Memories of Pioneering in Northern Minnesota

By:  Emma Pelland A. Parker
Born:  September 1, 1880 in Nadeau, Michigan

In 1893 my Father and Mother, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pelland and six children moved from Tower, Minnesota to a homestead at the mouth of the Littlefork river near Rainy river.Father was a lumberman and cruiser.  One of the jobs he had not long after settling down was to help survey in Itasca County. Our trip from Tower was a long, tiresome, dreary one.  We had to cross Vermillion lake in a small steamboat.  Some of our goods was loaded in a barge and towed by the steamboat.  I think the barge was more heavily loaded then it should have been, which made it top heavy.  We got along well until we were about to land at Kettle Falls.  In order to land properly, the barge had to be turned around somehow.  In doing so, the barge turned over and all our supplies fell into the water.  One of the things that Mother had prepared for the trip was a large clothes basket filled with bread.  While we watched, the bread floated away toward the falls, some Indian boys standing on the bank jumped into their birch bark canoes and fished the bread out of the water before it could go over the falls.  Mother had to make biscuits in a little tin oven by an open fire for the next two weeks.  There were six of us children, so it kept her busy getting meals for eight people. From Kettle Falls, the long twenty-six mile portage was something to be dreaded.  The country was low land and in places the lumber wagon we rode in, had to travel through mud,  Sometimes the wagon would get stuck in the mud and it would take hours to get it out.  In the meantime we were almost eaten up by mosquitoes.  We spent most of the day going over this portage.  We finally got to Rainy Lake City, tired and worn out.

Getting ready to spend the night here was a chore-putting up tents and getting a meal ready while mosquitoes were buzzing around.  The next morning, the weather was clear and lovely.  We would have been happy if we could have stayed for a while, it was such a beautiful spot. The Walter S. Lloyd (steamboat) left there in the morning, so we had to be on our way.  We got to Koochiching (International Falls) in the late afternoon, where we put up our tents once more and spent two weeks or more waiting for another load of household goods and clothing. There were very few people at this place.  The only store I remember was owned by Tim Harrington.  It was a general store and carried a limited amount of supplies.  Some mail was brought in from Tower.  Mail was very uncertain.  Later, we got our mail at a Canadian post office  called Isherwood.  It was about four miles from our place and had to cross the Rainy river to get it, but as we were not always sure of getting across the river, we did not get mail often.

Koochiching was a lovely spot and we liked camping there.  The falls were beautiful.  We could catch all the fish we wanted below the falls, so we had fish often. After waiting for some time for our furniture, we were happy to be on our way to our new home.  Father bought a large flat bottom boat called a "scow".  It was roomy enough for the family and our supplies.  Father and my two oldest brothers paddled and poled the scow down the river.  It was a great sport for them.  That is a stands out in my memory.  It was a nice warm day, the water in the Rainy was clear and cold.  The trees along both sides of the river were changing to shades of brown, yellow and red, mingled with tall evergreen trees, made an impression on my mind that I have never forgotten.

Few people lived along this river at that time.  Occasionally we could see an opening in the woods and a little log cabin near the river bank.  We stopped at one of the cabins on the Canadian side of the river.  A man by the name of Joe Bone lived there alone.  He invited us to stop for a meal and we gladly accepted.  We watched him prepare this meal in amazement.  He rushed around, got vegetables from his garden, fried bacon and eggs, went down to the river for water to make tea and soon had a very good meal for us.  He thought we should stay with him that night.  I have often wondered where we could have slept, as he had but a one room shanty.  My folks were anxious to get to our own place, so we did not accept his invitation.

When we got to our place, we had to clear a place to put up the tent.  We soon got enough trees and brush cleared so we could put up the tents.  A log cabin had been started years before we got there.  Dad thought the logs were not good enough, so with the help of the boys, he went to work and built a new log cabin.  The logs were hewn so they were flat on one side and a fairly smooth wall.  The roof was made from hollowed out logs.  The spaces between the logs were filled with moss we had gathered from the woods.  We lived in this cabin the first winter and we were comfortable and added onto it later.  Mother had never lived in such a wilderness and Father had to leave us alone for weeks at a time to go on cruising trips.  She was frightened.

Once, soon after we came to the homestead we heard loud noises from across Rainy River.  All night long we could hear voices weeping and screaming and drums beating.  We found out later that the Indians were having a pow-wow on the reservation on the Canadian side of the river. It was not long before some of the Indians came to call on us.  Most of the time they came quietly into the house without giving us any warning that they were around.  If we seemed startled by their presence, they laughed and tried to make us understand that they wanted to be friends.  Mother did not like having them around, she could not trust them and was afraid of them.  Some of them became friends and would often bring us fish, venison and berries.  They did not expect to be paid at first.  Later they asked to exchange whatever they had for flour, sugar, etc.

