mundane but necessary

I now have a clean desk and floor.  My research project on Voyageurs National Park has generated thousands of documents, almost all hard copies, that have needed a home in my office.  I have slowly and steadily been filing these pieces of paper, but then I got another box from the park with more documents.  Back to work filing.

Why do I have an entire blog post on filing?  I have found with past research projects that filing is sometimes the crucial link between research and writing.  When I sit at my computer working on a chapter, I have documents in piles around me.  What I pull for that chapter largely depends on how well I filed the documents.  Sure, I take good notes when researching, and I refer back to those notes to make sure I have everything for a chapter.  But, the files are my entry into a chapter. If I cannot find a document, no matter how good my notes or my memory, I cannot use the document for evidence.

Historians live by dates as a starting place for building our arguments.  I, at least, need to know what happened before, during, and after so that I can make an informed statement about why or how.  So, putting documents in chronological order is a simple but important step in my filing.  The task is mindless and mundane but necessary.

But my documents are not simply placed in chron order.  I organize them by topics or major events first.  For Voyageurs, that has meant topics like Master Plan, General Management Plan, Snowmobiling, Wilderness, or Concessions.  I try to keep all the interpretive materials together.  Key organizations, like the Voyageurs National Park Association or Citizen’s Committee on Voyageurs National Park also have their own files.  Many times, the number of documents for each topic spread over several files just to keep them manageable.  Those files are divided up by date, of course.

I have found over the course of several research projects that too much division into topics ends up more work when writing.  I used to divide out park management into much smaller topics, such as land acquisition, community relations, employee relations, etc.  Now, I keep those topics and more all together.  I find I use the documents more if they are included in a longer sweep of management issues than if I separated them into discrete units.  Park superintendents have to juggle many issues at once, and I try to keep that in mind when filing and writing.

I guess I should end with the confession that my desk and floor are not perfectly clear.  I have been writing chapter one, and so those documents are out and about.  My filing system seems to be working as I put words on the page.  Those words come slowly, sometimes with great determination and anguish, but at least I know my filing gives me easy access to the documents I need.

anticipation

I am starting to write my history of Voyageurs National Park.  It will be seven chapters and will cover the period from 1975 to 2005, with background material going back to the time of the voyageurs and American Indians.  Moving from research to writing is always exhilarating and daunting.  I am anxious to put into words the ideas and leads I have uncovered while reading through the documents and conducting oral history interviews.  But I also enter this stage of a project with anxiety and trepidation, remembering the arduous task of matching documents to themes and events, wrangling a coherent story out of thousands of primary sources.  I often think of this stage as pregnancy all over again, nurturing what is inside, battling the discomfort and pain, and then birthing something (hopefully) new and wondrous and beautiful.

I have two postcards tacked onto the bulletin board behind my computer screen, easily within view as I write.  They give me hope.  One is a Norman Rockwell painting from the Saturday Evening Post.  Rockwell is sitting in a chair, his back to the viewer.  His legs, spread wide apart, hold a book face down and a rag.  He scratches his head, paintbrush in hand.  All is gawky and angled with diagonals going every which way.  Before him sits a white canvas with just the outline for the Saturday Evening Post banner.  His desk and floor are a disarray of newspapers and journals.  Rockwell captures in this humorous account of the artistic process the moment of befuddlement, of anticipation, of sheer confusion that must always precede the vision that drives the creative process forward.  It serves as a reminder to me that I am okay, I just have to keep going.

What is the second postcard?  It shows the photograph taken at the moment of the first flight at Kitty Hawk.  I can remember the story the Park Service told at the visitor center there, that the Wright Brothers had flipped a coin to determine who would be in the airplane and who would be on the ground.  They asked a third person (can’t remember if he was a local or not) to stand at the camera and push the button to take the shot when the plane took off the ground of its own power.  “Yeah, yeah,” I can almost hear the man say, as if the Wrights will actually get their invention to fly.  But, the airplane does lift off the ground.  The man pushes the button, mouth agape.  The first flight captured forever.  The promise fulfilled.

