18 minute read
Grandfather Land
by Liselotte Erdrich
Sioux-Chippewa Peace Conference, Fort Abercrombie, August 1870. The author’s great-grandfather, Joseph Gourneau Jr., wears a white gown in the center of the photo.
State Historical Society of North Dakota, State Archives, 2018-P-012-00009
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I thought it was his name,
until the word for grandfather sunk in. Mooshum was the father of my Grandpa Pat, spoken of in a certain way that conveyed such reverence, presence, that I presumed him still alive on Turtle Mountain. There, my mother grew up in a solid, squared-oak log house built in 1880. Grandpa’s blacksmith anvil sat alongside the northeast corner for decades, the old homestead and fields hidden by dense stands of bur oak and quaking aspen, secluded from the road and modern times. I remember eating Grandma’s light bread, fresh from the Range Eternal woodstove, listening to the talk of grown-ups and my youngest uncle’s pet crow.
In 1956, when perhaps ninety-eight years old, Mooshum was interviewed by Minot Daily News reporter Robert Cory, who wrote, “His biography, if fully written, would recount the history of the Indian people and all they have done, and all they have suffered, to make possible the life we North Dakotans have today.”
An unusual statement in the 1950s, when prevailing federal Indian policy chants and incantations— Emancipation, Relocation, Termination—could officially vanish Native entities finally, permanently, from the geographic conscience. House Concurrent Resolution 108 would dissolve tribal governments and reservations, end federal benefits and services, and otherwise abrogate treaties and agreements by which the government had previously acquired Indian lands. Some twenty million acres were ceded by the Chippewa under conditions of extreme duress following decline of the fur trade, bison hunt, and Red River cart freighting economies that had paved the way for settlement. Today’s Turtle Mountain people were the original workforce, expeditionary units and cultural brokers in those empire-building enterprises, indispensable then but literally starving by the final 1892 “Ten-Cent Treaty,” or McCumber Agreement, extinguishing Chippewa claim to nine million acres of the better land at ten cents an acre. “It was a transition first from the life of a hunter and trapper to that of commercial hunter and freighter, and finally to small farmer,” Cory said of a century seen by Joseph “Keesh-ke-mun-ishiw” Gourneau Jr., whose Indian name translates to “The Kingfisher.”
“Root hog or die,” Grandpa Pat called it, farming the unfarmable lands of Turtle Mountain. He, his wife, and children worked a one-horse market garden business over three decades, selling produce to hotels, restaurants, grocers, farmwives, never going on public assistance even in the 1930s. Mom’s childhood chores included garden work, snaring rabbits, herding cows, churning butter, and selling Grit newspaper while her brothers did hard labor, hunting, trapping.
Grandpa Pat and other tribal chairmen fought hard to defeat the termination proceedings, enlisting support of non-Indians wherever possible—politicians, newspapers, and public officials who could foresee devastating economic costs to the state and county. He had a persuasive manner and love of language, was multilingual, and made friends everywhere he went. Harsh sanctions had been proposed for the tribal debt, which he eliminated by depositing thirty thousand dollars in the US Treasury that had been approved as his salary for the years of his chairmanship. He worked as a night watchman at the Turtle Mountain Ordnance Plant during that time to support his family, taking on the chairman duties in the daytime until 1958. Tribal historian, champion dancer, culture revivalist, the first person I ever knew who wrote a book, he was a goldmine. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” an elder told me. “That’s how our people were,” he added, after a thoughtful silence.
Swept along in the intergenerational struggle, Grandpa Pat nevertheless ensured we could know our collective history while assimilating, relocating, renegading all across the USA. In one rare 1970s long-distance phone call, he mentioned to my sister Adelheid that Sitting Bull rode away to Canada with his father’s long underwear after the Little Bighorn. “What!?” The Sioux camped across the river from Mooshum and his outfit, who were following the buffalo. The Chippewa made a ceremony of gifts to send them on their way, “too risky to associate with.” That sixth-grader won first place in the Historical Research Essay Contest that year, sponsored by Red River Valley Heritage Society.
Mooshum was born at Red Lake, Minnesota, to a roaming band of hunters, on the eve of the upheaval (the 1862 “Minnesota Massacre,” then the 1863 Old Crossing Treaty, then the 1870 railroad, then the settlers). He was present where his father had to make his X mark, “Warrior of Pembina,” on the treaty ceding eleven million acres of the Red River valley: richest soil in the land, a wilderness of grass bounded only by the visible shores of glacial Lake Agassiz. The pipe smoked at Old Crossing was handed down through generations to my grandfather, whose father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been occupied here since the 1700s by the fur trade, large-scale buffalo hunt, and commercial freighting on the Red River cart trails between Pembina, St. Paul, and Winnipeg. Chippewa were recruited as protection from the Sioux in establishing these venues. Their extreme exertions and inroads made settlement possible, but now they had to leave.
