house is creamy yellow, the second house on the right on a small cul-de-sac ending in a large swamp. Sean said I would see a small boat on a trailer in the driveway and another big boat parked out front. The big boat is a twenty-two-foot Bayliner with a waterskiing deck, a berth, and a sporty white canvas cover over the wheelhouse. Marc drove it up from Colorado, and since they had nothing else they used it to net the year before.
When I’d walked in the door I saw Sean and Marc wrestling on the living room floor. Marc outweighed Sean by at least forty pounds and had him on his back. Mike and their other brother, Jay; Marc’s wife, Holly; and their mother, Bonnie, half-watched the wrestling match and half-watched Ghost Rider. The flames from Nicolas Cage’s digitized skull licked Bonnie’s enormous flat-screen TV. Bonnie barely seemed to notice that her sons, all in their forties, were trying to rub each other’s faces in the carpet until finally Sean said, “I give! I give!” Marc wouldn’t get off him till Bonnie said, “Let him up, Marc. You’re hurting my little boy.” Holly, pregnant, went into the kitchen to make some lunch.
Everything is big at Mille Lacs, except the reservation itself. A smattering of small parcels scattered over east central Minnesota, Mille Lacs is close to, but shies away from, Minneapolis and its crawling, clawing suburbs, which are eating up the nearby farmland. Mille Lacs Lake is huge: covering about 132,000 acres or 206 square miles, it is the second largest in the state and one of the largest in the United States. The Ojibwe name for the lake is Mizizaga’igan, “It Spreads All Over.” The Sioux who lived there before the Ojibwe called it Mde Wakan, “Spirit Lake,” and this is what the Dakota of Minnesota still call themselves, the Mdewakanton Sioux.
The lake was settled and contested, lost and won, many times before the Dakota and then the Ojibwe settled there. It has been continually inhabited for at least 9,000 years, a fact attested to by huge archaeological sites and a particularly impressive and perplexing altar composed of more than fifty bear skulls, uncovered during a highway expansion project.
The first European to see Lake Mille Lacs was a Franciscan priest, Father Louis Hennepin. In 1680 he was traveling, mapping, and baptizing his way through the region when he was taken captive by the Dakota. He spent five months as a captive at Mille Lacs. During that time he described the lifestyle of and the region inhabited by his captors. He was struck by the wealth of the land and the people. One thing he noticed was that the Dakota, rather than living in tepees, built earthen lodges like those the Arikara and Mandan later adopted in the West.
Two hundred years later it was still possible to see what attracted the Dakota and why they fought so hard to keep the lake to themselves. The lake “lies imbedded in deep forests,” wrote the Ojibwe historian William Warren in 1885. “Its picturesque shores are skirted with immense groves of valuable sugar maple, and the soil on which they grow is not to be surpassed in richness by any section of country in the northwest. The lake is nearly circular in form, though indented with deep bays, and the view over its waters broken here and there by bold promontories. It is about twenty miles across from shore to shore, and a person standing on its pebbly beach on a clear calm day, can but discern the blue outlines of the opposite side, especially as the country surrounding it is comparatively low and level. Its waters are clear and pure as the waters of Lake Superior, and fish of the finest species are found to abound therein. Connected with it is a string of marshy, or mud-bottomed, lakes in which the water is but a few feet deep, and wherein the wild rice of the north grows luxuriantly, and in the greatest abundance. Possessing these and other advantages, there is not a spot in the northwest which an Indian would sooner chose as a home and dwelling place, than Mille Lacs.”
