Category: Native American

New Research on the Role of Indigenous Women in the History of Maple Sugaring – An Interview with Susan Deborah Wade

Dr. Susan Deborah Wade – Courtesy Susan Deborah Wade.

Dr. Susan Deborah Wade is a historian who recently completed a doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee titled, “Ojibwe Women and Maple Sugar Production in Anishinaabewakiing and the Red River Region, 1670-1873”. Maple Syrup History website creator Matthew Thomas (MT) had the recent pleasure of conducting the following email interview with Dr. Wade (SDW) to learn more about her interesting and important work and share it with interested readers.

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MT: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and share your research with the readers of my website. It is always a pleasure to discover new and interesting scholarship on topics related to maple history. With my own background in ethnohistory and Indigenous studies, I am especially excited to read and share your work with the maple history community. Can you give us a quick summary of what your dissertation is about and what you have learned?

SDW: My dissertation focuses on Indigenous women and an important food product – maple sugar. This foodstuff was used as medicine, food, trade good, and as a gift. The setting for this work is Anishinaabewakiing, a large region that is eventually divided by an international border by the British and Americans in 1783 (editor’s note: the Red River region encompasses portions of today’s Manitoba, Ontario, North Dakota, and Minnesota). Fur trade companies and settlers on both sides of this border used maple sugar as a provision for workers, and as a sweetener in place of hard to get and expensive cane sugar. Maple sugar was traded by Indigenous women for trade goods and in turn collected and auctioned by fur trade companies to increase their profits. As settlers moved into the Great Lakes region, land use changed. For example, treaties reduced the amount of land the Anishinaabeg had to continue producing maple sugar and lumber companies clear cut forests.

Map showing territory of Anishinaabe peoples in United States and Canada. Source – https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/anishinaabe#

MT: The title of your doctoral dissertation contains many interesting clues to what one can expect to encounter in its reading. Can you tell us more about the choices and importance of the different components in the title of your dissertation? Such as your reason for choosing these particular start and end dates, why the Red River region, or the meaning of the word Anishinaabewakiing?

Map showing range of acer negundo, aka Manitoba Maple or Boxelder. Note overlap of range of acer negundo with earlier map of Anishinaabe territory. Their intersection is an area of focus in Dr. Wade’s research. Source – http://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/dendrology/syllabus/factsheet.cfm?ID=3

SDW: I expanded on my master’s thesis which focused on maple sugar production by Indigenous women set in what is now Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. In my dissertation I wanted to expand the time frame and region but also more important to write about an Indigenous perspective, and the land the Anishinaabeg inhabit. The Anishinaabeg are the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. Part of learning about an Anishinaabeg perspective is both learning and using Anishinaabemowin (Anishinaabe language). I set the narrative in Anishinaabewakiing and discuss northern and southern Anishinaabewakiing when the international border is drawn on the map in 1783. The Ojibwe migrate west into the Red River region in the mid 18th century and tapped Manitoba Maple.

MT: In 2011 you completed a master’s thesis in history at UW Milwaukee focusing on a similar topic of Indigenous Women and Maple Sugaring the Upper Midwest, albeit covering a slightly smaller time span of 1760 to 1848 and a different geographic space of the Upper Midwest. How did you get interested in this topic and how did your master’s thesis research set the stage for your doctoral research?

SDW: When I began thinking about getting a master’s degree it was to become a better researcher in my job as an historic cook and collections manager at living history sites where I worked. I grew up in Canada and had a passion for fur trade history and maple syrup. The University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee had a course on food history and a fur trade scholar, Dr. Cary Miller in the History Department. I began working with Dr. Miller on fur trade history and Great Lakes Indigenous history. In one of the courses, I read Susan Sleeper-Smith’s Indian Women and French Men. There was a tantalizing reference to maple sugar being shipped east to Detroit. I wanted to know more about who produced it, who collected it and where else it was shipped. Eventually, with the help of Dr. Miller I shaped a master’s thesis that was narrow enough in scope for a master’s theses but with the ability to expand in depth and breadth to a dissertation.

MT: Where would you place your research and interests as far as established schools of research?  Do you see your work as ethnohistory, Indigenous studies, gender studies, food history, cultural geography, or a less structured but more inclusive interdisciplinary studies?

SDW: I see it as an interdisciplinary study that includes food history, Indigenous studies, traditional archival analysis, and analysis of language.

MT: Maple sugar in its various roles as a food item, an exchange good, or as a tool of economic power is central to your research. How has your research help us understand the historic role and place of Indigenous peoples in the development and evolution of the modern maple industry?

