The Empire Club, Callahan’s, and the White Turtle drew a few horse-drawn buggies, and saddled horses were tethered to hitching posts. But more and more, cars were parked outside the “soda fountains.” He had a few more Studeys to sell. He’d get his business loan paid off soon. Then he was switching to Fords. Factory built, sure, but they were the wave of the future. A vehicle everyone could afford.
Instead of checking on his remaining inventory, he walked on.
Sadie Rose.
She’d stopped by the creamery—on the pretense of running an errand—but she must have wanted to say good-bye to him. And he’d been cold toward her. He didn’t want her to go away to college with that as her last memory. He wanted to wish her well, to say good-bye properly.
He turned up the street past the community building to the Worthingtons’ cedar-shingled cottage. The Studebaker he’d sold Aasta and Hans was parked out front, gleaming, as if Hans had spared no elbow grease in keeping it up.
When he knocked on the door, Aasta, lean and towering, met him with her silver-blue eyes, which smiled, even if her lips did not. With a nod, she read his mind before he had to form any words. She drew in a quick breath. “While Worthingtons are away, we stay over. And . . . ja, Owen. She is down at the dock then. She wanted her feet to put in water—one more time before she catches train tomorrow morning, ja?”
He nodded his thanks, then walked past the garden shed and the side of the house. In deepening shadows, he spotted Sadie Rose silhouetted at the end of the dock. Beyond, the train rumbled across the bridge, drowning out any attempt to be heard.
Expecting she might startle, he walked up beside her. He cleared his throat. “Sadie?”
She turned in her sleeveless dress and looked up at him, as if she’d been expecting him. Her face glowed in the last remnants of light. Her skin was made of peaches and cream. Her dress skimmed her knees as she swung her feet in the water.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Please,” she said, motioning for him to sit beside her. He sat down, but not too close. He didn’t want her to think he was trying to start things up again. He respected her need to move on, even if it was the last thing in the world he wanted. Tipper flopped down between them.
“You leave tomorrow morning,” he said, gazing out at the bay. In shades of silver and black, the current swirled in eddies and flowed westward into the river’s arms.
“I heard what happened,” she said, stroking Tipper’s back. “It was in today’s paper.”
He stared at the water. What could he possibly say in response? There were no words.
“Yes,” he managed.
As a loon popped up halfway between the dock and the bridge, the dam in him that had held everything back broke loose. He told her about the events of the past seven months. About his fight with his father and his death. About Jerry. He told her about being held to secrecy or else risk his family’s welfare and go to prison. Despite a brief onslaught of mosquitos, he recounted what happened before and after the sheriff and deputy were shot. When he finished, as if a heavy beam had been lifted off his chest, he drew in a deep, full breath. “I don’t need to keep silent anymore.”
She put her hand on his arm. “That’s why you’ve been so . . . so far away all summer.”
The loon broke into a wail, aching with melancholy. The song pulsed several beats, then stopped.
“I should go,” he said, standing up. “But I want you to know, I’m ready to let go of you now.” She gazed up at him. The moon rose above the spruce tree and lit up her face and the water at her feet. He had to leave. Lingering, even a few seconds longer, might kill him.
“I think I’ll always love you.” He half laughed. “How could I not love you?” Then he grew serious again. “But there’s someone else out there for you, Sadie. Someone who can take you to heights I can never reach.”
“Owen, don’t say that.”
He stepped away before she could touch him. “No, it’s fine. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. That’s not why I came over.”
“Then why did you?” she asked, meeting his eyes.
He would always love her dark, brooding eyes. He’d hold this picture of her in his heart, wherever life took him. “To say good-bye.”
She jumped to her feet, grabbed both of his hands in hers, and squeezed them hard. “Damn it, Owen. I don’t want you to let go. I don’t want you to say good-bye. When things were crazy for a while at school, I know I said I needed a break. But all summer, I thought you were angry with me. Or tired of me. You’ve been distant and cold, pushing me away every chance you’ve had and—” She began to cry.
