Our Nest on Wheels

Grand Portage - The Kitchen

by Jane

In our ongoing tour of Grand Portage National Monument (see links to previous posts in the August 2019 archives), we find ourselves in a state-of-the-art kitchen—for 1797. Here, the meals were prepared for about 100 men (yes, only men) dining in style in the Great Hall next door.

To ensure that the “gentlemen,” or partners, of the North West Company received the quality food to which they were accustomed, one of the partners would bring his personal cook from Montreal. That cook would oversee a staff of about 20 local Native women and retired voyageurs—men who were too old for strenuous paddling and portaging but were still in debt to the company store. I’ve heard it said that a small army of children was also employed for the sole purpose of batting away the flies, and it takes only a few minutes during fly season to see why!

Every day, whoever is assigned to the kitchen prepares something from an 18^th-century recipe. Those of you who know what an indifferent cook I am will be amused to learn that Hannah Glasse, of The Art of Cookery, has become a household name to me, and I’ve been known to watch cooking videos on the Townsends You-Tube channel.

I'm still a fairly indifferent cook, but I've been enjoying dressing up modest dishes with fanciful presentations using whatever is in season in the garden. Below, the humble and ever-present Lake Herring (even if we don't cook it, we have to rinse it every day, so we may as well use it) in spring and fall, and Salmagundi (which could just as easily be called "use up your scraps" salad).

With the exception of a couple of loaves of bread on their arrival, the hard-working voyageurs don’t get to sample the food from this kitchen. Their rations continue to be exactly what they have been all season: dried corn, dried peas, and pemmican. And, as Steve mentioned in his post on the Great Hall, they are cooking and eating those rations over their own campfires outside the depot fence.

The kitchen is my favorite place to work, because there are lots of cool gadgets that are fun to demonstrate to adults and kids alike. Some of them are reproductions, and some of them are actually from the 18^th century. It isn’t easy to tell which is which; I found out that I’d been letting kids grind coffee in a 200-year-old artifact. Oops. Some of the fun things I’ve been able to do include roasting coffee beans, deep frying squash blossoms, and baking in a “bake kettle” (what nowadays we call a “Dutch oven”), and roasting chicken in the rotisserie that was called a Dutch oven back in the day.

The kitchen lends itself to picturesque photos (as a visitor from Montreal the other day said with approval, "It's so French!") so let me leave you with some images.

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

Grand Portage - The Great Hall

by Steve

Welcome to the Great Hall! And thanks for joining us on this tour of Grand Portage National Monument, where we are volunteering this summer. (If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find links at the bottom of the page.)

This is the inland headquarters for the North West Company, the largest fur trade company of the day, around three times the size of Hudson Bay Company. The partners who own the company, also called "Gentlemen," are here for a few weeks during the summer to conduct their business meetings. They travel here from Montreal, London, perhaps Scotland, to meet with the wintering partners who stay at the inland trading posts. They also meet with the clerks and interpreters who run the trading posts. They will inspect and review all the furs acquired over the winter and manage all the resupply orders for trade goods that come from all over the world.

You can also see that this hall is set up for fancy dining, and that although we are in the middle of nowhere--we are 1200 miles from Montreal--we still have china, linens, and elegant glassware. Because these are wealthy gentlemen, anything they want here they will have. On some evenings, they will push the chairs and tables to the side and have dances with local Ojibwe and Metis women in attendance. So this is a business hall, dining hall, and party hall.

You can see that the guides, clerks, and interpreters are also welcome to join the gentlemen in this hall for dinners. They get the same fancy food served from the kitchen next door, and while their seating accommodations are not quite as nice as those the gentlemen enjoy, it is certainly better than being outside the fence cooking your own supper of peas and corn as the voyageurs, the real workers of the company, have to do. They are not welcome in the Great Hall; in fact, they are not really welcome inside the stockade. The societal class structure of the period is echoed by a similar class structure within the company: owners, managers, and workers. Perhaps not much has changed in 240 years.