SDW: Indigenous women in the sugar maple growing region were instrumental in introducing maple sugar to colonists. Maple sugar was also modified in its appearance by Indigenous women to satisfy the need by upper class settlers for white sugar – white cane sugar was an indicator of wealth. Hand in hand with trade was the introduction of alterative equipment like copper kettles for producing maple products, and further changes to production. Great Lakes fur trade companies exported maple sugar east and, in some cases, Indigenous women’s maple sugar made it to Britain’s shores.

MT: Has developing a deeper understanding of the cultural and economic importance of maple products sparked interest in looking at questions of maple use in other historic contexts?

SDW: It has sparked an interest in the use of other maple products such as vinegar. It has also sparked an interest in the use of the sap of other trees in the Great Lakes region such as birch and the sap of trees on other continents.

MT: Your research topic geographically covers portions of what are today the United States and Canada, and likely your source materials were found in both countries, not to mention probably being written in English and French. What kinds of historical source material were you able to examine for your research and were there challenges to working with source material from two separate countries and languages?

SDW: I did not deal with too many French sources. The companies I concentrated on were British, Scottish, or American run companies. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was run out of London, England. I went to the HBC archives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Example of archival materials used in Dr. Wade’s research. Source – Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba, Journal of Occurrences at Henly District 1819/20, B.117/a/4.

That is a wonderful archive and the Hudson’s Bay Company has detailed documentation of its posts. The management in London expected daily accounts of what was happening at the posts as well as detailed records of trade. The North West Company (NWC) was formed by small fur trade companies owned by Scottish merchants living in Montreal. Although they kept the French-Canadian voyageurs on their payroll the men who ran the posts were English speaking. The HBC eventually took over the NWC in 1821 and the men who ran the posts did not keep as detailed records as the HBC. The American Fur Company (AFC), established in 1808 in New York, had ties with some of the merchants in Montreal, but after the War of 1812 had virtual monopoly in the southern Anishinaabewakiing region. For the AFC I primarily used “Grace Lee Nute’s “Calendar of the American Fur Company Papers.” Some records for a small Montreal company, the XY company, that eventually joined with the NWC can be found in the Collections of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

MT: Your study covers a time span of over two hundred years, during which a lot of things may have changed within the Fur Trade and Indigenous communities. What changes did you find over this span related to the manufacture, trade, or sale of maple sugar?

SDW: There were changes in all these areas. Changes in production happened as Indigenous people encountered European trade goods. The equipment changed as trade items were introduced and adapted and adopted by Indigenous groups for use. There were also changes to both the appearance and amount of sugar produced. Upper class white settlers and upper-class Hudson’s Bay company officers wanted maple sugar to look like white cane sugar and Indigenous women shifted the way they processed and purified some of the sugar for this market. In the spring of 1836, the man who oversaw a Hudson’s Bay Company post in the Lake Superior region sent two men to sugar camps to secure or “reserve the right” to trade for that year’s supply. The HBC did not want to miss out on this valuable commodity by having the rival AFC trade for it first.

MT: Your scholarly interests are not purely in the realm of ethnohistory, gender and Indigenous studies. You recently were part of a team that translated the classic French children’s book, “The Little Prince” into Anishinaabemowin, the Indigenous language of the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe peoples. How did you get involved in this project and how has working with Anishinaabemowin influenced your historical research?

SDW: My thesis advisor and advisor at the beginning of my dissertation, Cary Miller, stressed the importance of learning Anishinaabemowin in order to understand an Ojibwe worldview and to make connections with community members. I was taught the language by Margaret Noodin. I also worked with Dr Noodin on a grant, Ganawendamaw. As part of this grant, I helped with curriculum development for Anishinaabemowin class. One book used by teachers of many different languages is Le Petit Prince, it is translated in to so many languages. She was interested in completing a translation for use by teachers and families interested in learning Anishinaabemowin. I worked with her, Michael Zimmerman, and Angela Mesic to translate the text. It was during Covid lock down and was a wonderful experience to work with these scholars and create a text that could be used to teach and continue to revitalize the Anishinaabe language.

MT: The reservation era, a period immediately following the period of your study, saw great changes and upheaval for Indigenous communities. It would please me greatly to learn that you have plans for carrying this research further to look at the reservation era when forced relocation to reservations limited the seasonal mobility to places like sugaring camps, fur trade economies were replaced by cash-based settler economies, and substantial changes in gendered divisions of labor?