The Chief of the reservation had a wife and two daughters.  The oldest daughter, named Emma, was about my age.  She came to our house often and we became friends.  She could not speak English very well but we had no trouble understanding each other.  We often went for long rides in her little birch bark canoe.  From her I learned to paddle a canoe and also how to sit in the bottom of the canoe as she did.  We had pleasant rides together.

It was some years before we had enough land cleared and ready for a garden.  The work had to be done without machinery and was a long, slow process.  Our family was very healthy and we did a lot of work. Four more children were born after we came to the homestead.  There were no doctors near us.  I believe Dr. Moore in Ft. Frances was the only doctor that could be called on.  We did not need to call him.  There was an old Indian woman who came at the time for the babies to be delivered.

The only school near enough for us to go to was an Indian school on the Indian reservation.  We tried going there but the teacher was a young man who had just finished the eighth grade.  I had finished that grade before we came and my two brothers had finished the sixth and seventh grades.  If we had attended that school, we would have had to cross Rainy River.  The river had a swift flowing stream and not safe for children, so we gave up.

In 1900, Itasca County furnished a teacher.  We had to find a place for the school.  There was an abandoned cabin not far from our house that could be used.  It was cleaned and fixed up.  There were no desks at first.  When the teacher arrived he held classes anyway for sometime before the desks came.

During the hot dry summer of 1898, the waters in the rivers were very low and the Canadian steamboats that ran on Rainy River stopped running.  The settlers were rather uneasy when the Leech Lake Indians went on the war path.  We felt quite helpless and some of us kept watch night and day.  They seemed to gather at different  reservations for meeting and we could hear them singing their war songs and beating their tom-toms night and day.

One Sunday, a group of young people gathered at Koochiching for a picnic.  The boys were running canoe races.  The girls were watching them from the bank of the river.  We noticed a twelve foot birch bark canoe filled with Indians coming toward us.  They looked as if they were on the war path....their faces were painted!  Some of them knew us and were usually friendly and often greeted us with the cheerful "Bon Jo".  This time they would not even look our way.  When it was time for us to go home, our friends thought we should not leave.  They feared we might meet with a band of Indians who might scalp us.  We arrived home safely, however our folks were thankful to have us get home.  They moved some supplies out in the middle of the river on a little island where they watched for the Indians that night.  They thought they would have a better chance of seeing the Indians there, should they come near.  From Duluth and other places some soldiers were sent to protect us.  The Indians settled down, after that we had no more trouble.

Thinking back on our experiences in pioneering, I wonder how we lived through them.  We had to do things for ourselves.  If we wanted fish for a meal, we had to catch a fish.  We hunted for partridge, duck, rabbit, deer and moose. During June we picked, canned and preserved wild strawberries.  Raspberries grew in abundance and it was not unusual for us to can hundreds of quarts.  In the fall, blueberries, wild plums and high bush cranberries yielded good crops.  Mother and I liked picking berries, so our supply of canned goods was good.

Many times we would get lost in the woods and wander around for a long time before finding our way out.  Sometimes we came across a spot where a bear had been resting.....but we never saw one.  We thought he might have seen us first and ran away before we discovered him.

Fish were plentiful at that time in the Littlefork River.  We came to know when the whitefish and goldeye came.  We had no trouble getting enough for a meal at these times.  There was a time in the spring when the sturgeon went up the river in great numbers.  One spring morning we heard an unusual noise--like a wind storm, so we went down to the river where the sound came from.  We saw sturgeon in the water--a slowly moving mass.  Had I been brave enough I could have walked across the river on their backs.  This may sound like a "fish story"--it's true, believe it or not.

There was a natural maple grove on our homestead and in the spring we looked forward to making maple syrup and sugar.  Each tree was tapped and some pails and cans were fastened to the tree so The sap ran into them.  When the pails were full, the sap was put into large containers. Our ox team moved slowly through the woods, with a small sled, carrying the barrels to there the containers of sap were and then carried them to a big iron kettle that hung over a log fire.  The sap was strained and boiled down until it was thick enough for syrup.  If we wanted to make sugar, we often took the syrup to the house and boiled it down until it became sugar.  We put the thick syrup into large flat pans or small muffin pans where it was kept until it hardened.

We had very little in the way of entertainment  One day one of our neighbours invited my brother and me to a party given by some friends who lived about six miles down the river.  It was in January and a bitter cold day.  Our neighbour had a team of oxen and told us that he would take us half way where we would join some friends and could ride with them as they had a team of horses.  The ox team walk very slowly so we started from our place early in the afternoon and arrived at our friends house about supper time.  Our friends Pat, Kerr, Nellie and Cassie, took us home the next afternoon.

The above letter and photo were graciously provided by Nellie Pelland.
 

Pelland, Minnesota 483122N 1064810W

The above Pellands descend from Louis Pelland.