6, Thursday March 2025 Longing

 

Melancholy Point

   There's an area northwest of our house where trees don’t readily take hold for some reason. I've begun wondering if something happened there that has affected that place. Before I purchased the farm in 1971, the larger field had been fenced into smaller fields for pasture and crops. Maybe the cattle congregated in a corner of the pasture here during fly season and the concentration of manure had made the soil too acidic; that's what happened to trees I planted elsewhere.

 

   I know how the field has been used during my tenure, but I can only speculatively imagine what could’ve happened here in the past 125 years or so, given the natural lay of the land. After the fur trade era, and the European demand for beaver felt hats fell to the wayside, fur trapping continued but not as earnestly. Virgin timber became king and Minnesota's forest areas fell prey to those who took all the white pine and spruce wherever they could.

 

   Cut-over areas deemed fit for agriculture were opened for 'settlement' after the Treaty of Old Crossing [on The Red Lake River] of 1863 involving land cessions by the Red Lake Ojibwe and Pembina Band of Ojibwe to the United States; and subsequent treaty amendments between Red Lake Ojibwe to the United States of 1864, 1889, and 1904. The NE/SW diagonal reservation boundary line extending from Warroad to Thief River Falls is still in evidence today on Roseau County Plat books as on the surveyor map below. Land west of the line was ceded in the treaty of 1863, 1864; the land east of the line was 1889, & 1902,

Surveyor's map showing Mud Lake (Lower image) and Thief Lake (Upper image), Palmville (1901) & surrounding townships; Mikinaak Creek and its confluence with the South Fork of the Roseau River.

   Animal trails became Indian trails that became wagon trails following sand ridges and river banks. One such trail as depicted on the hand-drawn surveyor map was called the Thief River Falls to Roseau Trail which passed through here following the high bank along Mikinaak Creek. (I spell the name of the creek in Ojibwemowin, because it's anglicized on maps and in history books.) 

 

   There is a portion of the Thief River Falls to Roseau Trail here along Mikinaak Creek that cuts through a clay-bank descending a draw, past the Palmville Cemetery, then angled NNE to toward Wannaska. Up the other side, the trail is now obscured by half mile-long tree rows of white spruce and hybrid poplar we planted in 1981. 

 

   I heard a family story that my uncle Martin Davidson, who owned the farm before me from 1931-1971, had found many arrowheads in the area west of the cemetery when he was farming the land there, and had created quite a collection, so perhaps this area had been the location of one of Mikinaak's seasonal camps; it could be.

   There has been a passage of animals and humanity along those trails, through this spot, along the river and creek banks and the woods between them for hundreds of years; perhaps it was an ancient Indigenous dwelling was near water where people traveled, carrying things in their hands, or on their backs: backpacks/furs/firewood, or many people on horseback, driving livestock, or horses pulling travois, pulling sleighs, wagons; people on skis, on snowshoes; people cutting trees down, dynamiting tree stumps, hauling rocks, horse-drawn farm equipment, and new farming equipment. People have passed through here for centuries, as I found a flintlock pistol barrel in an adjoining field, you've heard me say.

   Or, the trauma troubling this ground could've been that one hot July afternoon in the 1990s, when we had a totally-preventable wild fire here that rapidly spread 360-degrees driven by high winds. It whipped through high grass on the south side of the draw where that the old trail was, roared up the north side of the draw to where it totally ignited the dry lower branches of 20-foot tall spruce trees then engulfed their tops, exploding across that spot until the Wannaska DNR stopped it with a tracked unit and additional fire fighters. The land was scorched; hundreds of small trees were burned. Many of them never grew back. Although a good number of young trees were replanted within literally hours of the event; I don't think its ever been the same.

Grasping the idea that the spot had something austere about it, it seemed appropriate to name the area: Melancholy Point.