SDW: My master’s thesis did not go into this topic, but my dissertation does discuss the effects of settler colonialism on the Ojibwe and maple sugar production. One of the chapters talks about the ways Great Lakes and Red River nations keep a hold of their culture through treaty negotiations. In the nineteenth century in the United States, Ojibwe ogimaag (leaders) negotiated for the rights to gather resources on ceded land also known as usufructuary rights in the United States. In the case of Ojibwe in Canada, the ogimaag negotiated with the Canadian government in what is called the Numbered Treaties. In these regions the First Nations, including Ojibwe, did not cede land but instead negotiated for sharing the land and working with Euro-Canadians in taking care of natural resources. This, however, was not the intention of the Canadian government or her representatives whose aim was a surrender of lands. In the case of maple sugar, it was not just resources that were taken away, but also women-centered places where political activities, ceremonies, and teaching took place. It was a loss of women’s roles in their environment.

By the late nineteenth century, cane and beet sugar became the dominant form of table and cooking sugar. Maple sugar production waned but maple syrup gained in popularity, as you explain in your dissertation “Where the Forest Meets the Farm.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in matters of maple syrup manufacturing it was not just the decimation of maple groves and appropriation of land but the attack on gendered food procurement. The Allotment Act (1887) promoted the life of the yeoman farmer whereby a man worked his farmland. Reservation land was divided into single farms given to men of households or single men. Although Indigenous women continued to harvest wild rice, collect berries and other resources, and manufacture maple sugar. It was not until after the Great Depression in the 1930s, that Indigenous men began to take on the production of maple sugar and syrup. Today Anishinaabeg maple production is more multi-gendered.

MT: You defended your dissertation in 2021. What is next? Do you plan to publish the doctoral study as a book length monograph, or will you be focusing on publishing the results in the form of a peer-reviewed article?

SDW: I have been working on a manuscript that combines my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation. It has been a challenge learning to rewrite a dissertation into a book. I hope to send it to a publisher by the end of this summer. I am also working with a fellow scholar to create an exhibit on maple trees and the maple sugar bush.

You can read and download a copy of Dr. Wade’s doctoral dissertation at THIS LINK.

Uncovering the History of a Collection of Native American Maple Sugaring Tools

You can read my latest maple history contribution to the Minnesota Maple Syrup Producers’ Association March 2023 newsletter at this link or by clicking on the image below.

This March 2023 contribution shares my research into the back story of the origins and history of an interesting collection of Native American wood and birch bark maple sugaring tools that were donated to the Tamarack Nature Center in Ramsey County, Minnesota for use in their maple syrup education program.

As discovered in research and interviews with surviving family members, the collection was acquired from the 1930s to the 1970s by a volunteer to the Nature Center who had a long association and friendship with a number of Ojibwe Indian families in east central Minnesota.

Minnesota’s Most Famous Maple Sugaring Painting

You can read my latest maple history contribution to the Minnesota Maple Syrup Producers’ Association September 2021 newsletter at this link or by clicking on the image below.

This contribution examines the history and details surrounding the famous watercolor painting titled Indian Sugar Camp that captures a scene depicting a group of Native American women, men, and children making maple sugar, presumably in Minnesota. The painting was created by Seth Eastman, an officer in the United States Army that was stationed at Fort Snelling on the Minnesota frontier in the 1830s and 1840s. Click on over to the article for more on the story behind this well-known painting.

 

 

Minnesota Maple – Grand Portage Band Maple Syrup in the 1950s and 1960s

You can read my latest maple history contribution to the March 2021 newsletter of the Minnesota Maple Syrup Producers’ Association at this link or by clinking on the image below.

The article tells the story of well-meaning, but unsuccessful attempt to establish a commercial maple syrup operation on the Grand Portage Ojibwe Reservation in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The ridge running above Lake Superior in northern Minnesota is known for its high quality sugar maples, with some of the most extensive stands found on the Grand Portage Reservation. Looking for economic development opportunities, the State of Minnesota hit upon the idea of helping start a cooperative commercial maple syrup operation with the members of the Grand Portage Ojibwe community. Click on the article for the rest of the story.

 

 

Maple Sugaring History and Native American Treaty Rights Research

Over the years as my research into Native American maple sugaring progressed I never ceased to be impressed by one particular scholarly publication. A variety of careful treatments of various topics that touch on the role and place of sugaring in the lives, economy, and culture of Native North America have been written and published and still more are coming out every year. Likewise, important articles and papers presenting research on the maple sugar origins debate and archaeological investigations into Native American maple sugaring have and will continue to be featured in this blog. But in the last thirty years, for me one piece stands out as a unique, well-researched, well-referenced, and thought-provoking article written from a broader ethnohistorical perspective.

