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LAKE SUPERIOR - APOSTLE ISLANDS NATIONAL LAKESHORE
----Cruising Halcyon slowly among the rocky, tree-covered islands, with rarely the sight of a human, is an experience of wilderness. At sundowner time, our minds wander back in time. Slowly, the moon rises from behind the island ... |
----"What was it like to be the first to live here in this North Country?", El asked as we scanned the rocky wild shores. Her question opened the door for reading some of the studies on archeology of the region. ,
---AAs a geologist, I knew that the view we shared from our boat was not the same as the first residents saw. The first humans living along the south shore of what slowly became Lake Superior arrived about 9,000 years ago shortly after the last glacier released the North Country from it's icy grip. Nomadic hunters walked broad, mounded, hummocky hills. Their eyes cast over this landscape, recently freed from the overburden of glacial ice. Trees had only begun to colonize the grass-covered mounds. The hillocks were composed of the scrapings of rock and soil from the lands to the north. Their families lived in nearby small shelters of hide or brush, ready to move with the game or the seasons. Their eyes searched for movement among the grasslands - Mastodons. Most of the large game they sought would later be termed megafauna by biologists.
---AJust to the north, a massive sheet of ice covered the land. Streams of water poured off the melting glacier and gathered as lakes along the ice margin. The weight of over a mile of ice had depressed the land into a broad trough and it slowly filled with the glacial meltwater. Lake Superior was born. The mounds, with a core of resistant bedrock but covered with glacial till (the stripped soil of the land to the north), rose above the lake surface as islands. Trees colonized the land.
Note the soft glacial till (slope) above the tilted bedrock
---AWith the weight of glacial ice gone, the land slowly rose (geologists refer to this rise as isostatic rebound) and more mounds lifted above lake water to become the Apostle Islands. Human culture evolved as the natural environment changed. The large Ice Age mammals became extinct. A more settled life replaced the nomadic life of the big-game hunters around 7,000 years ago. Copper found in outcrops along the south shore of the lake became the material used for tools, artwork, and trade goods. Archeologists call these people the Old Copper Culture. Gradually the natives adapted to the forestlands. This new social structure has been called the Woodland Culture.
---AThe islands, home to the Ojibwe (the most recent group of native peoples to live in the islands) found everything material they needed to sustain their lives - their food, clothing, and housing - as well as material for tools, transportation (large birch bark canoes), and their artwork. Their lives were controlled by the seasons - hunting, fishing, gathering berries and wild rice - and collecting maple sugar and syrup. The seasons also controlled their ceremonies and games. They traded with neighbors and shared stories and historical tales.
----Today, many Ojibwe people live on reservations in the region. Through treaty agreements, they have the right to annuities, reservations, and rights of use. An ever-so-great grandfather of mine was a trader with these Native peoples. He was married to a woman raised within the Native culture. English was a second language in their family. He was trusted by the Natives and served as a translator for many of those treaties.
KITCHI-GAMI
---- The Ojibwe began a migration from the traditional lands of the Chippewa, along the shores of the St. Lawrence River, about the time Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Following the shores of the Great Lakes, they were led by a legendary squirrel named Ojidaumo. They were searching for a land where food grew on the water, and when they found the wild rice along the shores of Lake Superior they settled in their new homeland. Wenabozho is a cultural hero (and sometimes trickster) in local legends.
This is their legend of the island's creation:
-----"In the Ojibway legends, Wenabozho's favorite place was Kitchi-gami. In his travels he noticed a giant beaver in a bay of the lake. Wenabozho decided to capture the giant beaver by building a sandy dam across the bay. When he finished his work, Wenabozho smiled proudly. He was sure he had captured the giant beaver with his soft, sandy dam.
-----But the beaver was a giant and he easily swam through the sandy dam. When Wenabozho saw what happened, his pride turned to anger. As the beaver swam to the freedom of open water, Wenabozho scooped handfuls of dirt from his dam, and wildly threw the dirt at the escaping beaver. Twenty-one handfuls he scooped from the dam. Twenty-one handfuls he wildly threw at the swimming beaver. Twenty-one islands he created as the sand landed in the waters of Kitchi-gami.
-----Today we call Wenabozho's island creation the Apostle Islands, and the Ojibwe call the islands wenabozho ominisan (islands of wenabozho). Long Island is all that remains of Tagawaminkong, the soft, sandy dam that Wenabozho built across the Lake Superior Bay we call Chequamegon."
Tagawaminkong - The Sandy Dam Today
-----There are twenty-two islands today in the Seashore, one of which (Madeline) is excluded from the National Seashore, has year-round residents and is mostly privately owned. The number of islands varies through the vagaries of erosive storms. Some have joined together reducing the total number of islands (York and Rock Islands joined sometime after an 1824 survey) and one (Little Steamboat) disappeared (much to the chagrin of the landowner who had been paying taxes on his 'land' for years). Before 1960, Little Manitou Island existed to the south of present-day Manitou Island, but it was eroding away. The Coast Guard placed a warning beacon on the little island but it was vulnerable to erosion. So, they arrived with fire hoses, washed away the loose overburden, and left only a shoal and a pile of rocks to support the light.
(07/10)