He pulled her in, drawing her to his chest, his face buried in her hair. She nuzzled her nose into his shirt.
“Owen,” she said, her voice muffled, until she turned her head. “This is where I want to be!”
“Here? Not returning to college? No, you can’t do that. Not when you have the opportunity to—”
She stopped him, pulling back and looking into his eyes. “No, of course I’m returning to school. Oh! You’re making this so difficult. I want you, Owen. You.”
“You do?” he whispered. “Not Sam, not one of those attorneys who could offer you—”
She rose to her tiptoes and kissed him deeply, her lips silencing him. They kissed, quieting in him, for the first time in many months, his grief and hopelessness.
He pulled away, and with more certainty than he’d ever had about anything, said, “Marry me.”
Her lips trembled; then she smiled. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
She nodded. “Soon as I finish college.”
Tipper whined and nudged his nose between them.
“I think Tipper likes the idea, too,” she chuckled.
Owen looked toward the house. It was completely dark without a single light on, as if Sadie’s grandparents had retired early to give them privacy. “Think they’ll approve?”
“They love you,” she said, fingering the Saint Christopher medal around his neck. “I know they’ll approve, even if you’re Catholic.”
“Let’s swim. No one can see us.”
In growing darkness, they removed their clothes and let them drop in heaps onto the dock. They slipped into the water without a sound. Tipper followed, paddling around them, until Owen found a floating stick and tossed it out farther for Tipper to retrieve.
To the north, swaths of pale green swept back and forth.
“Northern lights,” Sadie whispered.
“A good sign,” Owen agreed, then dove into the dark, cool, forgiving water. He had the oddest sensation of being baptized . . . of going under into the cleansing water, leaving the past behind and coming up new.
When he broke the surface, Sadie Rose emerged nearby. She wiped water from her eyes and smiled.
Out of the shadows, Tipper paddled straight for them, teeth clamped around a stick, as if he’d never let go.
Letter of Intent
On the Minnesota–Canada border, when Rainy Lake sheds its winter coat of ice, we call it “ice-out.” Some years it happens after a season of warm spring days: the sun beats down, turning one hundred miles of ice into a vast honeycomb of black, until the ice gradually yields to open water. But most times, ice-out is preceded by a violent storm. Sheets of ice, like huge glass windows, crash forcefully against the shoreline.
In a similar way, a gale-force wind struck my otherwise uneventful life. In a half year’s time, I lost my father to ill health and my best friend to Prohibition (through a preventable drowning) and witnessed the cold-blooded murder of a sheriff and his deputy. These events busted my insides into shards of ice.
Set me adrift.
And changed me forever.
I understand now how fleeting life is. Each of us is here for only a season.
For better or worse, this season is mine.
I can’t turn back Prohibition. I can’t rescue and bring back my friend, or raise the local sheriff and deputy
from the dead. Along with my father, they are all gone and will never return. But their deaths clarify and sharpen my purpose. More than anything, I know now that I want to work toward a fair and just society. I believe mercy and justice should go hand in hand; and I want to see this sort of justice carried out across our state, including in small towns on the northern border. With the hope of something better—something higher than what I have witnessed—I am reclaiming my dream of attending college, with the intention of completing law school and eventually returning to Koochiching County to practice law.
Therefore, please consider my application to your institute of higher education.
Sincerely,
Owen Jensen
Author’s Note
WHEN I FIRST THOUGHT ABOUT A YOUNG MAN TRYING TO make something of himself during Prohibition—an era on the northern border when no one seemed to hold the moral high ground—I turned to stories of my own father’s youth. My father was born in 1929 in Chisholm, Minnesota, and like Owen, his early years were hardscrabble. As a boy, and at his mother’s instruction, he trailed his father from bar to bar, gathering his father’s loose change. To earn money, he and his friend raised, trained, and sold white rats. As a teenager, he stopped his father from strangling his mother. Indeed, similar to Owen’s father, my grandfather was so stunned by what he had done in his drunkenness that he stopped drinking. After my father returned from the navy, he met and married my mother, and they eventually left northern Minnesota for St. Paul, where they raised ten children. A successful businessman, my father always had a heart for people.