The article, available at the links here, is Robert “Bob” H. Keller’s America’s Native Sweet: Chippewa Treaties and the Right to Harvest Maple Sugar.  It was published in 1989 in the journal American Indian Quarterly (vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 117-135) and makes a well-argued case for the protection and exercising of the right of Anishinabe people (also known as Chippewa or Ojibwe) to harvest maple sap and make maple sugar and syrup on off-reservation lands in the ceded territories of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The context of the timing of the article was that in the 1980s Native Americans from Anishinabe Bands (sometimes called tribes) across the Lake Superior region were fighting the states in court to defend their rights to hunt, gather, and fish on lands outside the boundaries of their reservations, rights that were reserved in exchange for ceding ownership of these lands to the federal government via a number of treaties agreed to in the 1800s. To make a long story short, the Anishinabe were successful in court and their reserved rights were recognized.  The regulation of fishing and the sharing of the annual take of fish by sportsman, commercial fishing, and treaty-protected fishing was the overwhelming focus of debate both before and after the conclusion of the cases in court. While the issue of off-reservation maple sugaring as a treaty-right was barely acknowledged.

Nevertheless, Bob Keller dove into the topic and in doing so presented a wonderful overview of the history and cultural significance of maple sugaring for western Great Lakes tribes in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. For anyone interested in a short but accurate introduction to intersection of some of the social and political issues and questions related to the evolution of Native American maple sugaring into the 21st century, that is grounded in historical research, Keller’s article is the place to start.

For those interested in who Bob Keller was, Bob Keller was a professor of history in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He wrote about a wide range of environmental and historical topics, including Native American history. He retired in the 1990s before passing away in 2017.

Another notable and related work to Keller’s look at maple sugaring as a treaty-right and digs a little deeper into documenting the historic use and importance of maple sugaring to one Anishinabe community in Minnesota is the massive 572 page tome Fish in in the Lakes, Wild Rice, and Game in Abundance: Testimony on Behalf of Mille Lacs Ojibwe Hunting and Fishing Rights by James M. McClurken with contributions by Charles E. Cleland, Thomas Lund, John D. Nichols, Helen Tanner and Bruce White.

Published in 2000 following the Mille Lacs Band’s success in arguing their treaty-reserved rights to off-reservation hunting and fishing were not extinguished in the past by various federal actions, the book presents the detailed research and arguments of a team of ethnohistorians that demonstrated, among many things how, where, and when hunting, fishing and gather activities continued to be a part of the daily lives of the Milles Lacs Anishinabe community, including maple sugaring.

 

A Collection of Early References to Maple Sugar and Syrup

Unbeknownst to many maple historians, a unique and valuable bibliographic collection of early references to maple sap, maple sugar and maple syrup appeared in 1935 an 1946 in the obscure publication Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. 

The result of an extensive and very comprehensive examination of publications in the collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin covering travel reports, natural history, and first hand narrative accounts in journals, diaries, and correspondence.

To the uninitiated, the collections of the library and archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are an amazing and extensive treasure trove of information. I would even go so far as to call it the single greatest public library dedicated to history in the United States.

The first iteration, titled Maple Sugar: A Bibliography of Early Records was written by H.A. Schuette and Sybil C. Schuette and appeared in 1935 in volume 29 of the Transactions.

The second iteration, titled Maple Sugar: A Bibliography of Early Records. II written by H.A. Schuette and A.J. Ihde appeared in 1946 in volume 38.

Volume I of the bibliographies contains 72 entries in chronological order spanning a period from 1634 to 1895. Volume II contains 147 entries spanning a period beginning in 1534 and ending in 1933. Each volume of the bibliographies contains an index at the end.  The individual entries include a full bibliographic reference and a verbatim quote or excerpt of the notable and relevant text that addresses something related to the presence of maple trees or the use of maple products in the past.  The vast majority of entries are focused on accounts of the early use of maple sap or manufacture of maple sugar and maple syrup by Native Americans, fur traders, and early settlers in Canada and New England. In addition, some entries have very brief notes or annotations to help explain some of the context or broader content of the specific publication in reference.

There is nothing especially unique about any of the entries in and of themselves since one will see most of these references repeated in other contexts and publications and one can discover these references through an exhaustive search of one’s own. However, what is handy and useful is having them published and indexed in a precise chronological form for easy use and reference.

Henry A. Schuette in 1940 when President of the American Oil Chemist’s Society.

