Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  “Maybe J.J. was only telling tall tales?”

  “I doubt it. The other two things he mentioned, fur trade and lumber, are major aspects of business in this territory. Now, J.J. could not help but know that. But to have his nose cocked for iron, already! My God! Even if the ore is there in quantity, the area is a wilderness. It might take ten years, maybe more, to begin getting money out of it. I do know one thing, though.”

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “As soon as we get our house built, I’m going north to see for myself. And I’m also going to write a letter to that Chicago geologist. Sperry was his name. I cut the article out of the paper.”

  Concentration darkened his face.

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “I was wondering how many other men must have read that article, or heard about the possibility of iron ore by other avenues. Iron ore is destined to be Minnesota’s gold. There are going to be a lot of people who will want it.”

  Kristin said nothing. She could feel the dark tension of future struggles forming there in the room.

  “But I never expected it to be easy,” Eric said, cheerfully now. “Of all the potential businessmen in America, J. J. Granger is the one who threatens me least.”

  “You don’t have to worry about it now,” she said.

  “No,” he said, lifting her and carrying her to the bed. “No, I don’t have to worry about that now, not at all.”

  Eric purchased a five-acre lot above the Mississippi, engaged an architect, and began plans for the house and grounds. Windward it would be called, a bright, spacious house with light, airy rooms, and sturdy white colonial columns facing the river on one side and the street on the other. From the house a green lawn would fall gently to the trees along the riverbank, and at evening the setting sun would bathe the rooms in radiant colors.

  Progress was swift, and by September the architect’s plans were complete. It was time to purchase lumber. There were only two sawmills in the immediate area ambitious enough to prepare an order as large as Eric’s: one at St. Anthony Falls, a bit north on the river, and the other in South St. Paul. Eric asked for bids, and the St. Anthony Falls plants submitted the lower, guaranteeing shipment before October.

  “Very good,” Eric said. “The house will be up by winter. It will take years to furnish property, but at least we’ll have our own place.”

  Three days after he had signed the purchase order, J. J. Granger came to call. He was wearing a top hat now, and a beaverskin coat of obvious style.

  “I hear you’re lookin’ for lumber,” J.J. said.

  “I was,” Eric responded, “but I contracted with the mill at St. Anthony Falls.”

  “You made a bad mistake.”

  “I did?”

  “Yep. I could have got you that same order of lumber for your house for five hundred dollars less.”

  “You could have? I didn’t know you were in the lumber business.”

  Granger, who was chewing tobacco, leaned over and shot a gleaming brown swatch of juice onto the sidewalk. The two men were talking in front of the First National Bank in St. Paul. “I’m not exactly in the lumber business, but I sometimes act as representative for the sawmill in Anoka.”

  Anoka was a town north of St. Anthony Falls.

  “Are you still working for the Hiawatha Steamship Line?” Eric asked.

  “For that idiot, Till?” Granger spat again. “That soft-handed, stiff-necked pantywaist! He accused me of doctoring accounts, embezzling funds! And not a lick of proof. I ought to have hung him from the statehouse flagpole. Well, look here, Gunnarson, if you need any lumber, that Anoka mill I represent works fast and big. Keep us in mind.”

  “Certainly will,” said Eric idly, sure he would not be needing J. J. Granger’s services.

  Eric, Kristin, and the children were living comfortably at the St. Paul hotel, and had already met many fine city families. They were sure a good life lay in wait, and were eager for their new house to go up. At last the word came from the sawmill. The shipment of lumber was on its way downriver, to be docked and unloaded at the Hiawatha wharves. A massive flatbarge would be used for transport, and teams of horses waited to haul the lumber from river to building site. Everything was in readiness. Kristin and Eric waited on the riverbank, looking upriver for first sight of the barge. Finally it came into view, a tiny speck on the big, slow-moving river. Then something happened. They did not know what, at first. They saw a puff of smoke, or maybe only dust, form around the barge.

  “How odd…” Kristin started to say.