My father (left) often spoke of his best friend, who died in World War II.
Whenever they could, my father and mother packed ten kids and family dog in the station wagon and headed north to our grandparents’ cabins: one on Eagles Nest Lake near Ely, the other on Elbow Lake near Cook. Those childhood trips instilled in me a deep appreciation of wilderness, which I still share with my husband, Charlie. It’s why we moved north after college. He took over an insurance agency in International Falls; I began to write.
During most of our time on the border, we’ve lived in a historic home in Ranier across from the lift bridge joining Canada and Minnesota. The bridge was built in the early 1900s and still operates today, lifting to allow passage to large boats in summer and carrying trains year-round. From this place of confluence, where two countries converge, where the lake and river meet, where seasons play out with quiet drama, I have watched the seasons come and go. One spring, during ice-out, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted a deer riding a large ice raft under the bridge and into our bay. I might still wonder if I’d imagined it if another resident hadn’t spotted the deer, too.
How much of my novel is inspired by actual events?
Honestly, most of it.
This postcard captures Ranier, Minnesota, as a frontier town in the early 1900s—but unfortunately misspells the town’s name.
That said, for me as a novelist, the key word is inspired. I have taken creative liberties with actual people, places, and events to weave a story that I hope is entertaining; that compacts events to convey how an era might have felt; and that explores moral dilemmas that everyday people, like Owen, might have encountered during Prohibition here in 1922.
For those who want to know more about what’s factual, here’s a partial list of actual events that occurred here during Prohibition:
·A truck with a load of sugar, destined for stills somewhere on Rainy Lake, went through the ice. Its driver surfaced and survived.
·When a Koochiching county sheriff was dismissed because of charges of corruption and bribery related to bootlegging, Sheriff VanEtten was appointed.
·A bootlegger was arrested on the lake and handcuffed; when the vehicle went through the ice, law enforcement officers survived. The bootlegger did not.
·When casks of whiskey were discovered under shingles in train cars, federal agents broke the casks with axes on the bay in Ranier. Locals showed up with cups and buckets; some lapped it up on their hands and knees.
·When a man’s body with a bullet hole in his back was found floating near the dam, Sheriff VanEtten claimed the bullet ricocheted when he shot the bootlegger fleeing across Rainy River to Canada. Many locals were outraged at the sheriff’s actions.
·In 1922, following up on claims of check forgery, Sheriff VanEtten and his deputy went to a shack east of town and were shot dead. The culprits fled. One was shot by someone in a local search party of two hundred men. The other was shot after a confrontation at a hotel south of International Falls in Ray, where he appeared “exceedingly nervous.”
·The area’s most prominent bootlegger, Bob Williams, first worked as a chef at the Palmer House in Chicago and moved north to run his own restaurants and taverns.
·As Prohibition built momentum, Bob Williams and VanEtten did not see eye to eye, especially regarding Williams’s “son,” whom VanEtten seized and put in foster care. Eventually, by marrying a woman who ran a Ranier candy store (and brothel upstairs), Bob was able to adopt Charlie Williams legally. Lil and Bob Williams bought the Kettle Falls Hotel, and the Williams family ran the Kettle Falls Hotel for decades. You can still visit and stay at the hotel today, which is on the Historic Register and within the boundaries of Voyageurs National Park.
·Horse races on ice-covered Rainy Lake entertained onlookers and gamblers. Often favored to win, Bob Williams’s horse Hamline “J” ran the one-mile race in two minutes twelve seconds.
·Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, hosted Babe Ruth, but in October (not August) 1922.
