The Indians in winter

March 13, 2011

The Indians in Winter: How they survived -- and thrived -- in a frozen landBy Robert DownesHave you ever wondered how the Indians of Northern Michigan lived throughthe cruel, cold winter months just a few generations ago?Today, we depend on natural gas, forced-air furnaces, electric blankets,heated cars and expensive down jackets and still we complain of the coldand yearn for Florida. By contrast, the Chippewa (also called theAnishnabe and Ojibwa), along with the Ottawa and Potawatomi Indians ofpre-settlement days lived in homes built of bark and saplings, relying onfurs and open fires to keep themselves warm, and faced with the challengeof hunting their own food in the wilderness with only primitive weapons.Several years ago, a bestselling book, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer,told the story of Christopher McCandless, an idealistic young white manwho starved to death in Alaska despite having a rifle to hunt game withand the shelter of a trailer. By contrast, the thousands of Indians wholived in our region 200 years ago had far less to work with. What they didhave, however, was woodcraft, endurance and wisdom that was hard-won overcenturies of struggle.How did they survive? And what could they teach us today, in a world facedby concerns over peak oil and climate change?LOST VOICESSince the Indians used the oral tradition to pass down their history andlegends, much of what we know about how they lived in the winter comesfrom conversations which were written down for posterity, along with thewritten accounts of white explorers and trappers who lived among them.People like Henry Schoolcraft, the son-in-law of a Chippewa chiefsdaughter, who lived among the northern tribes as an Indian agent for 30years in the early-mid 1800s; or Alexander Henry, an English trader whowas captured in the fall of Fort Michilimackinac in 1763 and spent a yearwith a Chippewa band, joining them as a hunter in their winter camp.These writers left us stirring tales of people who regarded winter as anally in their survival.The Athapaskan and Algonquin tribal groups of Alaska and the upper Midwestperfected winter living and travel techniques over 10,000 years, notesStephen Gorman, author of the book, Winter Camping.Northern peoples have always found an ally in winter, Gorman states.The season makes their lives easier, not harder. Northern natives dependupon winter; they do not exist despite it. Winter makes life in the Northpossible WINTER TRAVELIn the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, prospectors found that the only way totravel was during the winter, when hard-packed snow made it possible torun dogsleds across the tundra, which was potted with unwalkable tussocksin the summer months.The same conditions served the Indians of Northern Michigan, with winterbeing a primary hunting season. For the hunter, mobility is of paramountimportance, writes Gorman. The ability to cover vast areas in search ofelusive and widely-dispersed game animals is critical to survival. Snowprovides that mobility.In addition to beating down the brush of the forest, which was difficultto walk through during the summer, snow made it possible to track animalsand to sled their meat and skins back to camp. Frozen rivers becamehighways for Indian hunters. By some accounts, the Ojibway called Januarythe Snow Moon, February the Hunger Moon, and March the Moon of theSnow-Crust, because by then the sun had covered the snow with a firmcrust, making it easy to travel. April was the Moon for BreakingSnowshoes, a haphazard of a season of hard use.In 1809, Alexander Henry wrote an account of his winter with the Chippewaand how he was saved through his friendship with Wawatam, the leader of asmall band. Wawatam considered him to be his brother as the result of avision he had a year before the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac in 1763.In his vision, Wawatam had been told that he would befriend a white manand make him a member of his family; he recognized Henry as his futurebrother when the trader arrived via a long canoe trip from Montreal.Thus, Henry fell in with a tribal band on its seasonal migration southfrom the Straits. He wrote that after fishing with great success forsturgeon off Cape St. Ignace, Wawatams band made preparations to leavefor their winter hunting grounds as the fall grew near.At our wintering ground we were to be alone, he wrote, for the Indianfamilies separate in the winter season for the convenience as well ofsubsistence, and re-associate in the spring and summer.HUNTING & FISHINGHenry estimated that the band traveled about 150 miles south along thewest coast of Lake Michigan to what was then called the River Aux Sables,which is thought to be the present-day site of Ludington. There, hejoined the tribe in