  Then they heard the explosion. The barge, nearer in the current now, seemed to sink down into the water. The team drivers and stevedores, also waiting there, craned their necks.

  “Looks like they got big trouble up there,” one of the workmen said.

  Now the barge seemed to be wallowing in the water.

  “Oh, no!” Kristin cried.

  The river moved the barge along, and so everyone on the bank saw it disintegrate, come apart. Lordly twelve-by-twelves floated from the sinking raft, and roofbeams circled like abandoned sticks in the current. Bales of shingles sank without a sound. Windward disappeared in front of Eric and Kristin, and, watching it either sink or float past them, she would have wept. But she was too stunned for tears.

  What had happened?

  “I just don’t know,” said the hapless bargemaster, who had managed to swim ashore. “There was an explosion, rather like gunpowder, right along the keel. She started sinking right away. My God, I just don’t know.”

  Who had ever heard the like? Gunpowder on a river barge? Exploding? Any evidence in support of such a claim was on the bottom of the Mississippi, where it remained.

  Two days later Eric found J. J. Granger at the Anoka sawmill.

  “Hey, Gunnarson. What can I do for you?”

  “I expect you’ve heard. I need lumber for my house.”

  “Yeah, too bad. What rotten luck about that barge. Lumber. Sure, sure. Just tell me what you need.”

  Having no choice if he wanted his house built before winter, Eric handed over the order. “Sure we can do this,” Granger said, making his calculations. “It’ll cost you—”

  And he gave a figure nine hundred and twenty-three dollars more than what the mill at St. Anthony Falls would have charged.

  “What?” cried Eric. “You told me you could do it for five hundred less than they charged!”

  “That was then,” Granger said. He spat some tobacco juice into a cuspidor next to his battered rolltop desk. “This is now. Take it or leave it.”

  So Windward went up, on the banks above the Mississippi. The Gunnarsons moved into it in December. It was sparsely furnished, but the big fireplaces warmed it as much as love did, and it was a good place to wait out the long, long Minnesota winter.

  In January Eric read in the St. Paul paper that the St. Anthony Falls sawmill had gone into receivership.

  In February he heard that J. J. Granger had purchased the mill, had combined it with the plant in Anoka to found Granger Mills.

  Eric had learned more than a little from Gustav Rolfson. He recognized the breed.

  During the winter Kristin planned her house, ordering the finest of furniture, linens, draperies, china, and silver from New York, Chicago, even New Orleans. Every day, as spring came, so, too, did riverboats, bringing her treasure. Windward was the talk of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and a gala open house was eagerly awaited. Eric corresponded with the Chicago geologist Professor Norman Beauchamp Sperry, who arranged to come north when the school term at the University of Chicago ended. Eric also bought one-third interest in the Hudson Bay Fur Trading Company. The company purchased furs from Indians and French trappers in Canada and northern Minnesota, and transported them south to the Minneapolis-St. Paul railhead by ox-drawn carts made entirely of wood and lubricated, if at all, with bear grease. The endless screech of the carts as they moved along the countryside was strange and eerie. It could be heard for mil
es before the carts came into sight. And the drivers, rough men in pelts and furs, filthy from weeks on the trail, looked like apparitions out of a lost century. The Hudson Bay Company could not, in fact handle the entire fur trade. Its president, Norman Kittson, cast about for someone willing to handle the excess trade.

  J. J. Granger was able to put up a sufficient amount of capital to win this concession.

  J. J. Granger had, during the winter, also consolidated the various sources of coal. Granger Mills and Fuel Company went into operation.

  As Eric awaited the arrival of Professor Sperry, and prepared for a surveying trip into the North Woods, Kristin got ready for the open house. She had servants now, to cook and clean, a groomsman for the horses, and a gardener to tend the grounds. Haakon and Elizabeth were tended by a governess who, English by birth, sometimes looked askance at what she considered the rude life of the frontier, but who was bright and very loving to the children. Into this staff, in late spring, came Indian Ned.