I am indebted to the research and recent books by Mike Williams and Peggy Vigoren, both descendants of the Williams family. Mike Williams’s book My Life at Kettle Falls creates a rich portrait of the early years of bootlegging as well as a day-to-day glimpse of life at the Kettle Falls Hotel, located between Canada and the United States. He writes: “Overnight lodging, food, beverages, prostitutes, and gambling were all available at Kettle Falls. . . . With prohibition and smuggling, you had the perfect recipe for notoriety.” Mike grew up in Kettle Falls, where he claims he caught walleyes as fast as his mother could serve them to the restaurant’s customers. He and his wife, Mary, later owned and operated the Thunderbird Lodge on Rainy Lake. A respected fishing guide, Mike now also works as an interpreter for Voyageurs National Park.
A federal agent breaks up a wooden barrel of whiskey, likely found on a train passing from Canada into the United States through Ranier, circa 1920s.
In her book The Adoption of Charlie Keenan, Peggy (Williams) Vigoren documents her family’s earliest connections to the area. In a narrative blend of fiction and nonfiction, Vigoren creates a complex picture of her grandfather, Bob Williams, mastermind of the region’s bootlegging. Williams owned the fastest boat on the lake at that time. He cleared an airstrip on his farmstead for planes to transport liquor. He was visited by Chicago mobsters, yet he was never convicted of bootlegging and won the admiration and support of many locals. When I imagined Owen Jensen, a fatherless nineteen-year-old in 1922, how could he not cross paths with Bob Williams—or at least a fictionalized version of him?
Other real historic figures who inspired my cast of characters include:
·E. W. Backus, the leading paper-mill industrialist of northern Minnesota.
·Ernest Oberholtzer, originally from Davenport, Iowa, and Harvard educated, who lived on Mallard Island and almost singlehandedly ran the fight against Backus. The Wilderness Society met in secret in St. Paul, with many young attorneys risking their jobs to be in attendance.
·The librarian is entirely from my imagination, but the International Falls Public Library was housed in 1922 in a building with a “soda fountain” (also referred to as a “blind pig”) where illegal liquor flowed. A local resident wrote to the newspaper praising the new library but added “kill the pig.”
·Jess Rose, a customs officer in Ranier, was pitted against his childhood friend Bob Williams, the are
a’s leading bootlegger.
·Rainy Lake, a character in itself, which still claims lives, especially of those who venture out on ice that looks perfectly safe when it is not.
My heart is full of gratitude to those who have generously taken time to read and comment on this story in its various stages of creation, including: Mary Dahlin, Erin Falligant, Gail Nord, Sheryl and Dick Peterson, Margi Preus, Steve Rutkowsky, Susan Swanson, and Karen Warren-Severson. In addition, a heartfelt thanks to my friend and editor extraordinaire, Erik Anderson; production editor, Rachel Moeller; agent, Fiona Kenshole at Transatlantic Agency, who believed in this story from the start; author and historian Hiram Drache, whose books capture the history of Koochiching County; the staff at the International Falls Public Library; Ed Oerinbacher at the Koochiching Historical Museum; Jim Hanson, for sharing lore from Atsokan Island (the inspiration for Baird’s Island); the Oberholtzer Foundation and time spent on Mallard Island; and of course to my local writers’ group and annual island writers’ group. Thank you.
My deepest thanks goes to my family: Kate Casanova and Chris Koza, Eric Casanova and HaeWon Yang. Finally, thank you, Charlie, for being there with me, every valley and mountaintop along the way.
For Further Reading
Drache, Hiram. Koochiching. Danville, Ill.: Interstate Publishers, 1983.
———. Taming the Wilderness: The Northern Border Country, 1910–1939. Danville, Ill.: Interstate Publishers, 1992.
Paddock, Joe. Keeper of the Wild: The Life of Ernest Oberholtzer. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001.
Replinger, Jean, Charlene Erickson, and Barbara Garner, eds. Ober and His Rainy Lake World: Scans from the Rainy Lake Chronicle, 1973–1982. N.p.: Oberholtzer Foundation, 2010.
Searle, R. Newell. Saving Quetico–Superior: A Land Set Apart. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1977.
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