Myths of the Rune Stone

by David M Krueger

  Rocky Revelations and the Anxieties of Conquest

  Larson’s and Holand’s integration of the Kensington Rune Stone narrative into their historical accounts provided Minnesotans with what Max Weber would call “the psychological reassurance of legitimacy.”79 In other words, the artifact bolstered the conviction that their success, happiness, and prosperity were deserved and were bestowed on them by the providence of God.80 According to the way the story is typically told, the immigrant farmer Olaf Ohman “discovers” the Viking relic while clearing trees from his land in order to prepare it for cultivation. Therefore, the rune stone becomes a sign that God has blessed the farmer’s efforts to reclaim the land from its wild state.81 Because the stone emerges from ground that is already claimed by European Americans, it is interpreted as a revelation that God considered their ownership of the land justified.82

  The Great Seal of the State of Minnesota.

  Evoking memories of Indian savagery would be one attempt to demonstrate that white residents had a rightful claim to the landscape, but nostalgic renderings did the same. Henry W. Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha became a template for the construction of a modern, peace-loving Indian far more palatable to white Minnesotans than the “savages” of the Dakota War and the flesh-and-blood Ojibwe Indians who continued to live in Minnesota.83 The poem popularized the notion that Indians were a people who had disappeared, or at the least had come to terms with the triumph of white civilization. One of the poem’s female characters, Minnehaha, is the namesake of a Minneapolis park dedicated in 1889. “Noble Indians” became the centerpiece of numerous advertising campaigns in the early to mid-twentieth century, including Hamm’s beer and Land O’Lakes butter. Starting in the 1940s, civic leaders in Pipestone, Minnesota, held an annual historical pageant based on Longfellow’s poem. The pageant romanticized tribal cultures as “noble and heroic” but ultimately “destined to vanish with the perceived advance of American society.”84 The notion of vanished Indians was also evident on one of the most sacred of civic symbols: the state seal of Minnesota, which depicted a farmer with his hands to the plow next to a stump with a rifle leaning on it. The farmer’s eyes were fixed on an Indian on horseback riding off into the setting sun.85 A 1944 poem by Gertrude E. Anderson interprets the meaning of the seal.

  An Indian, mounted on his pony, Rides full speed toward the setting sun; Behind him, the white man, bending, plowing, Visions the glory of work to be done. His ax sunk deep in a near-by tree stump, His heavy rifle, lying low . . . Galloping, galloping goes the pony . . . “White man here now; Indian must go.” Fainter, fainter, the pony’s hoofbeats . . . Almost vanished, the Indian horde . . . Freedom! Freedom! The white man’s struggle still goes on. L’etoile du nord!86

  Despite the fact that Minnesotans were comforted by the notion of “vanished Indians,” they continued to include living Indians in civic events to commemorate the sacrifices of white settlers. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of New Ulm in 1912, “a peace delegation” of local Dakota Indians was invited to march in the town parade. Formerly imagined as “savages,” contemporary Indians were imagined to be “agents of wisdom and peace.”87 In 1938, Alexandria civic leaders hosted a “Runestone Remembrance Days” celebration in which Ojibwe Indians from the Leech Lake Reservation played an important role. Tribal members were among the actors in a historical pageant dramatizing the rune stone story and were also part of a “life-like Indian camp” staged for a film crew documenting the week’s events.88 Local papers noted that Chief Chibiaboos, a “full-blood Chippewa,” was a featured performer and “one of the most popular personages of the celebration.”89 It is likely that the presence of real, live Indians at their history pageant helped local white residents reassure themselves that the skrælings, once so savage, had now happily embraced their Nordic conquerors.90

  This photograph depicts a reenactment of one of the rune stone pageant scenes from 1938. It is unclear if the “Indians” in this particular scene are white residents dressing up in stereotypical costumes, but it is known that Ojibwe tribal members from Cass Lake were present during the week’s celebrations. Courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society.

  It is evident that some early-twentieth-century Minnesotans expressed a degree of moral ambiguity about the violent expulsion of Indians from Minnesota during the nineteenth century. For some, these anxieties morphed into feelings of regret and guilt regarding the plight of Native Americans. At times, even Holand conveys regret for the plight of Indians in the face of white settlement: “The saddest memories in America’s history are those in connection with the displacement and extermination of the Indians.”91 Ole Rølvaag’s widely read novel Giants in the Earth suggests that many Norwegian Americans in the region felt anxiety about claiming and settling a land that was not necessarily empty. In one scene, Per Hansa walked with his neighbors to the top of a hill overlooking his newly acquired plot of land and “stopped beside a small depression in the ground, and stood gazing at it intently for quite a while; then he said quietly: ‘There are people buried here . . . That is a grave.’” Rølvaag portrays Per Hansa and his Norwegian neighbors as somewhat disturbed by this discovery, but ultimately callous to the claims of others: “This vast stretch of beautiful land was to be his—yes his—and no ghost of a dead Indian would drive him away!”92