  A Chippewa, whose tribal name had been Swift Water, he had been captured by French traders during a skirmish and grown up at the Catholic mission on the shores of Lake of the Woods. Renamed Ned, the sullen boy grew into a sullen man, had fled the mission and come south with the oxcarts, with no particular destination in mind and perhaps no thought of any. Eric had come upon him at the Hudson Bay terminal in St. Paul.

  “Who are you?”

  “Ned. Chippewa.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “With carts. Walk beside oxen.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Ned gestured indeterminately. “Up north.”

  “Where is your home?”

  Ned opened his hands and shrugged.

  “Where are you going?”

  Ned shrugged again.

  “You mean you have no place to stay?”

  “Very true,” said Ned.

  The man’s plight touched Eric, who had once been homeless and adrift himself.

  “Come along with me,” he said.

  And so Eric brought the Indian home, intending to give him a meal and put him up for the night. The other servants were outraged at his presence—Indians were killers, everybody knew that—but Ned mollified them somewhat by his perhaps too-eager acceptance of a sleeping place in the stable. He did not care for them any more highly than they regarded him. Paul, the groomsman, was greatly insulted, however.

  “Mr. Gunnarson,” he declared, “I am a white man. There is a red pagan Indian in my stable, and I will not have it. Get him out of there or I quit.”

  “Come on, Paul. Be reasonable. The man needs a place to sleep, that’s all.”

  “Absolutely not,” Paul said.

  “If that’s the way you feel…”

  “That’s the way I feel.”

  “Eric,” said Kristin, when they had a moment alone, “the party is tomorrow night. We’ll have dozens of teams and buggies to take care of. What will we do if Paul leaves?”

  “Paul won’t leave. Complaining is a way of life with him.”

  But Paul did leave. On the morning of the open house, when Eric went out to the stable to get his own horse for his usual ride to the Hudson Bay office, Ned was alone in the stable, calmly currying the mounts. Eric had a sudden idea.

  “Ned, do you know horses?” he asked.

  The Indian did not remove his habitual scowl, but that dour grimace became, for a moment less severe. “Ned know all animals,” he said.

  “Do you think…that is, how would you like to take care of the stable for me and Mrs. Gunnarson? Do you think you can do that?”

  Ned nodded soberly. “Ned do it,” he said.

  “How did you learn about horses?”

  “Spend much time with them. Better to talk to horse than missionary priest. Horse smarter.”

  There was some comment among the guests that evening as they arrived for the party to see Indian Ned taking and hitching their teams. Everyone knew Indians would not work, and could not do anything right. That was the way they were, and one might as well accept it. But they soon forgot about Ned as they surveyed splendid Windward, and visited with one another. The guest list reflected the most illustrious people in the capital and adjacent Minneapolis, and the guest of honor, Dr. Norman Beauchamp Sperry, proved a learned and informative conversationalist. Perhaps the only man on the Gunnarson’s list of acquaintances who was not present was J. J. Granger. Eric saw no reason not to have him, but Kristin was uncharacteristically adamant. While Granger may not exactly have cheated on the price of lumber, for Windward, certainly he had not hesitated to turn the Gunnarson’s misfortune to his own advantage. If he had not also engineered that misfortune by sabotaging the river barge!

  “It wouldn’t be politic, either,” she told Eric. “We’re having Sylvester Till and his wife, and you know J.J. left the Hiawatha Line under a cloud.”

  Over a dinner of delicious corn-fed beefsteak, squash, spring peas and turtle soup, the guests marveled at Windward, and sang the praises of host and hostess.

  “I doubt we’ve ever had such a fine young married couple join our society with more elan,” cried Mrs. Brubaker, wife of the Hennepin County judge.

  She did not notice, nor did anyone else, the brief glance that passed between Kristin and Eric. So normal was their life together, they seldom had cause to remember that Kristin had never been divorced from Gustav Rolfson. But what could that matter? According to an old rumor, reaching Eric via certain stock transactions he was pursuing in the New York market, Rolfson had gone back to Norway.