That is how I always see my writing.  The promise fulfilled.  These next months, join me as I share the challenges and frustrations of writing about Voyageurs National Park.

can you canoe?

It is 26 feet long, wears multicolored medallions on its front and back, and has a hole on its side.  What is it?  A birch bark canoe handmade in 1974 expressly for the Voyageurs National Park visitor center.  The only problem is that the canoe never made it to the visitor center (though the Park Service did display it in its former headquarters building).

I don’t have all the story yet, but somehow the park’s first superintendent Myrl Brooks convinced National Geographic to pay for William Hafeman to build the canoe.  Hafeman had a boat works in Bigfork, MN, and he used traditional Indian techniques in constructing the canoe.  Birch bark for the skin, cedar for the ribs, sap mixed with ash to seal the canoe.  The front and back are painted white with medallions in red, blue, and yellow on a black background.

Brooks was a little ahead of his time in wanting the canoe for the new park.  He realized once Hafeman finished making the future display piece that the anticipated visitor center was still several years away.  What to do?  Brooks explored sending it to the Arch in St. Louis before the Koochiching County Museum in International Falls accepted the canoe under a long-term loan.  The canoe eventually made its way to park headquarters and then in 1988 to the Rainy River Community College, also in the Falls.

The community college hung the canoe up just over people’s heads against a huge plate glass window.  With time, the ties holding up the canoe shielded the areas under the ties from the sun which baked the rest of the canoe and washed out its natural color.  Students maybe/probably took the canoe down at least once and tried it out on some nearby water source, evidenced by grass stuck on the canoe’s bottom, as found after a one-year inspection.  Then a fight broke out in the community college’s hallway and an errant fist punched a hole in the canoe’s side.

The canoe now sits in archival storage in a specially made cradle by the park’s shop and maintenance staff.  Another canoe, also made by Hafeman, takes pride of place in the Rainy River Visitor Center.

Why am I blogging about a canoe?  This canoe tells us that the park, even before its official establishment in 1975 (it was authorized in 1971, but it took awhile to get key land from the state to make the park official), had a vision for its interpretation, to tell the voyageur story in a tangible lifelike way with a full-scale, traditionally made canoe.  The canoe also tells us that the park wanted a big enough visitor center to display the canoe, but such a building would take lots of time and money not immediately available.  And once the park had its showplace it had another canoe made to fit its central exhibit space.

There is more to learn, I am sure.  I have the above information from the accession file for the 26-foot canoe, plus from talking with the park’s collections manager.  How did Brooks and National Geographic end up working together in getting the canoe?  Do the medallions have any special meaning?  What did students think of the canoe hanging above their heads?  Can you take this canoe a little further along the history trail?

messy history

I walked yesterday from my car through the empty parking lot, down the ramp, and to the entrance courtyard of the Rainy Lake Visitor Center.  And then I finally paid attention to my ears.  No one was around, so I expected no sound.  But the trees.  They swayed and bristled and stretched in the rushing wind.  Their branches hit against each other.  Their trunks creaked like an old rusty door hinge.  I stopped and listened.  My head filled with the fullness of the woods surrounding me.  I felt connected to the trees and the land in an elemental way.

Driving through International Falls heightens my sense of smell.  The Boise Cascade plant manufactures paper, plus fiberboard.  Scrubbers seem to have eliminated most of the industrial smell from the air, but the sweet piney smell of pulverized wood remains, redolent especially on these cold crisp days.  I at first tried to cover my nose when I got a whiff of the wood scent, not sure of its origin and a bit taken aback that an entire town could be permeated by the smell of one industry.  Time has made me expect and anticipate the woody fragrance as I drive by the four-story high piles of fine wood shavings next to the railroad tracks.  The scent to me means International Falls.

