University Place

The Northwoods Canoe Journals of Howard Greene, 1906 - 1916

– Today we are pleased to introduce Martha Greene Phillips as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum’s employees. Martha Green Phillips began writing after retirement from a career in the mental health field. Her first book, “The Floating Boathouses on the Upper Mississippi River: Their History, Their Stories,” was self-published. With the success of that book, she began working on her father’s journals, now published as “Border Country: The Northwoods Canoe Journals of Howard Greene, 1906 to 1916.” Martha divides her time between a home on the Wisconsin River and a home in Madison, enjoying an outdoors lifestyle in the woods and on the water. Please join me in welcoming Martha Greene Phillips. (crowd applauds)

– Thank you all for coming. I’m pleased to be here today to talk about my book, which I always like to do, but also just to present to the Wisconsin Historical Society. They were tremendously helpful to me in this process, and they will be the eventual owners of this set of archival journals, so it all comes together. The Wisconsin Historical Society looms large in my family’s history. They’ve always been involved with it, and the culture of preserving history is really significant in my family tree. I want to acknowledge before I go any further the University of Minnesota Press who published my book, the Wisconsin Historical Society who did an incredible job on handling the photographs. I had the original journals, which you’ll see a slide of in a moment, and have all my dad’s original photos in them. The negatives were damaged in a house fire, and so we lost all the glass plates, all the original large format negatives. So the Wisconsin Historical Society stepped in to copy those. They made actual photographs of all the original photos to get the quality that it ended up. So a great deal of thanks to them. And finally to the university, excuse me, to the Minnesota Historical Society for a grant that helped with the publication as well. The book is a decade’s worth of annual canoe journeys into the wilderness of the Northwoods between 1906 and 1916.

The journeys went along the border in the UP, along northern Wisconsin, and up in what’s now Boundary Waters and Quetico, and I’ll go into more detail about those in a moment. But first I want to tell you about my connection to it. I grew up in a home that bridged a previous century and the mid-20th century. My father was born in 1864 during the Civil War. He grew up in Milwaukee, his father was a business owner, a pharmacist, also a Victorian amateur naturalist. And my father went to prep school in Milwaukee, he went to the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1886, one year after Frederick Jackson Turner, if that name is familiar to you. They were no doubt in classes together, which is fun to think about. My dad began raising a family and gradually took over his father’s wholesale drug company. During those early years, he was busy raising a family, getting the company back on an even keel after several financial panics and things that were taking place in the 1890s. He was in the Spanish-American War, and he was ready for a break.

He wanted to get his boys, his young sons, out of Milwaukee, avoid the Victorian niceties and get them out roughing it. Very much in the Theodore Roosevelt style. So he started taking them on camping trips, and the journals are the result of those camping trips. But to bring you up, totally up to speed on this, many years later Howard Greene found himself a widower, grown children, and at that time he married my much younger mother and had a second family. All those questions marks that you have. (crowd laughing) I’m the youngest of all of the children. (laughing) In our home wilderness and the Northwoods were very present. My dad could recite Longfellow’s Hiawatha at the drop of a hat, including the parody verses, “Hiawatha’s Mittens.” Are any of you familiar with that? It’s, “He killed the noble Mudjokivis. Of the skin he made him mittens, made them with the fur side inside. . . ” It just goes on. I heard all those growing up. Paul Bunyan stories abounded as well. I still remember the cook’s helpers greasing the pancake griddle with strips of bacon for skates. So that was part of my lore growing up. My dad’s office was nearly shingled with black and white photos, old black and white photos, studies of waterfalls and lakes and Native Americans. And he had in a cabinet by his desk a set of handmade leather bound journals, containing the narratives and the large format photos that documented his canoe journeys into the north. After my mom died, I inherited the journals, and I will start to tell you about them now. This is a copy of my book, which is substantial. (crowd laughing) I really appreciate the job the press did. I can tell you more about that. This is a picture of the actual journals. They’re about this big, leather bound, handmade, hand bound. He made a copy for each camper that went along. So originally there were many, many more. I think I have the only complete set left. There is a nearly complete set in the Newberry in Chicago, and that was donated by the grandson of one of the young campers. This is my dad, looking very Teddy Roosevelt-ish with those glasses.

