Campground sale brings Knife Island history to light

For decades, Marcie Stolberg has kept the island next to her campground as sacred space, aware of the stories of long-ago Native American battles and tragedy.

It was there, according to the 1937 novel, "Wawina: A Beautiful Story of an Indian Princess" by Chief Northwind (Joseph Northrup's pen name), that two stubborn chiefs refused to make peace, their children met a tragic end, and a huge battle took place.

A walk around Knife Island today reveals mostly undisturbed greenery - trees, wildflowers and grasses - with brown river water meandering past.

A small cabin dating from the 1870s is the one reminder that people lived or camped here long ago, along with the pedestrian bridge that connects it to the river shore. When the water is low, one can see beneath the bridge piles of slate that were brought there in the early part of the last century to keep out the river. When the water is high, the river will run right up to the wooden deck of the bridge or even higher.

Stolberg, who is part Native American, said her grandfather and great grandfather worked and lived at the slate mines that preceded the campground. Both married Ojibwe women for the land privileges that came with the marriage licenses, she said, acknowledging they treated their wives (her grandmothers) badly.

She also heard tales that previous landowners threw bucketfuls of arrowheads into the river, ridding the island of any evidence of the past.

"They were erasing the island's past before it was even ceded territory," Stolberg said.

Now Stolberg's time as steward of the island has also ended, after the sale of both the campground and island to the Minardi family late last month. It was a process that began when she was very sick earlier this year.

A conversation with Stolberg this summer was tinged with regret for how things unfolded the way they did. Many of the antiques she had spent a lifetime collecting were sold at auction, and a box of old documents that go with the land went too, accidentally, she said. But Stolberg retained the 1937 Duluth Herald newspaper page telling about the island and its place in Ojibwe legend. She said she always wanted the island to go to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. "I've been keeping it safe," she said.

In the weeks before the sale, the island was busier than it had been in years.

Fond du Lac officials visited and talked with Stolberg, led by Tim Krohn, land information manager for the Band, and Evan Schroeder, tribal historic preservation officer.

"I've also heard the legends that the reservation started over here," Krohn said, indicating the nearby riverbanks. "We have the legends, but a lot of the details are lost. You need to take the legend and find the details. Those details may change the story, but the themes are still there."

At least two people from the Band's public works department came with ground-penetrating radar devices, which helps identify anomalies in the soil below, showing disturbances that interrupt the natural sedimentation of the soil. The same type of machines have been used recently to find graves of Native American children who died at residential schools in the last century.

Efforts to reach the new owners of the Knife Island Campground were unsuccessful before the Pine Knot News went to press.

The story

"Wawina: A Beautiful Story of an Indian Princess" was originally written by Joseph Northrup as a series of stories published in the Carlton County Vidette newspaper. It is both a war story and a grand romance, but also contains detailed descriptions of day-to-day life in the villages: drying blueberries on racks of hazel brush twigs, the construction of rabbit-fur sleeping blankets, explanations of drums and dances and more.

The book is certainly a product of its time. The incorrect European versions of the tribal names - Sioux and Chippewa - are used. Wawina is described as a princess. There is no hint in the novel that the Dakota had lived in the area later known as Minnesota long before the Ojibwe, or that they co-existed here for many years as well.

Northrup also frequently revisits Wawina's desire to adopt the Christian religion of "love for everyone," and her wish that the "black robes" (priests) of the "paleface" would come and teach her people their practices.

Northrup's story ends with the unsuccessful attempt by Wawina and Black Cloud to make peace between their tribes, followed by Wawina's dramatic fatal stabbing of first her lover, then herself, in despair. The two sides then battle fiercely, with the Ojibwe winning, thanks to the superior strategizing of their chief. But the losses were deep on both sides, with the two chiefs killing each other during the fighting, and the Dakota warriors decimated.

"The Chippewa tenderly gave to the Spirits of the river the bodies of Wawina and her lover and, as they watched them disappear, named the place, Mok-ko-man-oni-gum, Knife Falls, and the portage, Knife Portage," Northrup wrote near the end of his book, allegedly referring to the island next to the campground, just across the Highway 61 bridge from Scanlon. "The Chippewa Indians believe that Wawina and Black Cloud still live on As-sin-min-is as it is called, below the falls. This island is held sacred and is never trespassed upon because they believe the Spirits of the deep are guarding the two lovers.