What does all this mean with regard to “messy history?”  The swaying trees take me back to the voyageurs traveling in their not-so-silent world, canoes laden with furs and cold weather chasing them back toward civilization.  The pulp smell reminds me of the logging and manufacturing history that prompted people to want to preserve as a national park the very lands that had supported the paper and logging firms.

Messy history complicates, challenges, opens eyes, puts things in your face, leaves you a little uneasy, and adds dimensions beyond a simple straightforward narrative.  Messy history lets you feel the weight of the past, like the ponderous tick of a timepiece echo down a long dark hall.

Where is some messy history with respect to Voyageurs National Park?  The voyageur history, that could become messy.  The French fur trappers are held up as rugged individuals who traded fairly with the Indians and shared their knowledge of travel routes and land possibilities that later settlers followed.  But surely not all voyageurs maintained such positive and mutually beneficial relationships with everyone they met.  And while the voyageur history sets the stage for the national park, to what extent does that history really play out in the average visitor experience?  How many people opt to canoe through the park as opposed to take their power boats and zoom?  People see the landscape that could easily have been nearly the same as what the voyageurs saw.  But the sounds, the smells, those details are incongruous with the past history.

The Boise story with regard to the park’s establishment is also messy.  Boise opposed the park because, officially, the company worried that a national park in Minnesota and other national parks in Washington State (North Cascades, for example), threatened the company’s long-term access to national forests and thus raw materials for the company’s manufacturing.  A good chunk of national forest land, plus Boise land, was needed to get Voyageurs National Park started.  The messy part is that Boise had recently acquired a land development company, and a possible place for development was the shoreline of the Kabetogama Peninsula, of which Boise owned a fair share.  The company remained very quiet about its ideas for that land, but park proponents talked endlessly amongst each other about the potential threat.

Messy history reminds us that there are multiple motivations and also multiple senses to engage.  We learn from allowing ourselves to become enveloped by these scents and sounds and complications.

knowing what to copy

I visited the Minnesota Historical Society (www.MNHS.org) this weekend to conduct some research for the Voyageurs history project.  I reviewed the Voyageurs National Park Association, US Rep. John Blatnik, and US Rep. Bruce Vento collections.  The helpful staff had already pulled boxes for me so that I could get right to work.  Online finding aids and email are great for saving time.

I easily settled into research mode, but I had to keep reminding myself why I was reviewing these particular files.  I started reading about the founding of the VNPA and its Citizen’s Committee, established to help publicize the national park proposal and gain Minnesota-wide support for the national park.  I got swept into the action of writing enthusiastic letters encouraging area organizations to pass resolutions of support for the park.  I silently cheered as the number of supporting organizations steadily grew from 53 to 112 to 245 and up.  I smiled at the camaraderie that clearly the VNPA staff and volunteers felt towards one another as their dream slowly materialized.  I wanted to copy and save and eventually capture in my own writing these telling moments of growing success.

But I had to ignore and keep pushing through the documents.  Fred Witzig has already written a fine account of the legislative battle to establish Voyageurs National Park.  My assignment is to summarize this work, not repeat it, and then focus upon the management of the actual park.

I kept thinking, maybe the VNPA one day needs someone to write its own history.  That person will read these same files and copy documents, and craft the history that I see within these pages.  Just not me right now.

But what was I looking for?  I had three questions about the pre-1975 period that Witzig did not address in his book but I think does have relevance for the history of the park.

1)  What development and interpretive plans did the National Park Service consider in the early days of studying the feasibility of the national park in northern Minnesota?  Were these ideas shared with the VNPA and saved in its records?

2)  Why did Congressman John Blatnik push to have the Crane Lake area (which really includes an area beyond Crane Lake and pushes the park further east than it would have been with Rainy-Namakan Lakes only) included in the park, even as the Park Service argued for the smaller park version?

3)  Why did the paper products company, which switched from M & O to Boise, first support exchanging lands to allow for park establishment then try to bring public opinion against the park?  What were its larger goals for the Kabetogama Peninsula?