This hall has a room at each of the four corners. Those would have been bedrooms for the partners to use while on site. There were additional partner accommodations in another building. We've left one room set up as a bedroom for Alexander MacKenzie. He's our famous partner who found the route to the Pacific Ocean 11 years before Lewis and Clark even left St. Louis. You can see the style in which he was accustomed to living while here.

The second corner room is set up as a hat-making shop in Europe. Most of the furs the company acquires are beaver, and most of the beaver goes into making the beaver felt hats that are the style for the upper class in Europe from 1550 to 1850. In that room you can see how the hat-making process is done.

The third corner room is set up as a typical trading post. We have over 100 of them in the western and northwestern parts of Canada, some as far away as the Great Slave Lake, and we'd also have one of them on site here at the depot in Grand Portage. You can see all the goods that are being brought here from all over the world to trade for furs. That includes textiles, metal tools, pots and pans, guns, ammo, and gunpowder, tobacco from Brazil, beads from Italy, and ostrich feathers from Africa. And you can see all the furs that we are taking in as trade. There are minks and martens, beavers and badgers and bears and everything in between. And you can touch and feel the furs to your hearts content.

The fourth room we have set up as a street of shops in London. The shops are closed now, but you can do a little window shopping. Everything for sale with a tan-colored label is an item that is made with furs that are acquired through the fur trade.

We hope you've enjoyed this brief look at the Great Hall. There's a lot more to see and experience here, but we just can't cover everything in a simple blog post. Maybe you need to make a visit!

Previous installments: Overview, Ojibwe Village, Canoe Warehouse

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

by Steve

Grand Portage - The Canoe Warehouse

by Steve

Welcome to the Canoe Warehouse. And thanks for joining us on this tour of Grand Portage National Monument, where we are volunteering this summer. (If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find links at the bottom of this page.

The park uses this warehouse to display the canoes used in the fur trade, as well as the woodworking skills from the 1790s that supported the depot.

Here's one of the interpreters working while standing under the large, 38-foot Montreal canoe. These canoes are the "semi-trucks" of the fur trade, used to take the trade goods, such as fabrics, metal tools, Italian beads, Brazilian tobacco, guns, etc., from Montreal to the Grand Portage depot. This canoe is capable of carrying 4 to 5 tons of men and material.

A Montreal canoe would carry: 57 crates and barrels, each weighing 90 lbs, for 5,400 lbs of cargo. In addition, the canoe would hold 2,700 lbs of men and supplies. Twelve to 14 or so men would paddle this canoe on the 1400-mile trip from Montreal, which would take them up to 8 weeks to complete.

Looking up into the inside of the canoe, you can see that there are no seats. The company isn't really as interested in the comfort of the paddlers (called voyageurs) as they are in carrying as much cargo as possible, so the voyageurs will sit on the cargo. The route these canoes take from Montreal follows the Ottawa river and eventually enters Lake Huron in Georgian Bay. It follows the shorelines of Lake Huron and Lake Superior to get to Grand Portage. There are around 36 portages between Montreal and Grand Portage,

At the same time as the large Montreal canoes leave Montreal, the smaller 24 - 26 foot North canoes leave the 100 or so inland trading posts, carrying all the furs that they have acquired over the winter. While the North canoes are much smaller than their Montreal counterparts, they still are capable of carrying 2 tons of men and materials. They are handled by a crew of around 6 men. They head out when the rivers are free of ice, and if all goes well they arrive in Grand Portage around 8 weeks later. The furs get carried down the Grand Portage trail and are then loaded onto the Montreal canoes for the trip to Montreal, and then on to London to be sold. The trade goods get carried up the trail to the Pigeon River to be loaded onto the North canoes to re-supply the trading posts. Notice that the canoes don't get portaged here, only the cargo.

We have some other birchbark canoes in the warehouse, including a canoe that was built on-site last summer by staff and volunteers, and this 100-year old Ojibwe ricing canoe. You can see that this is a shallow-draft canoe. Wild rice is a grass that grows in shallow waters. The only way to harvest it is to gently bend the grass over the side of the canoe and tap it. The ripe seeds will fall into the canoe. The Ojibwe have harvested wild rice this way for hundreds of years and continue to do so today. This canoe was donated to the park by a family that no longer needed it. You can see that the bark has been bleached white by the sun, so we know that it sat outside unprotected in the sun for many years. Birchbark is an amazing material, both waterproof and rot-resistant. It can last for a hundred years if not exposed to too much sun.