  One of the strategies to justify the conquest of one group over another is to construct and perpetuate a legitimating myth framed by the notion of “innocent domination,” which Jon Pahl defines as “patterns or systems of domination, hegemony, or power over others that are largely absent of malice on the part of the perpetrators.”93 Producing this type of myth requires a number of rhetorical devices, one of which is to demonstrate that one’s own group is more innocent than other dominating groups. Holand portrayed medieval Norsemen as morally superior to other explorers, such as the Spaniards, because the former “placed a much higher view on America’s importance.” Christopher Columbus and his ilk, claimed Holand, came with “thieves’ eyes” valuing America only as a place from which to extract wealth.94 The noble intentions of the Knutson expedition are likened to those of modern Norwegians who came not “to establish new kingdoms like the Mormons, or to dig for gold, or with force and intrigue to gain political power.” To the contrary, the aim of the pioneer immigrants “was to establish peaceful communities and build roads, to till the soil and the wilderness to bloom.”95 With such rhetoric, Holand disguises the complicity of Norwegian Americans in the violent conquest of Native Americans. Although most Norwegian settlers were not directly involved in the removal of Indians from Minnesota, the U.S. Army did it on their behalf.96

  The innocence of one’s group is enhanced by appeals to divine blessing. When writing about the history of Norwegian immigrant settlement, Holand asserted his group’s innocence in the conquest of the frontier by situating the endeavor in a biblical framework: “It was as if we were transported back to remotest antiquity, when man heard the first divine command to replenish the earth and subdue it. The greatest contribution the Norwegians have made to America is their obedience to this ancient command.”97 Holand implies that the experience of frontier life is what made Norwegian Americans so much more religious than those they left behind in Norway: “There is no more gratifying challenge . . . than to transform a wilderness into flourishing fields . . . It is as if one identifies himself with the Creator as he converts a chaos into a cosmos.”98 In Holand’s logic, it is God who has initiated the campaign of conquest; Norwegian Americans could not be held culpable for the violence they perpetrated. It was not only the Norwegian immigrants who understood God to be on their side. Many Christian missionaries viewed the Dakota conflict as a war of religions. Blaming traditional Dakota religion for instigating the conflict, they interpreted the victory of white civilization as divine affirmation that Christianity was superior.99

  Another component of a myth of innocent domination is to portray the dominated as needing to be thus.
They are either irrepressibly savage or unable to manage themselves or their environment in a proper manner. Through their portrayals of Indians as the savage “other,” Holand and Larson also make it appear that Indians by nature are unable to relate peaceably to European Americans. Therefore, their need to be conquered is both natural and divinely ordained.100 Holand also emphasized that white settlers had a greater claim to the land because they made better use of it than did the Indians. He portrays the work ethic of white settlers as superior to that of the Indians:

  But one day the white man came to these parts—the energetic Yankee and the strong serious Norseman. For him, life is not long, and carefree, but short and filled with responsibility . . . He digs himself a hole in the side of a hill for a house . . . He chops and saws the hard oak trees and builds strong fences around his property, sows his corn, digs a well, drains and irrigates, plows and digs. Soon a small church appears where he can beseech a God he more fears than loves. For him, life is serious.101

  The theme of divinely ordained white supersession is evident in Holand’s story of Norwegian settler Søren Bache who made his pioneer home in an Indian mound: “Bache excavated a roomy tunnel through this mound . . . in this way he acquired a fairly cozy place to live.” Capitalizing on an opportunity to expand local commerce, Bache later transformed his dwelling into what Holand calls “the first Norwegian grocery store in America.” In later years, Holand says that “this same Indian mound was to become the first Norwegian-Lutheran parsonage in America.”102 Finally, in 1844, the Indian mound was leveled and the first Norwegian Lutheran Church was built on top of it.103 In this vignette, Holand charts a clear path of “progress” from Indian savagery to a white, prosperous, Christian civilization.104 Holand’s rune stone functions as a primordial land claim foreshadowing this divine destiny.

  The mythology enshrouding the Kensington Rune Stone became a repository for settler anger over the events of the “Indian Massacre of 1862.” Far from removing violence from the culture of Minnesotans, the mythic narrative and the ritualized evocations of Viking martyrdom perpetuated ongoing notions of both Scandinavian immigrant and Anglo-American innocence in the genocide and exile of Native Americans. This civic myth with violence at its center yielded an enduring and elastic symbol, the skræling, which could be rhetorically applied to a variety of threats in the twentieth century. In short, the Kensington Rune Stone became a tool in a “cosmic war” between the forces of savagery and civilization that used a mythic past to justify the policies of the present.105 As part of Minnesota’s sacred civic landscape, Holand’s Viking trail served to further reify white claims to the land. If God’s blessing of the American nation extended so far back in to the past, it would surely extend into the future.