These three questions had to shape my research effort and decide what I copied.

And I did find some illuminating tidbits, particularly for question two.  It seems that Blatnik, who had already served the eighth congressional district for many years, feared a serious challenge in the upcoming campaign.  He felt most vulnerable in the Iron Range section of his district, with the steelworkers.  He and his staff repeatedly made clear to the VNPA that support had to be shown from this key area before he would introduce a park bill to Congress.  The Crane Lake area offered an eastern entrance to the proposed park, which may have been attractive to the Iron Range constituency–I still need more substance to this part of my argument.  But, it is clear from these VNPA records that once Blatnik received support from the steelworkers in the Iron Range, he introduced the bill.

I think the Crane Lake addition is an impressive story not yet told in detail, and I plan to make it a central part of my writing in the early part of the book.  The research trip to the historical society proved fruitful.  Hopefully my out-loud thinking helps clarify the research process.

emancipation and interpretation

I had the opportunity today to visit President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Old Soldier’s Home in Washington, DC.  The guided tour prompted in me some larger public history thoughts.  First some background:  The cottage is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which led a multi-year effort to preserve and restore the cottage to the time of the Civil War, when Lincoln and his family “summered” there between 1862 and1865.  The cottage, originally built in the 1850s for the Riggs family, is an example of the American Gothic architectural style with more than 30 rooms and sits on the extensive grounds of the first federally sponsored home for retired and disabled veterans.

The Trust made the decision to have very few furnishings inside the cottage because the original pieces used by the Lincoln family were unavailable.  Reproductions filling the house, an alternative considered,  would likely confuse visitors, thinking they were seeing Lincoln’s chair or Lincoln’s bed.  Instead, the Trust followed the example of its historic house museum Drayton Hall near Charleston, SC, which is bare bones inside.  When I toured Drayton Hall several years ago, the bare rooms spoke through the stories the interpreter told of the successive generations of the family who had owned the house.  Plus the striking architectural features of the rooms held the spotlight.

Lincoln’s cottage does not have significant interior architectural details to delight the visitor’s eye.  There are some benches and chairs for visitors to sit on while listening to the interpreter.  There are a couple of huge plasma TV’s which flash visual images from Lincoln’s time and accompanying quotes read by actors to accentuate story lines from the interpreter.  Other rooms have speakers controlled with a remote for more voice overs.  These 21st-century additions to the rooms are a bit jarring to see and hear at first but the intention of deepening the guided tour is important.

A desk sits in the room that was Lincoln’s bedroom.  This desk carefully reproduces its original counterpart (can’t remember where in DC that desk is–White House?  Smithsonian?).  The Trust uses this desk as a focal point for its major theme for the tour:  emancipation.  Lincoln thought about and wrote drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation at the cottage, on the original version of this desk.  The Trust argues in its tour (at least this general admission tour, not for schoolkids or for special events) that the cottage is significant not just because Lincoln stayed in this building for about one-quarter of his presidency.  The cottage is important to history because Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation there.

The Trust has filled the bare bones of the cottage with Lincoln’s ideas about slavery, the Union, and the Civil War, as opposed to period furnishings.  The tour makes the spaces inside the building secondary to the ideas generated there.

This uncommon approach to historic house interpretation brings me back to my thoughts about national park visitor centers.  Why are some stories told and others not?  What is the organization trying to accomplish, trying to convince its audience to believe?  The interpreter for my tour shared some information about Lincoln’s family at the cottage and some of the visitors who traveled the three miles out into the then-country to see the president.  But many of these stories still fed back into the larger emancipation theme.  Tad Lincoln became a favorite with the Bucktail soldiers guarding the cottage, and he often ate with them.  But Lincoln also saw these soldiers march and practice their combat skills, ready to defend him if the Confederates attacked.  Lincoln could also see from the second-story front windows the regular burials of Civil War dead at the first national cemetery just north of the cottage.  The tour interpreter played a retelling of Lincoln’s famous quote about how he would free all of the slaves, none of the slaves, or some of the slaves if that would save the Union.  The war, the Bucktail soldiers, the burials, all of these constant reminders contributed, the Trust argues, to Lincoln’s proclamation freeing the slaves in the rebellious states.