Mooshum was baptized by Father Goiffon, the Frozen Priest of Pembina (whose leg was amputated after a sudden blizzard in which he experienced auditory and visual hallucinations and began to eat his horse). He was the son of Kah-isig-iwid, or “Born-on-a-Pile,” Joseph Gourneau Sr. His grandfather was Little Thunder or Animikance, who acted as a double agent in the War of 1812, receiving medals from both the British and Americans while keeping the Chippewa out of the fray, and “well known through the whole country, in consequence of a desperate encounter he had with three Grisly bears” west of Pembina. He too was known as Joseph (Native pronunciation Sooza, Soozay, Soozayf). The great-grandfather of Mooshum was Old Wild Rice (Vieux Folle Avoine, Crazy Oats, Wild Oats, Old Manominee, Old Fallewine, Menominee as recorded in the Pembina fur trade journals of Chaboillez and Henry and pronounced in his family Gay-tay/Mahnoo/min, three words translated: “the old good seed”). This ancestor in 1800 led a brigade of forty-five canoes of warriors aiding Alexander Henry to establish a fur trade post on the Red River, and before that was he documented by Chaboillez to have hunted in an astonishing 1,400-mile circuit with his young men during the winter of 1797 to supply the Pembina post with food and furs.
Around 1970, during his annual summer visit to Wahpeton, Grandpa took us to visit the Fort Abercrombie historical museum. There he saw a photo of the 1870 Chippewa-Sioux Peace Treaty and instantly recognized the anonymous altar boy as his father. Mooshum appears in the center, flanked on either side by the two lines of warriors, a dark face in a white gown beside a pale face in a black gown: Father Jean-Baptiste Marie Genin, who signed his correspondence “Missionary Apostolic to the North West Territories.”
“In his youth he was altar boy for a missionary priest whose parish was larger than a diocese was today,” wrote Cory of the St. Joseph to Pembina to Fort Abercrombie to Fort Totten circuit where Father Genin conducted religious services. Genin also accompanied the Chippewa and Métis people on their months-long annual buffalo hunting expeditions. People received daily sacraments all along the trails and river valleys, across the plains and over the breaks and hills, following the herds. Mass was said every evening. People were born, died, married, and buried. All of North Dakota is sacred and a church.
Two-wheeled Red River carts, invented at Henry’s post around 1800, served as a freight line for the bison hunt and pemmican trade supplying the furbiz and subsequent development of the territory. “The hunts took his people all across northern North Dakota from the Pembina River into what is now Montana, and as far west as Fort Benton on the Missouri and the Milk River along the Canadian border.” On one trip, Mooshum and four other boys were captured by a party of Crow whose scout, wearing a buffalo calf skin, had decoyed them over a hill. His father with two others rode into the Crow camp and demanded their immediate release. The Crow had heard of him, for he was “what is now called Police Chief to enforce tribal law—Ogitchitag, during the prime of his life . . . the Crows were aware that before entering into their camp, they (Ojibways) had the whole camp surrounded ready for battle.” Bison hunts were a highly organized venture (with sometimes hundreds of carts) governed by Plains Indian law, which dealt harshly with offenders, be they Chippewa or not.
Linda Slaughter, in Leaves from Northwest History, stated, “Father Genin was idolized by the Indians and halfbreeds of the northwest as no other man has ever been.” Miraculous works were attributed to Genin, handed down in stories, including one about his altar boy fetching water far out on the thirsty plains, at the divine insistence of Genin. Probably this boy could find water when he had to. Genin was credited for peaceful progress as civilization and military presence expanded west to Bismarck. According to Slaughter, whenever Genin approached a Catholic camp in the hostile region with his missionary flag carried “by an orphan Indian boy whom he had adopted, all the warriors in the camp would rush forth to meet him and falling upon one knee would fire volley after volley of salutes from their guns into the air.” This white flag with a red cross signaled a peaceful mission, like the original protection symbol declared at the 1864 Geneva Convention.
Father Genin the Legend was dissected by Terence Kardong, OSB, in Beyond Red River, citing church authorities who regarded him as a “renegade priest” and “pathological liar.” If so, Genin told the truth when he wrote to eastern newspapers reporting maltreatment of the Indian people by military authorities. Mooshum remembered meeting up with survivors of the Chief Joseph fight fleeing to Canada in 1877, and never forgot their miserable condition and suffering. Father Genin described how the Nez Perce refugees staggered into the camp of the buffalo hunters, where they received first aid and food. Nearly all were wounded; one had severed one of his hands and both feet to escape chains by which soldiers had bound him. His probably fatal action was attributed by Genin to the Indian dread of public hanging.