Here’s my dad in the Spanish-American War. And my dad growing up with his older sister. This is my grandfather’s fossil collection in Milwaukee. He’s an amazing Victorian naturalist and I showed that picture not only because I would have loved to have grown up with that but because I think that really had an influence on my dad, he was a natural historian. He was always interested in rocks and trees and what kind of a plant is this and what kind of a vegetable or animal it might be. The first trip they took was on the Wisconsin River. And, at that point, he didn’t know what was ahead, that he would start maintaining these journals and tell the whole story. But he wanted to take his son Howard camping, and he got his good friends, he had two outdoorsy men friends, to go along on the trip, and they started off to do the Wisconsin River from the origin down to Kilbourn, or the Dells. His son Howard got sick and was in the hospital, and they though he could join them later so they went ahead. But during this trip he started writing detailed letters to Howard every day about what was going on, and part way through realized he had the makings of a journal.

Howard never could join them on the trip. But he put together this initial journal which did not have the photos mounted in it. It was a much smaller work, but was the beginning. This is Clay, one of the other campers, with Doc, one of the other campers. Doc is one of dad’s good friends. He was an OB/GYN in Milwaukee, the ultimate outdoorsman, always hunting, fishing, going off somewhere whenever he could get away from women that were due any minute. That trip was a good trip. The journal is interesting. It’s probably most interesting just for the fact that he could write a letter almost anywhere along the Wisconsin River, leave it at a settler’s house, it would get on a train. It would be in Milwaukee the next day. He could have an answer the next day. Just amazing communication by mail. And some telegraph too, but mostly by mail. After that trip they really wanted to get, they realized they wanted to do it again. They got a lot more organized about it, and they wanted to get out a little more remote. So they tried the St. Croix. And I think that the St. Croix jumped– I have to make a lot of guesses here as to their rationale. I think it jumped into their choice list because of all the publicity that was going on about the Brule River and the St. Croix as a possible waterway. It’s a traditional Native American waterway trade route, but during the 1880s they were actually talking about building locks and canal to make that a full waterway from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. So it would have been around a lot that way. And it would have been present because the Brule River was a favorite place for all of the Milwaukee gentlemen to go to lodges. And so they’d go off to lodges and come home. And he would have heard that discussion in the clubs over cigars in port, I think. A picture of the campers, just two of my half-brothers on the middle and right and the other is Clay, this young man that was on almost all the journals, another friend of my dad’s and the family dog Di who went on almost all the trips. A picture of the cook. They always hired a young man who was idled from logging season in the summer to come along as a cook. They did not have guides in the sense that we would now if we went out on an outfitted trip, as I did just last week.

The guides knew where we were going, they helped us pack, they told us all, there was none of that. The men were totally on their own, but they had help with the cooking and a little bit of the hefting. The Bateau on the bottom I just think are lovely. And those are significant in the Bateau canoe history of the Midwest. I could talk a while about that. Pictures from this trip, they’re on the ferry across at Pansy, Wisconsin, one of the many logging dams there on the right. When they had time in camp, they fixed things. And what they’re doing here is sewing a tent fly. Tents, at that time, did not have sewn-in floors. They did not have mosquito netting. They were just shelters. Heavy, canvas shelters. So they were sewing a tent fly because they had some time and had the materials along. They carried a huge amount of freight. Here is the Wan-na-genner Camp cook shack for the logging company that was doing a log drive on the St. Croix. So they got to witness a log drive. They also had fun with music. Mandolins were huge at the turn of the century. High schools and colleges had mandolin clubs.

So the boys took their mandolins and Doc bought a drum from a Native America along the way. So that’s them making music when they had a little free time. The next trip they went on was the Presque Isle in the Upper Peninsula. Are any of you familiar with the Porcupine Mountains and that? It’s a nearly vertical river. It’s just scary to walk along. It’s so steep. They chose it, my dad wrote to a couple of people he knew in logging and he said what about the Presque Isle? And one said I don’t think you’d like it, and the other said it would be a fine river. It’d just be a great river for canoeing, so they went off because that was the only information they had. (crowd laughing) And the first few feet were just wonderful and calm. There’s a nice. . . (crowd laughing) Nice scene. That’s one of his hand drawn maps. They could not buy maps of the areas they were going to, so they drew maps from the USGS maps, which were the only ones available. Actually, I have one. This is for later trips, but this is the kind of thing they took along. This is annotated after the trips. But they did all these on linen style paper.
– That’s their hand drawing?