hunting deer, bear, raccoon, beaver and marten. Theband had muskets as well as bows and arrows. Beaver were caught bycrossing the ice and busting up their lodges, while raccoons were trackedto their holes in trees, where they were easily scooped up in ahibernating torpor.On the 20th day of December we took an account of the produce of our huntand found that we had 100 beaver skins, as many raccoons, and a largequantity of dried venison, all which was secured from the wolves by beingplaced upon a scaffold, he wrote.Much of this was intended to be taken back to Fort Michilimackinac inApril as trade goods for the French Voyageurs. These included kettles,knives, hatchets, beads and ammunition. One can well imagine that an ironconvenience such as a kettle was well appreciated: the age-old alternativewas dropping a hot rock in a birchbark container to heat water or soup.The Indians also used snares to capture large game, and nets for geese andother birds. A French observer named Nicolas Perrot reported that a bandof Chippewa collected 2,400 moose on Manitoulin Island using only snaresin the winter of 1670-71.In his book, The Huron: Farmers of the North, Bruce Tribber claims thatfishing was even more important than hunting to the Indians as a foodsource. Fishing for whitefish, herring and sturgeon along the St. MarysRiver at the Soo was a tradition that is believed to have existed forcenturies. Dried or smoked fish was used to get through the winter, or asflavoring for corn soup. In the winter, fish were caught through theice. This was done with a net passed by means of a pole from one hole toanother; the holes being arranged in a circular fashion.Tribber says the Huron did most of their hunting in the fall, rather thanthe winter. Often, they organized game drives: Sometimes severalhundred men would land on an island and form a line through the forestThen, making a loud noise, they would drive the animals toward a fixedpoint along the water (where) the deer were either shot with arrows orkilled with sharpened poles by men in canoes.Enclosures of brush piled up 9 feet high were also used in game drives.Repeating this every second day for 38 days, a band of hunters was ableto kill 120 deer, Tribber writes of one enclosure hunt.  The coldweather was useful because it preserved the meat and allowed the huntersto haul the skins back to their villages on sleds.HOME SWEET LODGEHenry wrote that women erected the lodges that his band lived in (theyalso did the heaviest work of packing and transporting gear). A lodgecould be 20-by-14 feet, constructed of tamarack trees, the sharpened endsof which were thrust into the ground and then bent and tied similar tothat of an upside-down basket. The framework was covered with sheets ofbark, and animal skins were used to cover the door as well as the chimneyhole on the roof. Pole wigwams in the form of teepees were alsoconstructed.Longhouses constructed by the Huron and Iroquois, among other tribes,could be even bigger.Tribber writes that longhouses were between 90 and 100 feet long,depending on the number of families living in them. Houses wereconstructed of slabs of bark tied onto a wooden frame and held down by anetwork of saplings. Cedar bark was considered to be the best covering,although it was extremely inflammable and often caused fires thatdestroyed entire villages.Siting a camp in the winter was important. An oral history recounted by aChippewa from Minnesota named Gah-bay-bi-nayss (Forever Flying Bird),also known as Paul Peter Buffalo, had this to say:There were a lot of camping grounds along the river, and in the winter wemoved to one back in the woods where there is plenty of wood to burn, toheat our children. We lived in the woods by a lake where we could getfish, by a lake where theres plenty of wood, by a lake where theresgame. We always put our camp for the winter where we can get to fish. Wego where we can set net through the ice, under the ice. We picked out aplace where theres plenty of deer. In our area there would always beenough for the group. Course there was a lot of game them days. There wasgame.WINTER LIFEWinter was also the time for festivals, telling stories, and planningraids on other tribes for the coming year, according to Johann Georg Kohl,a German ethnologist and popular writer who lived among the Ojibway ofLake Superior in 1855.It is a frequent occurrence that the members of a family or the neighborswill assemble on the long winter evenings, when nothing else can be done,and request a clever story-teller to tell them old legends and fables,Kohl wrote in his book, Kitchi-Gami: Life Among The Lake SuperiorOjibway.These could include stories of fairies, animals, witchcraft, manitouspirits, great deeds, lovers, erotica, bawdy jokes, poetry and more. Thebest storytellers were highly valued, keeping the long