The primary author of these bibliographies was Henry A. Schuette, a food chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to his laboratory work, Schuette had a special interest in the history of foods and spent a great deal of his spare time in the historical society library on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. Schuette also encouraged his students to investigate and better understand the history of food as a context for their food chemistry research.

One such doctoral chemistry student who took Professor Schuette’s encouragement to heart was Aaron J. Ihde who later went onto to himself become a notable chemist and food historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin. Ihde collaborated with Schuette on the second volume of the bibliography. The secondary author to the first volume of the bibliography was Sybil C. Schuette, who was a librarian in Wisconsin and presumably a relative of Henry A. Schuette.

For those hoping to learn more about the early accounts and descriptions of maple sugaring by our Euro-American and Native American ancestors, these bibliographies are a great introduction to the literature. And as noted above, for those already interested in the early records and accounts of the use and production of maple sugar and maple syrup, these bibliographies are a useful collection to have in one’s reference library.

 

 

 

Things Are Not Always What They Seem

As someone with a strong interest in the history and anthropological study of Native American resource and land use, in particularly maple sugaring, there is one particular photograph that has always interested me. I first saw this photo in Thomas Vennum, Jr.’s Wild Rice and the Ojibway People. Published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1988, Vennum, then an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Folklife Programs, included the photo in a section of his book where he was describing the layout, activities and technology in use at the various Native American wild rice camps he visited across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Photo of Joe Pete and wife parching wild rice in maple sugaring flat pan. Photo originally appears in Thomas Vennum Jr.’s book, Wild Rice and the Ojibway People.”

The photo was taken on the Reservation of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians by Robert E. Ritzenthaler of the Milwaukee Public Museum during field work in the late summer of 1941.  In the photo Joe Pete and his wife are shown parching wild rice in a large flat rectangular sheet metal pan over a wood fire.  The pan looks to be about three feet by six feet in dimension with six inch deep sides, rolled rim at the top and two sets of handles on each side. As the caption in Vennum’s book notes “Joe Pete and his wife parching rice at Lac Vieux Desert, Wisconsin, 1941; the use of a rectangular metal trough and broom is unusual.” Instead, it was customary to use a kettle or kettle like metal washtub to parch rice. After harvesting wild rice by canoe from shallow lakes and rivers in the region, the rice was taken to nearby ricing camps or brought home to dry, parch, thresh, and winnow.  Parching was historically carried out by heating and drying the rice grains in a large kettle over a fire, constantly stirring to avoid scorching or burning, such as shown in the photo below.

Ojibwe woman parching wild rice in metal tub with wooden paddle. Source: http://www.nmai.si.edu/environment/img/03/03_03/full/08_E97_32W_p38_full.jpg

The novelty of using the unusual metal trough for parching rice is what caught Vennum’s eye in examining the photo. What he did not seem to realize at the time was that he was looking at a photo of Mr. and Mrs. Pete putting a maple sugaring flat pan to use as a wild rice parching kettle. While at first glance, it might seem an unusual departure from the traditional kettle or tub, it makes perfect sense and is actually a rather ingenious re-use of technology already on hand. Alongside collecting wild rice, making maple sugar and maple syrup, was and still is, one of the important seasonal gathering activities carried out every year in the Lac Vieux Desert community. Located on the north shore of Lac Vieux Desert in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this Ojibwe community has occupied this village site for over two centuries. During that time tribal members established many maple sugaring camps throughout the maple woodlands surrounding the old village known as Katekitgon.

With Euro-American settlement, land cessions treaties, and other changes in land ownership, control of much of the Lac Vieux Desert territory was lost, with a great deal of the lands closest to the traditional village site becoming lands of the Ottawa National Forest.  In 2001 I was working as an archaeological field technician for the Ottawa National Forest and was fortunate be tasked with conducting a re-survey of a large parcel of National Forest land adjacent to the lands of the old village in anticipation of a land exchange where these traditional lands would be returned to tribal ownership and control. Past archaeological surveys of the area had identified a wide variety of historic sites and activity areas associated with the village most notably dozens of maple sugaring sites. But in tromping through the woods, describing, mapping and photographing what I found, one particular site really got me excited. It was a sugaring camp like many others with a scatter of rusted, re-used metal food cans left behind from collecting sap at the maple trees and the nearly disintegrated remains of a stone and earthen bermed boiling arch.

What made this site different and gave me goose bumps that day was the appearance of a large rectangular metal trough with two sets of handles on each side. I knew that trough! That was the same trough that I had looked at so many times before used for parching wild rice in the photograph in Vennum’s book.

Metal flat pan recorded at abandoned Lac Vieux Desert maple sugaring camp on the Ottawa National Forest in the summer of 2001. (photo by author).