– Yes, from a USGS map. Right. Along the way, things were still going well. They had lunch under the railroad trestle. And they ran into a prospector. And that’s a prospector’s little railroad cart thing and they used that for portage. It was all wonderful yet at that point. Things got a little rougher, and my youngest half-brother Carl, who will show up in many pictures and is the second picture in there on the left, was a character and an artist, so he often did little cartoons. This little cartoon is Billy Mack, one of the adults on the trip, really got almost a broken rib from a canoe running into him on a portage. Again, looking fairly peaceful except things have already gotten wet. My dad’s camera equipment got wet. He is changing plates there in the field, and he did some developing in the field. And in the upper left you might see a cloth with a little pile of nondescript stuff on it. All the men smoked pipes, all the men had their own kind of tobacco that they really chose. It all got soaking wet, and they were so desperate that they put it all on a piece of blanket and held it over a fire to dry it so that they could all have pipe tobacco for the rest of the trip. A peaceful scene at the end of the river. It’s beautiful as it enters Lake Superior. But they had been impossible portages. If you can see the picture on the right, there’s a canoe coming down a bank of rocks. There were no portages. That’s old growth forest right up to the edge of the river, so there were no portage trails and the only way to portage was through the waterfalls. And I forgot to mention that just before they went up there they had had 10 inches of rain in that area. It’s kind of like what happened a month ago. The railroads were washed out. Ashland was under 10 inches of water. And they couldn’t know that. They got there and they heard there had been heavy rains. Weather forecasting and reporting was pretty minimal. So the river they took was even worse than if you go up there and walk along it and know that river. It was pretty scary, but they did survive. And it was the benchmark for all of their trips.

When it was all done, like all adversity and adventure, it was wonderful and they were so glad they’d gone. The next trip they went up into what’s now Boundary Waters in Quetico. They started off in Winton near Ely and went in on a route through all the lakes that are shown in that picture, a different route each time they went. The rainy lake trip is probably everyone’s favorite, if they get hold of a journal and start reading it. This is driving into Winton, and just to show you, this is one of Carl’s little pictures, but they took trains to Duluth, took another train to Ely, then it was horse and buggy out to their put in place. And that’s how they got there. Cars came along a little later, especially up in the north country. They’re at a fishing dock, and I mention that fishing dock because the fishermen were sending fresh fish to the Chicago market. They would pack it with ice from the ice houses, the railroad would change the ice all along the way, and fresh fish would be in the Chicago market within two days of being caught in Lake Superior. Again, the train travel was amazing then.

The man on the left is Ranger MacDonald. He’s one of the first Canadian rangers. They started about 15 years earlier as sort of logging police, but this is when they really came park rangers. And they ran into Ranger MacDonald, the man on the left, many times, and he helped them find a good portage route because, again, they were inventing their own and trying to figure out where to go. So the ranger’s notes were very helpful to them. That’s Ranger MacDonald’s list of how you should go from this lake to that lake and avoid problems. While they were up there, there were still loggers operating, so there was steam launches in those lake systems hauling out lost logs and things like that. A group of men in a York boat collecting old logs. The picture on the right is as they were leaving. They did not wear suits and hats while they were canoeing, but they always took one set of clean clothes for the train trip home. So that’s their exit picture. (crowd laughing)
– The picture on the left, that was one of the ones I remember most from the book. Their faces of those guys in the book, captures that life.
– It does.
– Tough characters.

– Oh, it was not an easy life up there. The prospectors, the loggers, the people who were hanging out up there. And that’s one of the things that makes these journals so significant is that there were other “white” people up there, but they weren’t keeping journals and taking pictures. And my dad’s time and place was perfect. As far as anyone I’ve ever talked to, this is the only set of things from this era. The only written documents. Washing clothes in camp. What I think is a remarkable picture for his camera equipment. A nighttime picture which he said he took by flashlight. Flashlights had just started around 1909, I think, in that era. They were just starting to get popular, so he probably had one along. They didn’t use flashlights. They used lanterns.
– A headlight maybe?

– I’m not sure. My rule was if I didn’t know, I didn’t say when I was doing my editing and additional information for the book. It could be. Someone may know more than I. They had carbide things. Anyway, he said he took this picture by flashlight and I’ve always liked it. They went to a lot of Native American villages. Generally, the people in the villages would be happy to have pictures taken. They wanted to tobacco or some gift. That was just the standard transaction. Native American graves. For the most part, in spite of using language that we don’t approve of anymore, I think my dad and his friends were fairly respectful, and, for the first few trips, they didn’t touch anything. The last trip they took something from a cache. They got a little more comfortable with it. But I feel pretty good about them. The picture on the left is they made a sale. They’re using, that’s a folding boat by the way. They had folding boats in 1909. But often they used what we would call a kayak paddle for canoeing in that kind of situation. The picture on the right, I just thought was a gorgeous young Native woman. She was selling blueberries to the crew as they came through. Gold mining was still going on in the Rainy Lake region.

