Carnival Lights

Prologue

Prologue

Village of Park Point, August 3, 1860

The carnival came to town, but not until after the Indian bones were excavated. Under the red beam of the Minnesota Point Lighthouse cast by a fourth-order Fresnel lens and illuminated by a kerosene lamp, a motley assortment of Finnish, German, and French men wielding spades and pick axes broke joints, cracked femurs, shattered fingers, and split the skulls of those buried long before Europeans set foot on the shores of the westernmost tip of Gitchi Gami, renamed Lake Superior by the French. A former John Jacob Astor agent in concert with the acting mayor of the unincorporated town of Duluth made the decision to build a carnival to “brighten the dour mood” of the sixty-odd dwelling on the shore and the few hundred in the logging and mining camps nearby. Although it was a hefty investment with questionable immediate return, the two men had plans for the port and needed to attract hundreds, and eventually thousands, more European immigrants to build the city. The two men believed once others heard of the grand carnival held there, Europeans would come in droves. The Europeans were sitting on a gold mine of trade prospects now that they had moved the Indians off the shoreline closer to Fond du Lac. The Indian graveyard had been a problem, though. The men worried someone might kick up a bone during the carnival and cause a sensation, frightening business to St. Paul or Chicago. So the bones were hacked out of the soil by criminal castaways and thrown into a wagon drawn by a single draft horse lent by a man who used the horse to clear tree stumps from the burgeoning township. That is how the Indian bones traveled to their new home, nearly three miles down the river that flowed southward out of Gitchi Gami, the largest lake in the world.

Two days after the removal, guided by the red beam of light, the Arawak steamer brought in supplies—a large metal wheel that hitched to a horse directly across from a wooden bench such that as the horse walked in circles, patrons rode the bench for four spins a penny around a fifteen-foot-wide path. Called the Sweetheart Ride—it was the center attraction for the first-ever carnival on the spit of land overlooking Gitchi Gami. The ride was the motivating factor behind George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr’s invention of the Ferris Wheel, which would make its first appearance at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, commemorating the four-hundred-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the archipelago inhabited by the Taino, and designed to be direct competition to the Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Paris Exposition.

Four days later a four-wagon caravan arrived carrying workers, lard, bags of flour and potatoes and dried pork, canvases, rope, tar, shovels, stakes, and wood that transformed into four tents, including a sideshow of Savage Indian Joe and His Squaw—a Ho Chunk Indian man and a Brothertown mixed-blood Indian woman who looked full-blood. For three days they set up camp, washed clothes on the rocks along the shoreline, mended costumes, and cooked. After considerable labor by the carnival workers that extended late into the evenings under torch light, the townspeople gathered for their first carnival on the Indian cemetery. Based on Mark Twain’s character, the evil Injun Joe who was the villain of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Harvard-educated, well-read, former John Jacob Astor agent created the sideshow he called “Savage Indian Joe and His Squaw,” changing the word “Injun” to “Indian” so as to avoid any legal complications with Twain. Savage Indian Joe and his pretend wife rubbed ochre over their faces and arms, donned goose feather headdresses unlike anything any of their ancestors ever wore, and lunged around a tent, waving their hands in the air and screaming gibberish, frightening European women and children alike, who paid a penny to sit on wooden benches and watch the heathens. An old French fur trader familiar with Indian ways looked into the future and knew this wouldn’t end well. The rest enjoyed the frightful show—sucking on the sour, birch, peppermint, lavender, and hoarhound candies while basking in the torch lights that removed the cold and loneliness and hunger they endured thousands of miles from their land, on the other side of the Atlantic. The Indians in the carnival made them feel superior not only to the Red Man, but to the squalor they themselves lived in.

One month later, after the carnival slogged westward over rutted paths, an old Ojibwe Indian lady living in a wigwam far enough out in the woods that the English, as she called all Europeans, had not removed her to the Fond du Lac reservation yet, walked seven miles alone to the site of her parents’ and her parents’ parents’ and her parents’ parents’ parents’ graves. Born in 1784, her grandmother had told her one night when she was a girl of nine that their people knew the time would come when more and more English would arrive, first by ships over water and later by ships in the air, bringing great death and destruction, the Windigo, the cannibal spirit. The old Indian lady’s grandmother told her that the English would make many lights that would guide the ships to the land. One day there would be so many lights they would no longer see the stars and barely know the difference between day and night. “All those lights,” the old woman added, “would make it hard for Indians to see the Star People, our Guardians and Guides, and slowly we will lose our ways. Their lights will steal our people.”

The old Ojibwe lady, then just a girl, stepped outside the wigwam to look at the Star People, hundreds of bright lights in the black sky. Her dog, Animoosh, stood watch at the edge of the clearing. The moon hung full, just over the tops of the bare tree branches, their leaves the size of beaver ears. She couldn’t imagine it—what her grandmother said about not being able to see the Old Ones. She bit a piece of maple tree candy her nokomis had given her and slipped inside the wigwam, nestling into the warmth of her grandmother’s belly and the beaver pelts they slept in.

Decades later, stooped, in a long skirt, with a red willow basket over one forearm, the old Indian lady wandered the shoreline where the carnival had been, occasionally bending over, setting something she picked from the rocky shoreline into her basket. Unseen, except by a curious Finnish boy who watched her, she moved through the Village of Park Point with the boy like a white shadow behind her. Crossing the spit of land into the unincorporated town of Duluth, a stray hound whose Finnish master had died six days after arriving on a ship, leaving the dog to fend for herself, lunged at the old Indian woman and flung the contents of her basket onto the dirt. The old lady yelled words unintelligible to the boy and kicked the dog in the face, scaring it away. Kneeling, she regathered the contents of her basket and slipped behind an English man’s tar paper shack. The young boy ran to where the woman had disappeared. Seeing no one, he searched the ground as he had overheard men discussing their quest for rocks that would make them wealthier than the Czar. Whoever that was, he thought.

The boy’s mother had recently died giving birth to a baby sister who also died. His eight-year-old sister took over cooking and sewing and stoking the fire at night while their father searched for work in the logging camps farther north. The children were starving. Near where the dog bit the old woman, his eye caught a pearly white shape in the dirt. Grabbing it, thinking perhaps it would be the special rock the men had talked about, the boy ran lest one of the men take what he had found. Long and smooth, about the length of the boy’s middle finger, he gave it to his sister, who mistook it for a bird bone and boiled it in the water she’d collected from the Great Lake for their dinner that night. And the next night. And the next.

And then, the one after that.