Well, at least it “looked” just like that trough and the Lac Vieux Desert context of both the trough in the photo and the maple sugaring flat pan found at the sugaring camp made it absolutely plausible and I would argue even probable that they were the very same pan. Making finds likes this and connecting what would seem like rather disparate dots are part the fun of archaeological and historical discovery. Moreover, this was a great reminder of the adaptability of people and the fact that sometimes there is more than what meets the eye and things are not always what they seem.

A 1952 Visit to an Indian Sugabush

This article originally appeared in a 2003 edition of the Wisconsin Maple News.

In the late summer of 1951 while working as a forester for the Northern Highland State Forest in Vilas County, a young Ted Peterson discovered a maple sugaring camp in an old growth forest of sugar maple and yellow birch on what he thought was state forest land.  Noting a large flat pan resting on a sturdy stone and earth arch and a very old upside-down copper kettle sitting inside half of a birch bark covered wigwam, Peterson made a note to himself to come back the following spring to find out just whose sugarbush this was.

Returning the following April with his camera in hand, Peterson came upon a nicely cleared path through the snow leading to the evaporator and wigwam he witnessed the summer before.  Only this time the sugar camp was in full operation with steam rising from the flat pan, metal pails hanging from every maple, and a middle aged Potawatomi Indian couple tending the fire and gathering the sap.  Realizing he was an uninvited guest, Ted Peterson quickly introduced himself to the proprietors, Rose and Pete Johnson.

Pete Johnson tending the fire and watching the boil on his flat pan and stone arch (photo courtesy of Ted Peterson and the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Historic Preservation Office).

Fascinated by what he saw in front of him, Peterson wanted to know more and began to ask one question after another to the Indian man tending the fire under the flat pan.  But Pete Johnson was very short with his answers, aw he was not sure who this man really was and why he was there.  Johnson also knew that there was a longstanding disagreement between the Escanabas, his wife’s family and landowners, and the state of Wisconsin over the ownership of the woods they were tapping and land on which they lived.  Not daunted by the Mr. Johnson’s cool reception, Peterson pressed on, taking pictures and asking questions about the boiling process, tapping the trees, and the layout of their sugarbush.  Not seeing any thermometers or hydrometers, Peterson asked Pete Johnson how he knew when the syrup was done, to which Johnson replied that it was finished when it tastes right and when it feels right.

A short distance away from the stone arch and flat pan was the half wigwam where Peterson found Rose Johnson tending a small fire under the old copper kettle.  The Johnsons often set as many as 500 taps each spring, and Peterson soon realized that in addition to making syrup, the Johnson’s were making sugar.  If fact, the majority of the sap they gathered ultimately went into making maple sugar.  It was at the hands and direction of Mrs. Johnson that as much as 160 pounds of sugar was made every spring in the large copper trade kettle, handed down from earlier generations.  In observing Mrs. Johnson boil the syrup for sugar, Peterson noted that she would rub the inner rim of the kettle with deer tallow, and each time the bubbling mass of thick syrup foamed up it would touch the grease near the rim and settle back down.  Traditional defoamer!  When the syrup has thickened to the right consistency and bubbles, the kettle was taken off the fire and the maple molasses was spooned into metal sugar molds to cool into sugar cakes.  Not having electricity or an icebox in their cabin, the Johnsons kept most of the more easily stored sugar for home consumption.  Much of the 150 gallons of syrup that they made each spring was sold in stores in Eagle River, Star Lake, Rhinelander, and Lac du Flambeau, providing much needed cash to an otherwise subsistence lifestyle.

View of the half wigwam structure for sugar making at the Johnson’s Partridge Lake Sugarbush (photo courtesy of Ted Peterson and the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Historic Preservation Office).

Rose Johnson’s parents, John and Mary Escanaba, settled on the north shore of Partridge Lake in 1904, after a smallpox epidemic broke up their Potawatomi village at nearby Indian Lake.  At that time, John Escanaba made a deal with a man from the sawmill in Star Lake to obtain title this 40 acres parcel from the Goodyear logging company in exchange for nine ponies.  Unfortunately, John Escanaba passed away the following year and the piece of paper they received in exchange was not actually the deed, being a worthless piece of paper.  In spite of that, the Escanabas never left, resisting efforts to move them to the Potawatomi Reservation instead choosing to maintain a traditional lifestyle in which they fed and clothed themselves from the land and their labors.  Pete Johnson came to the Partridge Lake settlement in 1914 when he married Rose Escanaba, where along with Rose’s mother Mary, they raised their family.  Although they maintained their traditional religious beliefs and a traditional gathering, farming, and hunting lifestyle, the Escanabas and Johnsons did not necessarily shun technological improvements.  Sometime before the 1920s, they stopped boiling sap in kettles and began to boil sap in a large iron flat pan.  They also abandoned the use of wood taps and birch bark containers, shifting to metal taps and sap cans.  Every few years they would move their camp to another location in these woods to allow some of the trees in their sugarbush a rest and they only removed the non-maples and the sick and damaged for firewood.