I talked to the historian at Voyageurs National Park and she was so excited because my dad had named this mine and they knew there was this mine on this island and another, but they didn’t know which was which. So the book provided her what she needed. The next trip was the Dawson Trail, which is also in the same area, not up toward Alaska or anything. Dawson did a survey route of the Canadian/US border, and my dad tried to follow the route of that Dawson route. It was a route set up for the military to put down the Creole rebellion, if any of you are familiar with that history. A lot of interesting history there. But they went in again, this time going in from out of Cok-adin, Canada, and went through what is now the Boundary Waters in Quetico again. So it’s another route. The two routes are shown on that little map that’s down there. The route was marked by lone pine trees.

That was how Native Americans and other people marked routes. They would clear away the area under a pine tree and keep it that way so you could see, okay, that’s where the portage is going to be, in addition to the other scrapes and other things that they would use to show the route. After a portage, just looking wiped out. They did a lot of portaging. They were carrying a huge amount of freight. My friend, Mike, added it up for this trip that he thought they were carrying about 1,500 pounds of stuff at the beginning of the trip, because they’d be carrying 100 pounds of flour, 100 pounds of potatoes, wooden crates, no Gore-Tex, no any of those lightweight things. The dam on the left is from the original Dawson route, and it was still there at that time. It was fun to see that. And some of the Canadian rangers again that showed up here and there on their trips. A palisade that most people will recognize who are regular Boundary Water canoeists. And drying blankets over the fire. Wool blankets and they bivouacked most of the time. They didn’t have sleeping bags. Sleeping bags were just coming into use, and so they carried old blankets. My dad had his Spanish-American War Hudson Bay blanket, which I still have and we’ve used for picnics and things over the years. A group of Natives just going to another village. A cache they came across. One of the fellows who went along regularly had an uncle, he was Canadian, and he had an uncle who had had a Hudson Bay post in one of these lakes and they found it. So this is an old Hudson Bay post in a lake in the middle of the Quetico. This is the store at Kettle Falls.

Are any of you familiar with Kettle Falls up in the Rainy Lake region? Okay, for people from that area it’s a huge store. Just a store they stopped at. And you can see that they have a launch that comes in, if you can read that signage, every few days and picks up people. They were able to buy flour. I think they bought a chicken. I think they had a chicken from there. The next trip was the Pigeon Outfit which was near the Pigeon River marking the Canada border up by Thunder Bay. It wasn’t actually on the Pigeon River, but they were in backwater. And this was a base camp trip. They took a steamer up Lake Superior and went to Hovland, which was called Chicago Bay at that time, up near Thunder Bay. And they went into a logging camp and used the logging camp as their base and went to the different islands. The picture on the right was the rooming house where they stayed in Hovland, and it is still there in someone’s backyard. It was kind of fun to see it. It’s coming down but it’s still there. That’s my dad taking pictures on the trail. On the right is the little Hovland Post Office. A trip up the tote road to the logging camp. That, if you look for the tote road between Hovland and Pine Lake, McFarland, you go up a trail and you see that exact same vista. And I took pictures of it up there. It was kind of fun to, that’s exactly where my dad was when he took the pictures.

They used the logging camp kitchen as their kitchen. And I’ll go into– I don’t want to talk too long, the picture on the left is a raft that my young half-brother Carl improvised to get across the lake. And it’s kind of amazing he made it, but he found those things on a beach and cobbled it together and cut out some of the hiking trip back to camp. The picture on the right is of Frank Kugler’s settlement. Frank Kugler, the man on the left, was an Austrian immigrant who came up there wanting to get away from religious persecution, from people telling him what to do, et cetera. He was a trapper. He was just trying to make a good life for himself. He owned the land on two sides of a little creek that connected Pine and McFarland Lake. The logging company who were hosting my dad were very angry with him because he was charging them a fee for taking their logs through that little tributary. And so they had a big fight going.

My dad, after meeting this man, ended up liking him so much I think he sided with him instead of the logging company. The logging company blew up his little tributary there one day while he was out and wrecked his house and things, but they wanted their access and that’s how it was done back then. The third trip up in that general area of northern Minnesota, the Quetico, was from Tower, Minnesota, to Ranier. This was a different kind of a trip than the others because a lot of the boys couldn’t go. They’d gone off to college, you know? Over this period of time, the kids grew up and had their own interests. So he went with a much lighter number of people and different people on this trip. Portaging by horse and buggy on the left. I just want to mention that. They would find someone who was around, some settler or something, and say, “I’ll follow you for a dollar,” which was pretty much a week’s wages for a logger at the time and that helped. This is the Vermilion River Gorge, which is near Crane Lake, Minnesota, up south of International Falls.