  “Mrs. Brubaker, I could not agree with you more,” added Cornelius Bannerly, vice-president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. “And we wish them every happiness here in the magnificent north country that we love so much.”

  “Hear, hear!” the guests chorused.

  “And speaking of the north,” prodded Lieutenant Governor Cooper, “I understand Professor Sperry, who comes to us from that incomparable citadel of learning, the University of Chicago, has been studying certain features of our northern regions. Is that so, Professor?”

  Sperry, a lean, hungry-looking man with a glint of intellectual zeal in his eyes, seemed to be of two minds regarding discussion of iron in the north. On the one hand his research suggested the possibility of a major vein of ore north of Duluth, and he wanted to talk about it. On the other hand he was here at Eric’s request and was being paid by Eric. So he did not wish to reveal information that other businessmen—and there were many present—might use themselves. But Sperry was glib and courteously evasive, as he described his surmises.

  “The land on the north shore of Lake Superior,” he said, “is at present all but inaccessible. Yet magnetic studies I have undertaken indicate powerful readings, such as might be gotten only if much metal were present underground. I have gone as far as the source of the Whiteface River to take my findings. Oh, yes, indeed, the pull on the magnet is strong, its action exceedingly bizarre. But to really know for certain if ore is there, and the extent to which it may be, one would have to go much further into the wilderness, into the Mesabi Range itself, and take samples.”

  “Didn’t I hear you say you were planning to do exactly that?” Sylvester Till asked Eric.

  “Yes, the professor and I shall go quite soon, and may remain all summer.”

  “If there is a lot of ore, then what?” demanded Judge Brubaker. “Are fortunes to be made forthwith?”

  “Oh, no, no.” Sperry laughed. “If the Mesabi does have a lode, it will be years, perhaps a decade, before an area that remote and inaccessible can be profitably mined. But if the vein of ore is as rich as I sometimes believe…”

  He paused, uncertain as to exactly how much to say.

  “Yes?” prodded Heckart Youngdahl, founder of the dry goods emporium that bore his name. “Yes? Then what?”

  “Then Duluth may be to iron,” said Sperry, “what Cleveland is now to oil, what Pittsburgh is becoming in regard to steel.”

  “Think of
it!” exulted Mrs. Bannerly, a bubbly blond little woman. “Minnesota may yet become the backbone of American empire!”

  “If you’re traveling north, Gunnarson,” said the lieutenant governor, “don’t forget mosquito netting. There are mosquitoes up in the north woods big enough to latch on and fly away with you.”

  The assemblage laughed ruefully at the truth in Cooper’s remark. Then, from the front entrance of the house, there was a commotion, followed by a cry.

  “I will by God come in if I want!”

  And J. J. Granger stood, swaying, in the dining room doorway. His face was flushed and his good eye was bloodshot. But it was anger more than the liquor he had drunk that had brought, him here, and he regarded the well-dressed guests with a haughty disdain that was almost—almost—convincing.

  “Well, there you be, eh?” he roared, pointing his finger at them, each in turn.

  “J.J., please…” said Eric.

  “All of the good, grand people of the state of Minnesota, eh? Think you have everything sewed up, don’t you? Everything under your thumbs. Well, I may not have been good enough to get invited here tonight—”

  He gave Kristin an angry stare.

  “—but I want you all to know, from this night on, that one day J. J. Granger is going to have this whole gopher-ridden chunk of wilderness in his hip pocket!”

  He slapped his anatomy in the general area of his hip.

  “J.J.,” said Eric again, getting up from the table.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Gunnarson,” the other responded. “I’m leaving. I don’t usually hold much truck with those that hire a redskin Indian to skulk about the house. You people better look to your scalps, hear?”

  He turned to leave, then spun around.

  “One more thing. Who’s that professor fellow?”

  Sperry paled. Tentatively he lifted his hand.

  Granger laughed. “Hey, don’t be skeered, hear? It’s just I never saw me a professor before.”