Rose Johnson spooning warm soft maple sugaring onto metal sugar molds (photo courtesy of Ted Peterson and the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Historic Preservation Office).

Pete Johnson died in the 1960s and Rose in the 1970s, but not before the family obtained title to their home and traditional sugarbush.  The family continues to own and occupy the homestead and sugarbush and has made syrup in the woods as recently as the early 1990s.

Ted Peterson later went on to become an extension forester with the late Fred Trenk at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he spent many years as a conduit for new information and technology on syrup making to Wisconsin maple producers.  Before his retirement in 1990, Peterson provided important operational support to the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association working hard with producers, striving to improve production and quality.  But it was his 1952 encounter with a Potawatomi family in the woods of Vilas County where he received his one of his first lessons on maple syrup production.

Matthew Thomas. “A 1952 Visit to an Indian Sugarbush.” Wisconsin Maple News. 2003, volume 19, number 3, page 23.

Sugarbush Archaeology

One interesting and important way to understand and tell the story of the history of maple sugaring is through the remains of past sugaring operations. Recording and investigating these sites and artifacts from maple sugaring’s past falls into the realm of what I like to call sugarbush archaeology.

For many folks when the idea of archaeology is brought up they immediately think of studying past human behavior before the time of written records, and that certainly covers a lot of the focus of archaeology. However, archaeology is not solely limited to the pre-writing segment of human history and also includes consideration of our material remains from more recent periods in time.

Just about everyone that has spent any time in or around a sugarbush which has been in use for a few generations or more is probably aware of the location of an old sugarhouse or boiling camp. If it is fairly recently retired or abandoned, it may be a standing ruin or relic, but if it was left many more years ago, chances are it has been reduced to a simple scatter of twisted metal, an irregular foundation or collections of stones, or a mounded patch of ground in the woods. Those remains are now artifacts and features of an archaeological site. The heritage of sugarmakers is certainly preserved in things like the photographs and collections of antiques and ephemera that line the wall of many sugar houses. But there are other artifacts, sometimes very big artifacts, of maple sugaring that we can also preserve and learn from.

While there are some written records describing early maple sugaring activities, the further one goes back in time, the fewer and fewer records there are and what is written is generally lacking in detail or description. For example, in the western Great Lakes region in earlier times when Euro-Americans were still settling the land and access to use of the woods was more open and with fewer limits, it was not uncommon to set up a sugarbush and boiling camp where ever it was deemed best. This may have been private land, it may have been unclaimed public land, it may have been tribal land or even tax forfeiture land.

Photo of nested kettles in abandoned Native American sugaring camp.

Today, archaeologists find a variety of sites in the forest that mark the past location of all sorts and scales of maple sugaring, from the simplest boiling camp that may have been a single kettle used for one season to the former location of a sugarhouse that contained multiple evaporator where thousands of gallons of syrup were made each season.

Most of the work being done that identifies maple sugaring archaeological sites happens on federal, tribal, state, and county lands where there are rules in place directing land managers to look for archaeological and historic sites like these and take those places into account when managing those lands. But maple sugaring sites are all over, and there are undoubtedly many many times more sites on private lands and in current sugarbushes that any of these public lands.

Photo of the unloading ramp and sugarhouse at the Grand Island sugarbush shortly after abandonment.

I’ve worked for many years as a field archaeologist in the woods of northern Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota and have recorded dozens and dozens of maple sugaring sites. Most of these sites were the remains of small short lived boiling camps with simple stone and earthen arches and an associated scatter of metal artifacts.  But every now and then there was an opportunity to work with a more substantial site. For example one interesting site was the remains of the Cleveland Cliffs Mining Company’s sugarbush on land now managed by the Hiawatha National Forest on Grand Island in Lake Superior off the shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

 

Photograph of the remains of the sugar house on Grand Island from east side of site looking west.
Map of archaeological remains of Grand Island sugaring camp.

The company operated a commercial sugaring operation for xx years before they closed shop and abandoned everything in place in 19xx. Unlike a lot of sugarhouses, when they closed they just walked away and essentially left the evaporators and equipment behind. I was able to photograph and map what was left of the decaying sugar house which was presented in a 2003 article in the Michigan Academician.

Other researchers have also looked at maple history from the lens of the archaeological record, with two notable publications being Keener, Gordon and Nye’s 2010 article on the Petticrew-Taylor Farmstead in Ohio and David Babson’s 2011 doctoral dissertation on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century sugaring sites in Lewis County, New York.

While the study of abandoned commercial sugaring sites is fascinating, a great deal of my attention has been spent working on identifying and understanding the remains of sugaring activities associated with Ojibwe and Potowatomi Native American communities from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most people who are less familiar with those Indian communities, including sugarmakers from New England, are often a surprised to learn that maple sugaring continues to be an important part of the seasonal activities of Indian people into the twentieth century. This is in part a legacy of the Indian maple production being a subsistence activity for family and community consumption and largely operating outside of the mainstream  realities the mainstream market economy. It is also a relic of a government assimilation policy that discouraged Indian people from continuing their traditional gathering activities, often forcing Indian people to quietly carry out their sugaring.

Map of remains of Native American boiling arch at McCord Indian Village in northern Wisconsin.

While working as an archaeologist for the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Band in northern Wisconsin we recorded dozens of abandoned sugaring camps both on and off the reservation. A great deal of this research was published in an article in 2001 in the Wisconsin Archeologist which presented an overview of the kinds of sites we were finding and the material remain left behind like metal cans, pails, birch bark containers, and metal and wood taps for sap collection as well as kettles, chains, and hooks for boiling sap.

Map of remains of storage structure and associated artifact scatter at Lac du Flambeau sugar camp LDF-081.

 

Learning as much as we could at the sites at Lac du Flambeau was a springboard to being asked to help record and interpret many more Native American sugaring sites in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Much of that work was presented in a 2005 article in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology about the remains of tell-tale U-shaped boiling arches at known and suspected Native American communities.  Both of these articles were largely aimed at helping the practitioners of professional field archaeology better recognize and appreciate this often overlook and misunderstood cultural resource.

Our limited understanding of the history of Indian sugaring has been an important reasons and motivation for me to focus on recording and interpreting these sites. There are many of non-Indian archaeological remains of sugaring to investigate as well; however, the supporting documentation and historical information related to those sites is a bit more robust. Also because many of the Euro-American sugaring sites were established on lands that continue to be held in private ownership, often as sugarbushes to this day, they may be in a better position to be preserved and protected.

When talking about the early years of maple sugaring in North American, curious and knowledgeable people invariably bring up the question of who made maple sugar first, Native peoples or the Euro-Americans and Euro-Canadians that came to the new world. That’s a very interesting question and one that archaeology should be able to help answer. Wading into the origins debate, as I refer to it, is a curious topic and not unlike opening up a political can of worms.  People are very sure of what they have come to believe is the truth, regardless of what evidence they are presented. However, I will save my thoughts on that topic for the moment and dedicate another post to tackling that in the future.

What is important to consider and appreciate in looking at and managing a stand of maple trees, be it a current or past sugarbush and on private or public lands is that the the land has a story to tell. Often times this story is not recorded any where else and may no longer even remain in the minds and memories of those that worked those woods. What looks like trash or ruins does have meaning if you look at it from a certain light. Likewise the old roads, fence lines, scarred trees, and signs of different cutting histories and forest management are part of the unwritten record of sugarbush archaeology. Where we can we should take the time to consider, document, learn from and maybe even preserve what remains of the past years of sugaring.

 

REFERENCES  CITED

Babson, David W., “Sweet Spring: The Development and Meaning of Maple Syrup Production at Fort Drum, New York.” (doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University, 2011).

Keener, Craig S, Stephen C Gordon, and Kevin Nye, “Uncovering a Mid-Nineteenth Century Maple Sugar Camp and Stone Furnace at the Petticrew-Taylor Farmstead in Southwest Ohio.” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 35, no. 2 (2010) 133-166.

Thomas, Matthew M., “The Archaeology of Great Lakes Native American Maple Sugar Production in the Reservation Era.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 82, no. 1 (2001) 75-102.

Thomas, Matthew M. and Janet Silbernagel, “The Evolution of a Maple Sugaring Landscape on Lake Superior’s Grand Island.” The Michigan Academician 35, no. 2 (2003) 135-158.

Thomas, Matthew M., “Historic American Indian Maple Sugar and Syrup Production Boiling Arches in Michigan and Wisconsin.” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 30, no. 2(2005) 299-326.