The author’s parents on their wedding day. On the left is Mooshum, second from right is Kookum.
In winter 1887–88 Father Genin reported 151 people died of starvation at Turtle Mountain when rations were withheld by military officials pending the final treaty negotiations. In that terrible winter, Mooshum traveled by dog team to Mountain City to haul what flour he could get. For his labor he was allowed one ten-pound sack of flour, which had to be rationed out among several families at home. The trader’s wife harshly rebuked her husband for wanting to supply more. Mooshum took a widow and twin babies by dogsled to Red Lake, where she had relatives. He found a lone old bison bull in a snowbank, which kept them alive. In the spring he made two more trips to Mountain City with four-horse teams, to haul more flour to the hungry people at Turtle Mountain. He later became a trusted employee of the trader LaRivierre, being a hunter and freighter throughout the territory from the Red River area to the Missouri breaks in Montana. In fact he was one of those freighters on the Mouse River trail, and on the trail between the Souris valley and Fort Buford, who hauled supplies through the valley where Minot stands, before there was a Minot.
He was a hunter for the big Hotel Wamduska which, having been built where the railroad did not materialize, became a lodge for wealthy sportsmen and those seeking a quickie divorce available in Dakota Territory. He and other hardy Chippewas carried the US mail along the northern tier and down to Bismarck. One thing Mooshum remembered vividly was when he first saw a train crossing the trestle in Minot in 1886. A mountain of buffalo skulls and bones was waiting for it. As with other such newly sprung towns on the Great Plains, buffalo bones were the first and only cash crop to be shipped from the railhead to carbon and fertilizer factories in St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit. Penniless folk could get maybe eight dollars a ton from buyers. Frontier teamsters like Mooshum, hauling supplies to remote military posts and settlements, were able to increase their profits by gathering bones on the return trip.
Next year the price was way down but the Minot paper noted, “Quite a number of cowboys and half-breeds are on our streets nowadays. They are gathering bones and drawing them into town.” A sad substitute for the Red River hunt, but the cart trains squeaked and shrieked across the plains again, sustained by the buffalo one last time in the hour of need. One hundred and three teams, about five hundred Métis, hauled bones into Minot on July 3, 1889—just in time for the Fourth of July celebration. These people actually cleared the land for the plow by removing the bones littered all across the state.
Mooshum recalled the year 1876 particularly. He was a teenager with a party of Indian families who once wintered on the Souris at what was called “the wintering place” near the mouth of the Wintering River. The place was south of where the city of Towner now is. Fish and game were still found there, and it gave the party an early head start over the Pembina and St. Joe people on the long trek into Montana come springtime. By that time buffalo were disappearing in their former range, and it was a long way to the western hunting grounds. With the coming of springlike weather that year, his father sent him on horseback to the Wakopa trading post in Manitoba, Canada, on the near central north edge of Turtle Mountain to purchase a few needed items. He bought some tea, sugar, tobacco, a few other items and a little whiskey for medicine. He left Wakopa early in the morning, skirted the Turtle Mountain range westward to its end, and then southward on the edge of the hills on the west end. When he reached the middle part of the west end, he climbed a high hill and sat there on his horse enjoying the scenery. Off in the distance, he spied three horsemen coming from the southwest, members of the wintering party who had come to meet him. The three horsemen turned out to be his father, his uncle Kahishpah, and an older brother.
Later that year, when the hunting parties of Pembina and St. Joe had joined together in a big encampment on the Milk River in northern Montana, news of the Custer annihilation reached them. Sitting Bull made a one-night camp across the river from the hunters, at which time the ownership of Mooshum’s long underwear was transferred.
My grandfather said of Mooshum, The first thing to say is that he grew up as a man of integrity. He possessed great ambitions to accomplish deeds to make life easier to live under; he was the only member of his family capable to speak the English language good enough to be understood. All his brothers and sisters could barely speak a few words in the English language. Some of the advantages he acquired from speaking good enough English and French was when he had to deal with Traders, Missioners, and being a Commercial Hunter to supply meat to hotels and restaurants when the towns grew to be the size to have them. After the Turtle Mountain reservation was fully established in 1884, he kept wandering around as a hunter, trapper and bone picker until he was thirty-two years of age to help support his parents, and once in a while some friends or relatives. But before that and years afterward, he made his living as best he could on the plains and in Turtle Mountain. He hauled buffalo bones finally under contract, but the day finally arrived when he had to discard a large pile of bones which he did not yet deliver before bone use was stopped. His bone picking spot covered the area northwest of Minot and northeast of Williston, a little over halfway up to the Canadian boundary.