The park plans to build another canoe on site next summer, so we had the opportunity to harvest the birchbark for this. Birchbark harvesting can be done at one particular time of the year, which is usually mid-July. At that time, the bark will easily separate from the trunk once you have made a vertical cut through the bark. By making only a vertical cut, you can remove the bark, and the tree will grow new bark. The second-growth bark will look more like scar tissue, and can't be used for canoe building. But at least the tree is unharmed.

To help us better understand what it's like to paddle one of these 38-foot canoes, we got to take a fiberglass replica canoe out onto Lake Superior with 17 of us in it. We did this in mid-May, when the temperature was in the mid-40s with a hint of rain. But at least the lake was calm. All went well, although we noticed that all the permanent park staff stayed on the dock and waved good-bye to us! After canoeing for a few miles on the lake, none of us were ready to make the 1200 mile trip to Montreal, and we certainly were not interested in carrying 180-lb loads, as the voyageurs did. But we did have a little better appreciation for the hard work that they did.

In our next installment, we'll look at the Great Hall, where the company conducted business while here.

Previous installments: Overview, Ojibwe Village

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

by Jane

Grand Portage - The Ojibwe Village

by Jane

Boozhoo! Daga biindigen Anishinaabeg Oodena.

Welcome! Please come in to the Ojibwe Village.

Thanks for joining us on this tour of Grand Portage National Monument, where Steve and I are volunteering this summer. (If you missed the first post of this series, in which Steve gives an overview, you can read it here.)

As you enter the historic site, you are welcomed into the Ojibwe* Village. More accurately, to a representation of a summer village, because in the 18th-century, the Ojibwe people moved with the seasons.

Seasonal Lifeways

Niibin -- Summer Summer was the time for living on the shores of Gitchi Gami, Lake Superior. Besides providing relief from the heat of summer (the lakeshore at Grand Portage is often 10 degrees cooler than our RV site just a half-mile inland), Lake Superior provided fish in abundance. Usually you will see fish drying near the fire, so that they can be stored for winter.

You'll also see a "Three Sisters" garden. What we now call "companion planting"--using plants that grow better together than apart--seems to have been universally known among Native peoples. The "sisters" are corn, beans, and squash. Beans provide nitrogen for the corn and squash; the corn provides a support for the beans; and the squash (when it thrives, which it has so far failed to do in our garden this year) crowds out weeds, shades the ground to conserve moisture, and deters critters with its prickly vines. Eaten together, beans and corn provide complementary protein for humans.

Dagwaagin -- Fall Sometime around October, the wild rice will be ready for harvest. Then the Ojibwe women, who were the architects and home-builders in the community, would take down the birchbark panels of the wigwams, roll the birchbark up, and, leaving the pole framework behind, carry them along as the community moved to the smaller, inland lakes where the wild rice grows.

We put birchbark panels on one of the wigwams as part of our training, which gave us quite an appreciation of that particular bit of "women's work." (The one with the ponytail is me.)

Truly wild rice (as opposed to cultivated hybrids) is still harvested the traditional way, using knocking sticks like those pictured below. (Pro tip: If you're explaining this to visitors, be sure to call them knocking sticks, not knockers.) You can read about how wild rice is harvested in this article.

Biboon -- Winter The community dispersed for the winter in order to find enough game to support them. Trapping was also important, because pelts are thickest in winter.

Ziigwan -- Spring When the sap began to run, it was time for one more move: to the sugar bush for maple sugaring. Before the advent of European trade goods, the Ojibwe used wooden spiles to tap the trees and caught and boiled (!) the sap in birchbark containers. You can imagine that metal kettles made the process a good deal easier! If you're interested in reading more about maple sugaring then and now, you may enjoy this article.

