clear and warm. So of course the first place I went was a storied old cemetery, a creation of the 19th-century rural cemetery movement, in this case Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery, dating from 1857. It’s an expansive place.

A small section near the entrance is devoted to Civil War dead.

It was a pre-dog tag war.

A couple of small chapels grace the grounds.

But not a lot of large memorials. Rather, a fair number of mid-sized ones.

Along with many old stones, of course. Some crumbling, as the decades of Wisconsin weather do what they do.

Still, Forest Hill, which is forested but not very hilly, is an active cemetery, with newer stones as well.

Fighting Bob La Follette and some other La Follettes are buried at Forest Hill, but I didn’t look for anyone in particular and didn’t know he was there until later. Seeing his bust at the capitol the day before counted, by my attenuated standards, as visiting a presidential site.

After all, he headed the Progressive ticket almost 100 years ago in ’24, getting a respectable 4.8 million votes (Davis got 8.3 million and Coolidge 15.7 million). He also got some electoral votes – Wisconsin’s 13 — which not all third-party candidates do. George Wallace was the last such candidate to do so, in 1968 with 46 votes, but none can compare to the haul made by TR when he ran as a Bull Moose (88 votes). And I’m not counting the 1860 election; everyone was essentially a third-party candidate that time.

The Wiki data on presidential elections is quite granular. From it, I learned that the county with the highest percentage of Progressive votes in 1924 wasn’t in Wisconsin, but Texas: Comal County, with nearly 74% going for Fighting Bob. That’s a nice go figure fact.

Turtle Creek Parkway, Tanks and White Line Frankenstein

Posted on August 7, 2023 by admin

Tooling along one of southern Wisconsin’s two-lane highways a week ago Friday, the radio station I happened to be tuned into – I’m not giving up terrestrial radio on road trips – introduced a new song by Alice Cooper, with a few words from the artist himself. That got my attention. Alice Cooper, shock rocker of my adolescence, is still making records?

He is, at the fine old age of 75. I never was a big fan of his, except of course for “School’s Out,” but I was glad to hear that all the same. Keep on keeping on, old guy.

For my part, I kept on driving, passing the greens and golds of high corn and the utilitarian buildings that support farming, intersections with gravel roads, hand-painted signs and, now and then, another vehicle. It was an obscenely pleasant July day, clear and warm and not nearly as hot as much of the rest of the country.

The new song came on. Title, “White Line Frankenstein.” Remarkable how consistent Alice Cooper has been through the years. What does he sound like, now that he’s a senior shock rocker? Sounds a lot like young Alice Cooper. A good showman finds something that works and sticks with it, and there’s no arguing his showman abilities.

About half way through the song I was inspired to pull off to the side of the road near where a rail line crossed the road, and take pictures.

Missed the last half of the song, but oh well.

Near Beloit, Wisconsin – close to the town of Shopiere, but not in any town, is a spot called Turtle Creek Parkway, a Rock County park. At four acres, it’s the rural equivalent of a pocket park, with its star attraction across a field next to Turtle Creek: the Tiffany Bridge, or the Tiffany Stone Bridge, vintage 1869, which as far as I know is still a working railroad bridge. (Tiffany is another nearby town.)

More than 20 years ago, I visited the bridge, accompanied by small child and pregnant wife. It wasn’t a park then, just a wide place in the road to stop. Enough people must have stopped there for the county to get a hint, I guess, and acquire and develop the land by adding a boat launch on Turtle Creek, a small rental event building, and a small parking lot.

Regardless, it’s hard to take a bad up-close picture of the structure.

Just a hunch: the arches are too sturdy to destroy in a cost-effective way, so it abides.

Rather than return to the Interstate right away, I headed out from Shopiere onto the small roads where I eventually heard about Alice Cooper. Not long before that encounter, I spotted a tank in the hamlet of Turtle, Wisconsin.

Another former Wisconsin National Guard tank, an M60A3.

It’s part of a plaza honoring veterans of the area. Interesting to run into another tank in southern Wisconsin so soon after the last one. I decided to keep an eye out for tanks on the rest of the drive, and sure enough I spotted more as the drive progressed.

Old World Wisconsin

Posted on July 25, 2023 by admin

On Canada Day this year, we were in Wisconsin. If we’d been in Canada, our Jasper Johns moment probably wouldn’t have happened.

Back up for a little context.

I looked him up, and remarkably, Jasper Johns is still alive at 93, and doing art as of only a few years ago.

We saw the patched 48-star flag on a clothesline of a re-created farm yard at Old World Wisconsin, our main destination during our early July southern Wisconsin dash (a one-day out, one-day back trip, according to my idiosyncratic definition).

Old World is a large open-air museum near Eagle, Wisconsin and Kettle Moraine State Forest. I’ve known about the place for years, probably since camping at Kettle Moraine in the late ’80s, but had never gotten around to a visit, not even with small children in tow. My Wisconsin completist impulses kicked in during the dash, so Yuriko and I went to Old World.

A unit of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the place is large: about 480 acres, with about 60 antique buildings from across the state, and a new brewpub, which I suppose counts as a welcome revenue stream for the nonprofit. Some are town buildings, others farm structures. Many immigrant styles are represented: Danish, Finnish, German, Norwegian, and Polish, and well as in-nation New England and African-American settlers in Wisconsin.

Among the town buildings is St. Peter’s (1839), the first Catholic church building in Milwaukee.

That wouldn’t be the last prominently placed stove we’d see. These were pre-HVAC buildings, after all. Makes me glad for the luxury of central heating, as much as I complain about winter.

More town structures.

The red one is an 1880s wagon shop from Whitewater, Wisconsin.

An 1880s blacksmith shop, with a smithy re-enactor.

And the band played on.

Among the farm structures, you can find this Norwegian schoolhouse.

With a spelling bee ongoing when we dropped in.

Antidisestablishmentarianism wasn’t a word in the bee, though it really isn’t that hard, come to think of it. Scherenschnitte: now there’s a tough one. Unless you’re German.

More farm structures.

More all-important stoves for those long winters. And cooking.

There were a few farm inhabitants, such as chickens and cows. We were able to sample some wonderful ice cream made from fresh milk. Also, we encountered an animal I called Future Bacon.

Yuriko chided me for that, but I’ve seen her eat bacon.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: History