  Chapter Three

  In Defense of Main Street

  The Kensington Rune Stone as a Midwestern Plymouth Rock

  [Small-town life] is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.

  —Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

  Despite the enduring appeal of the Kensington Rune Stone narrative for addressing external enemies and defending military campaigns of the past and present, it was also used to confront enemies closer to home. By the 1920s, there was more at stake in the promotion of the rune stone than justifying white claims to the landscape or bolstering ethnic power. Memories of the Dakota War of 1862 were fading and Swedish and Norwegian Americans no longer required homemaking myths to prove that they were loyal Americans. Residents of rural and small-town Minnesota during this period faced new and immediate threats to their economic well-being and sense of identity. Despite the rapid economic growth in urban, industrial areas during the 1920s, Minnesota farmers were suffering from an economic downturn. Grain prices had dropped sharply after the wartime demand for grain collapsed. Rural areas suffered population loss during the decade as younger residents migrated to cities for employment.1 And just as the material prosperity of rural Minnesota was eroding, its cultural prestige was under attack.

  Sinclair Lewis and the Marginalization of “Main Street”

  Sinclair Lewis’s depiction of small-town American life in his novel Main Street was in stark contrast to typical portrayals from the era. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, American literature and popular culture depicted small towns as the source of American virtue.2 The Norman Rockwell cover art on the Saturday Evening Post during this time frequently depicted sentimental scenes nostalgic for a small-town past.3 The accelerating forces of industrialization and urbanization left many Americans yearning for small-town life and its values. However, Lewis’s Main Street took aim at small-town boosterism and the idealizing of rural life. Released in 1920, it was wildly successful, selling more than 2 million copies within a few years. The success of Main Street has been described as “the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history,” and its impact on popular depictions of small town life in the 1920s was profound.4 In the aftermath of its publication, “[t]he term Main Streeter became a pejorative for someone who was gauche and provincial.”5 The public spectacle of Main Street identified a fault line in American culture between Middle America and the cultural elites of the East Coast.6

  Lewis’s mythical town of Gopher Prairie, the setting of his novel, was based largely on his hometown experience in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Lewis spent his childhood in Sauk Centre, but moved to Greenwich Village in New York in 1910 and lived among artists, authors, and left-wing political activists. Sauk Centre residents were not pleased with Lewis’s depiction of their town as parochial, gossipy, and narrow-minded. The local newspaper refused to acknowledge the book until six months after it was released, and its initial coverage was defensive: “A perusal of the book makes it possible for one to picture in his mind’s eyes local characters having been injected bodily into the story.”7 Local residents feared that they had become “the butt of a national joke.”8 The local outrage, however, was short-lived. Within two years, Sauk Centre came to embrace Lewis as a local boy who made good. Local business entrepreneurs capitalized on the publicity of his book. In 1923, a billboard was placed at the entrance to town describing Sauk Centre as America’s “Original Main Street.” In following years, a hotel opened with the name Gopher Prairie Inn and a local restaurant was named Main Street Diner.

  Sociologists Amy Campion and Gary Alan Fine asked how and why the town of Sauk Centre came to embrace the one who attacked them the most harshly. Because of Main Street’s immense success, Sauk Centre residents had to find a way to embrace it; to reject Lewis’s novel would demonstrate that they actually were Gopher Prairie. Campion and Fine remind us that external criticism often has the effect of making a community aware of itself: “Such a community may have some sense of group identity, but until that identity is questioned, it remains largely undefined and unarticulated.”9 They describe the town’s civic leaders as “reputational entrepreneurs” who were able to foster collective identity by challenging, incorporating, and reinterpreting criticisms of small-town life in Main Street. These community boosters or image makers utilized “neutralization” techniques to address the attacks. First, they “revalued” the message of the critic by making it “to mean the opposite of what was intended.”10 Civic leaders claimed that Lewis had neglected to describe the “other side of Main Street.” This was the “true” Sauk Centre that locals experience as a “haven of warmth and virtue” in contrast to cities like Minneapolis, which they described as a place of “corruption and hostility.”11 In promoting their town, civic boosters used only the few quotations from Lewis’s novel that spoke of the town in a positive light; they ignored the many quotes that crit
iqued the town. Additionally, they portrayed the author as a person who really loved his town despite his criticisms. In short, the reputational entrepreneurs of Sauk Centre seized control of the town’s identity by reinterpreting Main Street for their own purposes. By embracing Lewis, they promoted Sauk Centre “as the original, quintessential small town.” Lewis’s novel emerged as what sociologist Émile Durkheim would refer to as a “totem,” which represented the aspirations and identity of the community.12

  Main Street evoked an emotional response among residents of Alexandria, just twenty-four miles to the west of Sauk Centre. In September 1921, several newspapers throughout the country reported that Lewis’s novel had been banned from Alexandria’s public library. The articles attributed this to a rumor that Alexandria residents were concerned that the novel had their town in mind when he wrote about Gopher Prairie. An article in the Kansas City Star stated: