Myths of the Rune Stone

by David M Krueger

  90.This is not to suggest that ethnicity no longer played a factor in enthusiasm for the rune stone. Odd Lovoll coined the term “chamber of commerce ethnicity” to describe the ways that small towns capitalize on the so-called ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s by promoting ethnic-themed civic celebrations. These celebrations serve to generate financial gain from appeals to ethnic nostalgia (Lovoll, Norwegians on the Prairie, 262–70). As the following chapters reveal, appeals to ethnic pride persisted throughout the twentieth century.

  2. Knutson’s Last Stand

  1.Holand, “An Explorer’s Stone Record Which Antedates Columbus,” 15.

  2.Mancini, “Discovering Viking America,” 872.

  3.One example of this is Elliott, New England History from the Discovery of the Continent by the Northmen, A.D. 986, to the Period When the Colonies Declared Their Independence, A.D. 1776, vol. 1.

  4.Mancini, “Discovering Viking America,” 874.

  5.The armor on the skeleton was actually made from copper and years later was determined to be made by precontact Algonquian Indians—not Norse travelers. See Kolodny, In Search of First Contact, 151–52.

  6.Williams, Fantastic Archaeology, 191–92.

  7.Ibid., 193.

  8.Mancini, “Discovering Viking America,” 877.

  9.Ibid., 886.

  10.Kolodny, In Search of First Contact, 29.

  11.Ibid., 27–28.

  12.Ibid., 23–25.

  13.Ibid., 33–34.

  14.See Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind.

  15.Wingerd, North Country, 24.

  16.Andrew Isenberg tells the story of Presbyterian missionaries in the 1830s who lived in a mutually beneficial relationship with Indians at the Lac qui Parle mission. These missionaries viewed their life on the Minnesota River as a utopian retreat from what they saw as a degenerate white civilization (Isenberg, “‘To See inside of an Indian,’” 218–40).

  17.Wingerd, North Country, 191.

  18.Ibid., 185–96.

  19.Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 39.

  20.Wingerd, North Country, 307, 347.

  21.Ibid., 320.

  22.Ibid., 297. Clergy members were often the only white Minnesotans willing to stand in defense of the Dakota. However, most offered “no more than a timid protest” (316). Whipple was a notable exception known for his staunch advocacy of the Dakota.

  23.Ibid., 319.

  24.Ibid., 327.

  25.One such physician, Dr. William Mayo, of Mayo Clinic fame, acquired the body of a man he referred to as “Cut Nose” and used it to teach his sons about medicine. The remains of “Cut Nose,” or Marpiya Okinajin, were kept at the Mayo Clinic until 1998 when they were finally returned to his descendants and buried at Lower Sioux Agency. See Bessler, Legacy of Violence, 61, 66.

  26.Wingerd, North Country, 315.

  27.Ibid., 338. For accounts of the Dakota War from the perspective of the Dakota, see Anderson and Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes. Some six thousand Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) tribal members continued to live throughout northern Minnesota. By 1870, they were relegated to a handful of reservations.

  28.Folwell, A History of Minnesota, 3:58.

  29.Wingerd, North Country, Plate Caption 119.

  30.Ibid., Plate Caption 126.

  31.Ibid., Plate Caption 132.

  32.Having served as Minnesota’s second lieutenant governor and as a U.S. congressman, Donnelly was well known in Minnesota. His novel Atlantis, published in 1882, sold more than 1 million copies and has a number of references to Goths and to Odin as the god of the runes. Erick Wahlgren suggests that Donnelly’s novel was a direct inspiration for the creators of the Kensington Rune Stone (The Kensington Stone, 126).

  33.Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 227.

  34.Theodore Roosevelt argued that “overcivilized” men in the East should be encouraged to spend time in vigorous physical activity, such as hunting and camping in the western wilderness, in order to renew their connection to life in the pioneer era. The push to send U.S. troops to Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War was largely driven by the desire to “provide an outlet for men’s robust energies.” See Rosemary Radford Reuther, America, Amerikka, 113, and Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 8.

  35.“The Old Settlers’ Reunion,” Alexandria Citizen, July 12, 1900.

  36.“Old Settlers Get Together,” Alexandria Post, July 5, 1900.

  37.In 1914, Lucy Leavenworth Wilder Morris published her collection of pioneer accounts, which was widely read and well received by the public: Old Rail Fence Corners.

  38.In 1912, a monument was put up to commemorate the fifty-year anniversary of the execution of the thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato. It was located at a prominent intersection at Front and Main Streets and was marked by a two-by-five-foot plaque. Local white residents complained bitterly and it was eventually removed. It was not until 1997 that a monument was dedicated at the site. It is now called Reconciliation Park and is marked by a large statue of a buffalo. In recent years, Dakota tribal members have made an annual pilgrimage via horseback from the Lower Brulé Indian Reservation in South Dakota to Mankato. The 2012 documentary Dakota 38 tells the story: http://smoothfeather.com/dakota38/. Another group has participated in a biennial walk retracing the steps of 1,700 Dakota persons who were forcibly marched from Mankato to Fort Snelling after the Dakota War of 1862 (http://www.twincities.com/ci_21984103/dakota-commemorative-walk-remembers-1862-forced-march-fort).

  39.Dahlin, Dakota Uprising Victims, xvi.

  40.Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 83.

  41.It should be noted that sacred spaces are often contested spaces. The meaning of the site where General Custer met his demise on the Montana prairie in 1876 has long been contested. It is a place where two different groups have competed over a national story. During the 1970s, Native American groups protested the name of the site: Custer Battlefield National Monument. The park had originally been dedicated as a memorial to General Custer, who was seen as sacrificing his life to open the frontier for white settlement. Native Americans had long contested this claim and aimed to see it transformed into a site that commemorated the Indians who had died there. By 1991, the activists were successful in persuading the National Park Service to change the name to Little Big Horn National Monument. See Chidester and Linenthal, “Introduction,” in Chidester and Linenthal, American Sacred Space, 17–20.

  42.Holand, Westward from Vinland, 262.

  43.Holand, “Further Discoveries concerning the Kensington Rune Stone,” 332–33.

  44.Ibid., 337.

  45.Holand, Westward from Vinland, 198.

  46.Holand, My First Eighty Years, 230. The number of those who accompanied him is modified again in 1962 when he writes that twenty-five to thirty men visited the site during the fall of 1919. This latest account also tells a more dramatic story of Holand arriving in a sleepy town “early one Sunday morning after an all-night [train] ride in a day coach.” The only person Holand could find was a local minister preparing to leave for church. After feeding him breakfast, the minister drove Holand in his buggy near to Lake Cormorant, where Holand began his research (Holand, A Pre-Columbian Crusade to America, 121–23).

  47.Johannes A. Holik found evidence that at least one of the mooring stones was chiseled by a farmer at Lake Cormorant (Sprunger, “Mystery and Obsession,” 146).

  48.In response, Holand collected the testimonies of other area farmers who claimed that they had seen the so-called mooring stone holes prior to 1908. See “More Criticism Directed at Runestone by Holvik,” Park Region Echo, December 28, 1948.

  49.See “Historical Discoveries,” Ashby Post, December 3, 1909.

  50.Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone, 77. In Holand’s 1940 account, he says that a day’s journey is seventy-five miles and the fourteen-day journey would be 1,050 miles. This is but one exampl
e of Holand’s willingness to revise numbers in order to fit his theory.

  51.“Iowan to Search for Viking Explorer Clues in Area” (date of article and newspaper name are unknown), Archives of the Kensington Area Heritage Association.

  52.“Seeking Runestone Evidence—Divers Search Bottom of Big Cormorant Lake,” County Record (Detroit Lakes, Minnesota), July 8, 1965.

  53.Mircea Eliade speaks of sacred spaces as an axis mundi or “fixed point” that provides orientation (The Sacred and the Profane, 20–21).

  54.Larson, History of Douglas and Grant Counties, 83.

  55.Mircea Eliade illustrates the sacred significance that rocks and stones have held for many human cultures: “The hardness, the ruggedness, and permanence of matter was in itself a hierophany in the religious consciousness of the primitive. And nothing was more direct and autonomous in the completeness of its strength, nothing more noble or more awe-inspiring, than a majestic rock, or a boldly-standing block of granite . . . Rock shows the [human] something that transcends the precariousness of his humanity.” Of particular relevance to understanding the cultural role of the Kensington Rune Stone is to understand how stones function in commemorating violent deaths. Eliade notes that some groups in central India believe that the soul of a person who died violently would remain at the location, resentful that he had been cut off from the community. Stone markers placed at the site were believed to contain the dead, requiring them to help rather than harm the living. These burial stones are symbolic of protecting life against death. See Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 216, 218–19. For Christians, gravestones also function as symbols of immortality and resurrection (McDannell, Material Christianity, 17).

  56.Cichy. A History of Millersville, Minnesota, Douglas County, 75.

  57.Many of the army commanders who fought in the Philippines were veterans of the America’s Indian Wars. Filipinos were often described by American soldiers as “Natives,” “Injuns,” or “savages” who were incapable self-rule and “only understood force” (Ruether, America, Amerikka, 125). This was also evident among Minnesota soldiers. See Penick, “A Test of Duty,” 300. Subsequent chapters of this book demonstrate that Indians would serve as a recurring proxy for a wide variety of external and internal enemies. For another account of the battle, see McKeig and Geving, The 1898 Battle of Sugar Point.

  58.Matsen, “The Battle for Sugar Point,” 270.

  59.Ibid., 269.

  60.Bagone-giizhig continued to evade arrest, but most of his associates received light prison sentences and fines. The following January, President McKinley issued full pardons to all members of the Pillager band on the recommendation of the local commissioner of Indian affairs.

  61.“No Indian Uprising,” Alexandria Citizen, July 5, 1900. In 1890, the Ghost Dance had become a popular ritual for Indian tribes across the American West. It was widely known by white Americans and many feared that it could lead to a mass uprising. Practice of this ritual led to the massacre of more than 150 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. For a scholarly treatment of both Indian and white perspectives on the Ghost Dance, see Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890.