In the Nisawa'ogaan

The long lodge in the Ojibwe village is furnished to house an imaginary three-generation family. Because they're imaginary, they don't mind if people handle all their belongings, so we invite visitors to touch whatever they like, feel the different furs, sit down, lie down, take a nap . . .

Next Time . . .

In our next post, Steve will give you a tour of the Canoe Warehouse. Just follow the path, and you'll be there. Before you go, take time for a game of lacrosse or to try your hand at constructing a mini wigwam.

*A word about names. Ojibwe (also Ojibway or Ojibwa) and Chippewa are transcriptions of the name that Europeans gave to the tribe. At the park, we use Ojibwe. The sign for the reservation says Chippewa, because that is the name used in US treaties. None of the above, not surprisingly, are what the people called themselves; that name is Anishinaabe, meaning "the original people."

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

by Steve

Grand Portage National Monument, overview

by Steve

This summer we are doing something a bit different for us. Instead of traveling to many places and doing sightseeing, we are staying put in one spot for three and a half months and doing a volunteer gig. This is the first time we've done volunteer work as RVers. Volunteers are used at a lot of state and national campgrounds as camp hosts or other similar positions. Typically in exchange for your 20 or so hours per week, you get a free full-hookup site with utilities paid for the time you are there. We had never really been interested in being camp hosts, and we don't need to do this to save money. So if we were going to volunteer for something, it was going to have to be interesting.

Well, something interesting did show up on volunteer.gov, the website where these of jobs are posted: an opening for a couple to be costumed interpreters (wearing period clothing) at Grand Portage National Monument, a living-history site that is all about the fur trade.

The Grand Portage is a 8.5 mile trail that connects Lake Superior to the Pigeon River. This was the best route to get from the Great Lakes to the waterways that we now call the Boundary Waters. Once in these waters, you can travel via canoe to places as far away as Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, and the Great Slave Lake. The portage was necessary because the Pigeon River has about 20 miles of waterfalls, cascades, and gorges before it flows into Lake Superior, none of which can be traveled by canoe.

The North West Company, which was a partnership formed by formerly independent fur traders, took advantage of this trail and used it to transport trade goods like fabric, pots, metal tools, guns, etc., into the western and northwestern regions of Canada to be traded for fur.

Voyageurs like the one pictured above paddled the canoes and carried these loads of trade goods, two 90-lb bundles at a time, over all the portages on their canoe routes from Montreal to Grand Portage, and then up the Grand Portage trail to be loaded on canoes to re-supply the inland trading posts.

The North West company operated its inland depot at Grand Portage from 1778 to 1802, and quickly grew to be three times the size of the Hudson Bay Company, its chief competitor. At the Grand Portage site, the North West Company operated a large depot where all the furs it had acquired over the winter at its 100+ inland trading posts were checked, counted, and packaged for transport to Montreal. At the same time as the furs from the trading posts arrived, the trade goods that had been shipped via canoe from Montreal arrived at Grand Portage to be re-packaged for shipment to the inland trading posts. For two weeks each summer there was a great rendezvous with over 1,000 voyageurs at the site.

The Grand Portage National Monument consists of the historic site on Lake Superior, the entire Grand Portage trail, the site of Fort Charlotte on the Pigeon River, and a fairly new visitor center/museum called the Heritage Center. At the visitor center you can learn all about the fur trade, as well as the culture of the Ojibwe people who lived here for centuries, and view exhibits on archaeology that has uncovered early metal tools in the area, some as old as 7,000 years. It also has a fantastic view of Lake Superior.

Lake Superior from the Grand Portage Heritage Center

Our work involves being on-site interpreters wearing period clothing. We work three days a week. Each day we have a different assignment at one of the six locations on site: the Ojibwe Village, the Voyageur Encampment, the Canoe Warehouse, the Kitchen, the Great Hall, or the Heritage Center. So we are expected to know a lot about each of these areas and to be able to communicate it to visitors in an enjoyable way. If you come to the site on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, you can see us in action. If you can't make it here before Labor Day, which is when our time here will be over, we will cover the basics of each of these areas in subsequent posts.

We hope you will enjoy this virtual visit to Grand Portage National Monument.

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

by Steve