winter nights atbay. These stories, I was assured, are not at all inferior to theArabian Nights. Kohl wrote. They are just as amusing, various, andfantastic.Kohl notes that war chiefs would hold consultations to plan strategy, thewhole winter through, smoke countless pipes, beat the drum in turn, muttermagic songs the whole night, consult over the plan of operations, and sendtobacco to their friends, as an invitation to them to take part in the(coming) campaign.He added that winter is the season of consultation, for war is rarelycarried on then, partly because the canoe could not be employed on thefrozen lakes, and partly because the snow would betray their trail and thedirection of their march too easily.A benefit, of course, was this also meant that ones own band wasprotected from raids during the winter.TOUGH TIMESWinter was no paradise for the Indians, however, especially for the weakand elderly. Henry wrote that old people were often plagued by the miseryof rheumatism and lung infections. Their mode of life, in which they areso much exposed to the wet and cold, sleeping on the ground and inhalingthe night air, accounts for their liability to these diseases.Starvation was also a common occurrence, according to John Tanner(nicknamed the White Indian in his time), who spent nearly 30 yearsliving among the Ojibway and Chippewa. Tanner had two Indian wives andfamilies in the early 1800s.Tanner was once brained with a tomahawk by a Sioux enemy and suffered askull fracture. He was nursed back to health over a 10-day period by afriend named Otopunnebe. Some time afterward this good man suffered thefate which overtakes so many of the Ojibways -- he starved to death,Tanner wrote.Cannibalism could also occur in extreme situations, Tanner wrote. Onemember of his band, a rather insignificant person and a poor hunter, hadonce eaten his own wife because of hunger and the Indians had wanted tokill him at the time as unworthy to live.Kohl wrote that Ojibways who resorted to eating others in the face ofstarvation were dubbed windigos and were feared and shunned thereafter(windigos were also people-eating giants of old in Indian lore).  if aman has ever had recourse to this last and most horrible method of savinghis life, even when the circumstances are pressing and almost excusable,he is always regarded with terror and horror by the Indians.Its not hard to imagine that one could develop a feral temperament overfive months of cold and snow, especially when game was scarce. HenrySchoolcraft collected the following poem, Song of the Wolf Brother,which offers some insight into how starving Indians may have felt:Nesia, my older brother,Bones have been my forest meal,Shared with wolves the long, long winter,And their nature now I feel.PERSEVERINGYou can read through half a dozen books on Indian life and not find asingle complaint about enduring winters cold -- either by the tribalpeople or by the whites who lived among them.Perhaps people living in times past were indifferent to the cold by dintof enduring months in its grip in bark huts or drafty wooden cabins. OnLewis and Clarks expedition across the continent in 1804, they reportedseeing naked children playing on the ice beside a snowbound villagewithout any concern for the cold.That said, its also true that the Indians knew how to dress for theweather. The French explorer Charlevoix reported that the Potawatomi ofsouthern Michigan wrote highly ornamented buffalo robes in the winter;other observers state that deerskin leggings and furs of various animalswere commonly worn. Men and women also greased themselves with oil andanimal fat as a protection against the sun, cold and insects. TheAthabaskan Indians of Alaska reportedly survived that climates 50-belowtemperatures by wearing caribou fur, which has a hollow, doubly-insulatedfiber that sheds water and snow.Still, you have to wonder, if we were ever denied gas or electricity,could we with all of our technology, miracle fibers and insulation, makeit through the winter as well as the Indians did here in Northern Michiganjust a few generations ago? Perhaps someday well be forced to find out.FURTHER READING: The Indians of the Western Great Lakes: 1615-1760 by W. VernonKinietz, University of Michigan Press. Kitchi-Gami: Life Among the Lake Superior Ojibway by Johann GeorgKohl, Minnesota Historical Society Press. The Huron: Farmers of the North by Bruce G. Trigger, Holt, Rinehart,Winston. The Hiawatha Legends by Henry R. Schoolcraft, Avery Color Studios. Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts 1750-1870, edited byFrederick Drimmer, Dover Press. Attack at Michilimackinac 1763, edited by David A. Armour, MackinacIsland State Commission. Winter Camping by Stephen Gorman, Appalachian Mountain Club Books. Web: http://canadachannel.ca/HCOJR/index.php/H._The_Ojibwa_People