"The dead Chippewa and Sioux were propped up in a sitting posture, each facing the other as they had in battle. The most prominent places were reserved for the two chiefs who had died facing each other."

It's an image that resonates with Stolberg, who talked about the battle story in a visit with Krohn last month, pointing out depressions near a group of trees that might hide something below. Krohn has maps from the 1820s that show the island.

Wayne Dupuis, head of the Fond du Lac Natural Resources department, pointed out that the island does lie within the original boundaries of the Fond du Lac Reservation. However, like many other agreements between the tribes and the U.S. government and its representatives, the lines were changed before it was signed into law - ultimately leading to a loss of 25,000-30,000 acres. The reservation boundaries start instead miles away from the river.

The book's author, Joseph Northrup, doesn't get into the politics of treaties made and broken, but there are places one can read between the lines and wonder, such as this passage where he describes Wawina with a crucifix she was given by a suitor:

"Raising her arms aloft with the symbol clasped in two hands, she implored Gii-ii-mun-ido to permit the Paleface to come among her people and teach them to forget war, as they had done: to love everyone and live in peace," he wrote on Page 16. "Oh. Wawina! If you could only witness the effect on your people the white man's coming had accomplished."

Fact or fiction?

Northrup's grandson, Vern Northrup, isn't taking sides on the veracity of the story, but neither does the book, which declares the writing "based on personal records as handed down in the primeval wigwam lore, which can be considered more truth than fiction."

"They called him 'Chinoodin,' or 'Big Wind' because he would talk along with the drummers in the drum circle," Vern said of his grandfather. His grandfather got many of his stories from an uncle, Charles Northrup, a powerful medicine man, Vern added.

Vern described Joe Northrup as "prolific," both as a writer and a talker. He had published serialized stories in both the Vidette and the Minneapolis Journal, and allegedly ghost-wrote the book "Moccasin Flower," published in 1935.

"He wrote a lot in the 1930s and 1920s," Vern said of Joe. "He was also the first secretary of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe around the turn of the century and would go to Washington, D.C. a lot. ... He died in 1947, so I never knew him."

The answers to many questions asked today died with him.

We may never know what is true in Northrup's work, and what is historical fiction. It certainly contains many descriptions of life one can also find in history books. And there is a lot of Ojibwe and Dakota history along the river. In the days before Europeans came and cut down most of the trees, the rivers were the roadways, because the trees were so thick it could be difficult to travel through the forests of the Northland.

According to files at the Carlton County Historical Society, an archaeological survey of Knife Island conducted in 1998 before Stolberg purchased the island from Minnesota Power found some prehistoric flakes from stone tools, but no evidence of any burial mounds or great battle.

Dupuis pointed out the story of Wawina and Knife Island doesn't seem to be part of the extensive oral history of the Band.

"I would tend to believe that story wasn't handed down," Dupuis said. "If it was handed down, more people would know about it. ... I'm not saying it's untrue, I'm just saying it isn't widely known beyond the book."

There was a similar battle, however, on Spirit Island farther downstream, near the mitigation site from the old U.S. Steel plant, Dupuis said. The Fond du Lac Band purchased the 6-acre island in 2011 from a Duluth resident for $150,000.

For now, according to attorney Allie Jo Mitchell, the Band doesn't intend to do any further investigation of the island beyond the scans that public works is still analyzing. The Band also never made any kind of offer to buy the island.

"The thing with the whole estuary is people have been traversing it forever," Schroeder said. "So everywhere along the estuary, or river, is an important area to Fond du Lac. But we can't say definitively that one area is more important than another."

Stolberg seems frustrated.

"I kept the island sacred for almost 40 years and used my lifeforce with this sale to fight for the rights of the Ojibwe people to obtain their legend property of the last battle between the Chippewa and Souix," she said. "[It was] a battle won by the Chippewa, securing this area for the Ojibwe and lost hundreds of years later, now, with only myself battling to save it for them."

Some people see legends as just stories, and "that is sad," she added.

Carlton County planning and zoning administrator Heather Cunningham told the Pine Knot that the island itself can't be developed - not because of its history, but according to zoning laws, as it lies within 150 feet of the river.