Legend has it (and it probably is only a legend) that the Dakota were driven from Mille Lacs because of a lovers’ quarrel. Sometime in the 1600s a Dakota man and an Ojibwe man liked the same Dakota girl. The Dakota and Ojibwe had been fighting off and on for centuries, but during the time of this love triangle these tribes had been enjoying a lasting, if uneasy, peace. The girl chose the Ojibwe man, and the jealous Dakota lover killed him. This in itself didn’t lead to war; as William Warren suggests, “it only reminded the warriors of the two tribes that they had once been enemies.” Not long afterward, an Ojibwe chief from Fond du Lac, to the north, allowed his four sons to travel to the Dakota village at Mille Lacs to visit their Dakota friends. On their way back, one son was murdered. The remaining three brothers asked if they could go and visit again, and the father said yes: most likely, their brother had been killed by mistake. But another brother was killed on the second trip. They visited again. A third was killed. Only one brother was left, and he wanted to go again, despite the murders of his brothers. The weary father said sure, the three brothers had probably all been killed by mistake. Off went the fourth brother. He never returned. The father, overcome by grief, said to all who would listen, “An Ojibwe warrior never throws away his tears.” He planned and plotted his revenge and two years later led a huge war party against the Dakota. The Ojibwe wiped out a number of small villages and the few Dakota survivors retreated to the main village on the big lake. The Ojibwe attacked again and instead of simply relying on the few guns they had and their bows and war clubs, they threw bags of gunpowder down the smoke holes in the Dakota lodges. Many hundreds of Dakota burned to death. The surviving Dakota gave up the lake and retreated west and south. However, it would be another 100 years before all the Dakota left northern and central Minnesota. The lake is as beautiful and rich today as it was when the lovers’ quarrel set off that chain of events.
Mille Lacs is drained by the Rum River, named by early explorers with a sense of humor but still earlier known as Wakha’ or “Spirit River.” Many people now think of the name “Rum” as a pretty bad joke. Bogus Brook, a tributary of the Rum (which eventually flows into the Mississippi), is reputed to have been a backwater hideout for bootleggers during Prohibition. Many of the tourists who come to Mille Lacs in the summer are from Chicago. It is said that Al Capone had a house on Mille Lacs, and that he also had a hideout in Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin and at Leech Lake, north of Mille Lacs. It is also said that he had an Indian mistress with whom he was very much in love; some say she was from Mille Lacs, others say she was from Lac Courte Oreilles, and still others say she was from Leech Lake. Everyone wants to claim Al Capone. The casino at Mille Lacs is called Grand Casino, and it is indeed big.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundance of natural resources Mille Lacs was almost a reservation that wasn’t. In 1825, when representatives from Mille Lacs signed the Treaty of Prairie du Chien (along with about 1,000 other delegates from the Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Dakota, Iowa, and others), they were a force to be reckoned with. The meeting had been organized by the United States and was primarily a treaty not between it and the tribes but rather among the tribes themselves. The United States, having gained control of the area after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, no longer had to contend with the British. Now it had to deal with Indians. And at the time, Indians controlled the whole region. Trade and settlement were hampered by constant aggression between the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes along the Minnesota River, the dividing line between their territories. They fought over hunting and trapping rights—each anxious to control more resources than the other. The U.S. government was caught in the middle and feared that continued intertribal warfare would jeopardize the fur trade in the region and the trade routes through it. The United States was the supplicant; the Indian tribes were the power in place. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien established an uneasy peace between the warring tribes.
Circumstances, however, changed quickly on the frontier. By 1837 the fur trade was wobbling and about to crash. Animals such as the beaver, muskrat, and otter had been trapped to near-extinction within the domain of the Ojibwe in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Ojibwe, still strong, still a powerful military force, looked east and saw more and more white settlers. They looked west and saw that the Dakota had adopted the horse, had colonized the plains, and were growing stronger. They were being squeezed, and there was nowhere the Ojibwe tribes in the Great Lakes region could expand their land base. Also, there were no caches of natural resources outside their control that they could bring under their control—no additional rice beds, maple groves, cranberry swamps, or untapped trapping grounds. Starvation was, for many, only a season away. The Ojibwe saw this, and when the United States wanted them to come to the treaty table again in 1837 they said yes. Chiefs from Leech Lake, Gull Lake, Swan River, St. Croix River, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac de Flambeau, La Pointe, Mille Lacs, Sandy