He remained deeply religious, which was the norm for his people, walking fifteen miles to Mass every day and taking his gun in case he found food out in the bush. As a boy he wanted to become a priest because of the impression made on him by Father Genin. Turtle Mountain had been a land of bounty as a hunting, gathering, and wintering spot, but could not support a large sedentary population all the year around. Fur and game animals were rapidly depleted. The people were destitute but remained patient and prayerful in the face of their increasingly desperate situation. Agent Brenner reported in 1883 that they did not wish to do anything to endanger their friendship with the US government while their affairs were still pending. Another agent, F.O. Gretchell, wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs describing the reservation and its people:
Mooshum married in 1893 and settled down to become a family man and farmer on the Turtle Mountain reservation. He and Eliza had thirteen children, of whom eleven survived infancy. He was known as a good farmer, in the small way possible for him to operate under limitations of the land allowed him, said Grandpa Pat:
Mom recalled visiting Mooshum with her father, who conversed with him at great length as he sat in his rocking chair smoking his pipe, remembering the old days. She could not understand the Native tongue that was used; Grandpa was careful to use only English with his children. Every once in a while, Mooshum would stop talking and fill his pipe and smoke. Then he would resume the narrative, gesturing with his pipe toward Canada or Montana or Minnesota or whatever place he was telling Grandpa about. Although she longed to know what was being said, children were raised to respect their elders and never interrupt or seek attention. Also, if they were good, they might get a peppermint. Mooshum kept these in a brown paper sack in the little box next to his rocking chair, with his pipe and tobacco. They were the pink chalky type, purchased from bulk at the Big Store in Belcourt. At the conclusion of a visit, Mooshum would call the children over, one at a time by name, and give each a peppermint—just one.
LISELOTTE ERDRICH has worked in Indian health and education programs since the 1980s and occasionally writes fiction, essays, and children’s books. Sacagawea (Lerner Publishing, 2003) received International Reading Association Children’s Choice and Teachers’ Choice Awards, National Council on the Social Studies Carter G. Woodson Award, and was a National Festival of the Book “50 States 50 Books” pick for North Dakota.
NOTES & SOURCES
1. The biographical sketch of Joseph Gourneau Jr. was in Robert Cory’s column “Tumbling Around These Prairies,” Minot Daily News, 1956, date unknown.
2. The tale of Father Goiffon is told in sources including Terence G. Kardong, OSB, Beyond Red River: The Diocese of Fargo One Hundred Years 1889–1989 (Fargo, ND: Richtman’s Printing, 1988), 30–31.
3. The Pembina canoe brigade roster is given in Elliot Coues, ed., New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry, Fur Trader of the North West Company, and of David Thompson, Official Geographer and Explorer of the Same Company, 1799–1814, 2 vols. (New York: F.P. Harper, 1897). The French, English, and Native names of the individual Ojibway are listed. Various observations on the Pembina natives and furbiz happenings are also found in Harold Hickerson, “Journal of Charles Jean-Baptiste Chaboillez, 1797–1798,” Ethnohistory 6, nos. 3 and 4 (1959).
4. Pat Gourneau papers, personal collection. These papers include oft-undated correspondence and writings on tribal history, politics, culture, linguistics, storytelling, family lore, and various other topics, as well as a series of tribal chairman newsletter columns for the Turtle Mountain Agency, commenting on current and historical events. The italicized passages are all from Pat Gourneau, and distinguished in text as a familiar voice still guiding this writer.
5. Patrick “Au nish e naubay” Gourneau, History of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, 6th ed. (Rolla, ND: Star Printing, 1974), 11.
6. Harold Hickerson, “Genesis of a Trading Post Band: The Pembina Chippewa,” Ethnohistory 3, no. 4 (Fall 1956): 299.
7. The story of Little Thunder, who survived a horrific shredding by three grizzly bears in present-day North Dakota, is told by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Personal memoirs of a residence of thirty years with the Indian tribes on the American frontiers: with brief notices of passing events, facts, and opinions, A.D. 1812 to A.D. 1842 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co, 1851).
8. Turtle Mountain agency quotes are in Verne Dusenberry, “Waiting for a Day That Never Comes: The Dispossessed Métis of Montana,” in The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, ed. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 119–36.
9. Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1952) includes the observations of Father Genin at the scene of the Chief Joseph tragedy.