They learned how to do some log rolling in their spare time from the camp cooks. And this was black fly protection on the right. My dad taking notes in camp. And some of the Native Americans that he photographed. This picture on the right was over his desk and I remember as a child I found it otherworldly. They women looked like they were 100. They were probably 40. I mean, such a hard life. But that always intrigued me, those two women and that teepee. One of my favorites of his shots. The new Kettle Falls dam, which everyone thinks has been there forever but was being built while he was there. Another Native village. One of the maps that they used for reference was an old gold mining map from the area. Gold mining was huge there until gold was discovered in California, and then everyone took off. The last trip was on the Chippewa River. And this was a much, this was definitely camping light. He went with a nephew from the east coast. He wanted to do another trip. World War I was looming on the horizon. A lot of things were going on and I think he thought it might be the last trip for a long time.

So they took off on the Chippewa, which is a very nice trip and it’s a lovely place. I could track some of that myself by canoe. I’m not a portager and a Boundary Waters canoeist by any means, but I could do this trip. That’s the new Radisson Dam, which is still there as it is. It hasn’t changed much. Just some nice views. Another picture of my dad with his camera. And the end of the book. I think I have about two minutes. I want to share– There’s a lot more I could tell you, but I wanted to share one thing with you, which was– Just a second here. I’ll go to the book. They had for their Dawson River trip, or Dawson Trail trip, they had to go through Canadian customs. So they had to list absolutely everything they took. And that is a gift to all of us because he has this typed list of all the things he had to take. And it told me more about how they camped than anything else. I will not read you all the columns, but just for example, they took all their tents, the canvas tents, the ground cloths, extra paddles, I mean all the things you would expect to take on a trip like this. They took a diddy bag for sewing. They took a writing paper for the journal. They took a repair outfit, tulle, wire, nails, cloths, screws, tacks. I mean, they were ready.

There was nothing out there. They had to be ready for everything. They took a quart of orange shellac and a pound of white lead, and that was canoe repair. We’re talking about canvas canoes, and they were repairing in camp all the time. The picture of Doc repairing the canoe is up there, isn’t it, Mike?
– Yeah.

– Yeah. It’s by the front. They took bake ovens, bake oven pans. They made bread in camp on their days off. I mean, everything they took, they made. There were dried foods. There were dried beans and the usual things we’d expect, but they were carrying everything. They took a case of Carnation milk. They took a hundred what they called stereos. It was a beef bouillon tablet that they made some things with. 50 pounds of Oleo. Three pounds of baking powder. 25 pounds of prunes, dried prunes. (crowd laughing) A dozen Pettijohn’s breakfast food in two-pound packages. 30 pounds of cornmeal. Just huge amounts of stores for their pantry. One of the most interesting, and then I will close up and we’ll go to questions later, one of the things that they cooked a lot, my dad had a great sense of humor, a lot of wit, and he referred to as dynamite soup. And I had no idea. A lot of these things I had to look up long and hard to find out what on Earth he was talking about. But the dynamite soup kept alluding me. And then, finally, I found some reference to Erbswurst, which they took a lot of. And Erbswurst was basically a split pea soup dehydrated, put in sausage casings. So it was very portable, easy, very nutritious, and it looked like dynamite sticks. So smoked and, you know, so they could throw that into a kettle of water and have a good meal. But he kept referring to dynamite soup, and finally I learned from some reenactor online that that had been a ration in the Franco-Prussian War.

That’s what the soldiers carried for war health. So I found a reenactor who was remaking Erbswurst, and I don’t think he called it dynamite soup, but it was very clear they were talking about the same thing. But there were so many things in here like that that I had enjoyable hours researching but took a lot of figuring out what on Earth they were carrying. So that is basically the run of the book. I just touched on a few things. I can answer questions later and will be glad to share and sign books, if anybody wants to buy one. I have bookmarks whether you buy a book or not. If you would like one, I’d be glad to share those with you. I really enjoyed doing the book. I wanted to get these journals out into the public. I felt strongly that they shouldn’t be sitting on our family’s bookshelves forever where no one could see them. And although I plan to give them to the Historical Society, I thought if I just gave them there they could sit on a shelf for a long time and some grad student would come along in 25 years and say I wonder what these are but not have the information I did. And even in the five or six years that I worked on this, I lost some of my oldest family members that knew my dad that could help answer some things. My dad lived until I was 13, which was good, but I was hardly adult enough to ask him questions about these. So, I was kind of– (crowd applauds) Thank you.