I liked the tightness of this argument.  I liked the idea of filling the bare bones house with ideas, not furnishings.  But, in the end, I didn’t have a sense of the house itself.  Its walls and floors and windows did not capture my imagination and sweep me into Lincoln’s time.  They stood as a container, and that container had no personality or meaning of its own.  The Trust in some ways made a daring and risky decision to use ideas instead of things to make its story.  Does the Trust really need the cottage to tell this story?  I am not sure, at least not as presented to me today.

For a national park, the thing itself is the story–whether the thing is the battlefield or the historic house or the stunning natural scene.  The interpretation is secondary, to allow for reflection and appreciation and education.  If a national park decided to make the park itself a container to ideas, would the park survive?

tidbits in the research

I am in the depths of research right now on the Voyagers history project.  That means that I am going through as many documents as I can to determine which ones I need to refer to later when writing.  I don’t read the documents.  I skim them.  I pick up little leads or story lines and try to follow them along.  But I often get side tracked or lose the lead, pick up something new, move along on a parallel line for awhile.

These little tidbits of stories keep me guessing, enthralled and engaged.  One story line deals with the competition between two federal agencies:  the National Park Service and the United States Forest Service.  The governor of Minnesota in 1961 invited NPS Director Conrad Wirth and his associates to the northlands, with an eye toward convincing the NPS that the lands around Kabetogama Peninsula merited national park status.  A couple problems soon became apparent.  First, the Superior National Forest jutted up against the proposed national park lands.  Second, a major forest products company owned almost half the lands on the peninsula.  Soon, the Forest Service asserted its control and annexed lands that the Park Service considered for the proposed national park.  The USFS stated that its multiple-use strategy of management was sufficient for preserving and using these lands.  The forest products company then stopped talking about friendly land exchanges with the state to facilitate national park establishment.  Instead, the company went on the offensive, arguing that the federal government was land grabbing, wasting useful timber.

The story thickens.  A collection of resort owners, around Crane Lake, where the Forest Service annexed additional lands, vehemently opposed any national park in their area.  They adopted the Forest Service’s and the forest products company’s arguments, saying that the lands should be managed for multiple uses, including logging, hunting, fishing.  They knew how the Forest Service and the forest products company did business and the resort owners opted to stay with the status quo.

But, the status quo was on the cusp of changing, whether the National Park Service came in or not.  The USFS expanded the no-cut zone around the nearby Boundary Waters Canoe area, angering the logging interests who saw any reduction of timber areas as a threat.  And, according to some reading I am also doing in Fred Witzig’s legislative history of Voyagers, the forest products company bought a land development company with an eye toward turning the free-ranging deer-hunting paradise of Kab peninsula into a second-home exclusive enclave.

Now enters the Eighth Congressional District congressman, Blatnik.  He did not immediately embrace and promote the national park idea.  But when he did start talking it up, he added Crane Lake.  The Park Service had dropped it when the Forest Service had asserted its control.  Blatnik ignored the rivalries between the two agencies and insisted that the Crane Lake area added an important component to the national park, with access for people coming from the east (Duluth area) and additional recreational and scenic variety.

So my public history question from these tidbits is:  why did the congressman push for Crane Lake when so many were against it, especially people and influential companies in his jurisdiction?  And ultimately, he won–the national park includes the northern shore of Crane Lake and is significantly enlarged and enhanced by this addition.  The park is shaped by his vision and determination.

There are more tidbits and unanswered questions in this story, more for me to puzzle over and look for clues in other documents.  Research is often the “fun” part of history/public history, though I also like the pulling together, the writing, the connecting the stories.  Thanks for listening while I start that process.