  62.Sheldon Solomon, “Introduction to Ernest Becker,” http://www.ernestbecker.org/images/stories/pdf/transcript.pdf (accessed August 14, 2014).

  63.Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, “The Cultural Animal,” 24.

  64.Larson’s depiction is a contrast to most white American depictions of Indians in the early twentieth century, which tended to be romantic. This was particularly true of writing originating in eastern states, where violent encounters with Indians had occurred generations earlier. See Marsh, “Penn’s Peaceable Kingdom,” 654.

  65.Larson notes that another white settlement was founded near Holmes City during the same summer of 1858 (Larson, History of Douglas and Grant Counties, 125). This location was just six miles from where the rune stone was later unearthed.

  66.“Census of Douglas County for 1860,” Douglas County Historical Society Archives.

  67.Larson, History of Douglas and Grant Counties, 131.

  68.After a few days, a group of twenty armed settlers ventured back to the Alexandria area to check on their farms. Two of the settlers out in front of the group, Andrew Austin and Ben Lewis, were ambushed by a band of forty Indians and shot at close range. Lewis managed to escape on his horse, but Austin was killed. The others settlers decided not to engage in battle with the larger group of Indians and retreated to the military stockade in Sauk Centre. A dispatch of troops was later sent out to give a “proper burial” to Austin. When the troops found the body, Larson writes that “the savages had cut off Austin’s head and one of his hands and then had cut out his heart” (ibid., 150). In the 1890s, local newspapers ran articles about the sacrifices of early white settlers. One such article referred to Andrew Austin as “Douglas County’s first white martyr” (“Alexandria in Early Days,” Alexandria Post News, July 15, 1897).

  69.The fort became the center of commercial and social activity for the next few years. Troops were stationed there until the spring of 1866.

  70.Larson, History of Douglas and Grant Counties, 131–32.

  71.Ibid., 143. His figure of eight hundred is at the highest end of the range estimated by historians of his day. The conflict actually took place over several weeks.

  72.Ibid., 148.

  73.Ibid., 72.

  74.Ibid., 83.

  75.For a brief summation of Girard’s theory, see Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice, 28–29. Girard’s classic text on the topic is Violence and the Sacred.

  76.Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice, 28.

  77.See, for example, Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifices and the Nation.

  78.Holand’s historical narrative of the Viking massacre was ritually dramatized in several local historical pageants throughout the twentieth century. These pageants played an important role in forging civic identity and community spirit. As Marvin and Ingle assert, “violent, blood sacrifices make enduring groups cohere” (ibid., 1).

  79.Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 107.

  80.Eliade notes the ways stones function in biblical literature to demarcate sacred spaces. In the book of Genesis, God speaks to Jacob while he was resting his head on a stone. God tells Jacob that the land on which he was sleeping would be the land that would belong to him and his descendants. When Jacob arose the next morning, he took the stone, poured oil on it, and named the place “Bethel” or “house of God.” See Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 228–29. In this sense, the stone yields physical proof that God had given the land to one group and not to another.

  81.As Frieda Knobloch observes, the expansion of agriculture is inherently an act of colonization (The Culture of Wilderness, 49).

  82.Joseph Smith’s discovery of the golden plates also functioned as a land claim for his followers. It situated the Mormon American story inside a larger biblical narrative.

  83.Wingerd, North Country, Plate Caption 135.

  84.See Southwick, Building on a Borrowed Past. Although flesh-and-blood Indians were not often visible to whites in west-central Minnesota at the turn of the century, they were present. Boarding schools for Indian children were located in Pipestone and in Morris, which is less than thirty miles from where the rune stone was unearthed. This Morris school was operated by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy from 1887 to 1909 and educated more than two thousand children who were brought there from Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota reservations. Indian boarding schools separated children from their families for long periods of time and forbade them to speak their tribal languages or practice tribal customs.

  85.The state seal was modified slightly in 1983 so that the Indian appears to be riding south instead of west in order to “better represent the Indian heritage of Minnesota.” However, appreciation of this Indian heritage still is mediated by the presence of a gun. See “State Seal,” https://web.archive.org/web/200509
05003524/http://www.leg.state.mn.us/webcontent/leg/symbols/sealarticle.pdf.

  86.Anderson, “The Great Seal of Minnesota.” The phrase “L’Etoile du Nord” or “North Star” is the Minnesota state motto.

  87.Wingerd, North Country, Plate Caption 134.

  88.“Runestone Days Has Small Attendance,” Park Region Echo, June 30, 1938.

  89.“Indian Baritone,” Park Region Echo, June 30, 1938. Indians have long played starring roles in dramatic productions that portray Indians as violent. Perhaps the most notable example is the participation of Sitting Bull in William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show. See Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, and Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.

  90.The comic book Mystery of the Runestone, written a few decades later, makes a distinction between violent Sioux Indians and peace-loving Chippewa Indians (Leuthner, Mystery of the Runestone). The comic book perpetuated a good Indian/bad Indian dichotomy that expresses the white desire for peaceful, compliant Indians who accept white domination. See Deloria, Playing Indian, 20.