Wannaskan Almanac for May 3, 2018

On this Day in ....

1865: John Campbell, head of an outlaw band that had murdered the Jewett family of Garden City, is hanged by a crowd of eight hundred angry men in Mankato. Caught in Mr. Jewett's clothes, Campbell claims during his mock trial that Indians had committed the crime, captured him, and forced him to wear the victim's clothes. The "jury" finds him guilty but recommends waiting for a real trial before handing down his punishment. The mob persists, however, and Campbell eventually confesses to the crime.
   
1959: After passing through the St. Lawrence Seaway, which had opened on April 25, the British freighter Ramon de Larrinaga becomes the first deep draft ocean ship to enter Duluth's harbor.
   
1989: Charlotte Day, founder of the Red School House (St. Paul), dies. A member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe, Day founded the school to meet the needs of American Indian children, teaching Indian languages and culture as well as English reading and math skills in Indian contexts.

Strange that two out of three events on this day included ‘Indians’, the first of which implicated them in a murder, and the third of which was Red School House, a school for Native American youth unknown to me, and likely others as ignorant as myself, started by Charlotte Day, an Ojibwe woman born in St. Francis, Ontario, Canada, and grew up at the Nett Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, south of International Falls.
http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00878.xml
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/172218920/charles-allen-day

For the last 8 years, my wife and I have been driving between NW Minnesota and NW Wisconsin to visit our youngest grandson, his folks and family in Red Cliff, an Ojibwe reservation, near the Apostle Island chain. Beginning with his birth, we began getting acquainted with the northern Wisconsin region, an area that holds special significance to my wife beyond the birth of her youngest grandson, that being the Chequamegon Bay and Ashland Wisconsin, is where her grandparents lived and were married.
Originating along the Saint Lawrence, her Native ancestry appears to have come full circle, she, their eldest granddaughter arriving here, and her eldest son’s son being born here, so it is she and I have become students learning about the area’s history and possibly more of hers as well.

Visiting the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center, on U.S. Highway 2, near Ashland, I found a book that described 19th century life of Ojibwe and Métis people titled:                          “A Little History of My Forest Life: 
              An Indian-White Autobiography by Eliza Morrison.”

This book is an excellent read about the history of Chequamegon Bay, Lake Superior, La Pointe and Madeline Island. Born in 1837, Eliza Morrison begins writing her autobiography in 1894, as a form of correspondence letters to a white woman named                Catherine (Kitty) Gray, by whose family she is employed as hired help.

We’ve gifted the book to family members because of its detail and reread it often to renew its flavor pertinent to the areas we visit, those we know and those we don’t. There’s so much to learn about the lake and surrounding landscape before the Europeans came and what remains afterward. It’s still such mystery.