Category: anthropology

The Maple Sugar Origin Legend of Woksis and Moqua: A Second Look

By Matthew M. Thomas

Fans of maple history are often intrigued by the question of the origin of maple sugar. Related to that there seems to be a particular fascination with various Native American legends and folk tales that have been used to explain how Native North American people learned to make maple sugar. As a historian whose work is based on careful documentation, getting to the gist of folklore and legends that come from an oral story telling tradition can be a challenge. On top of this is the problem of sorting out what Native American stories are “true,” “old,” or “authentic,” versus those that are the creation of more recent authors and story tellers.

Late 19th century photograph of Rowland E. Robinson.

One notable example of such a questionable legend is the often-repeated Native American maple sugar origin story of Woksis and Moqua. However, contrary to the belief that the Woksis and Moqua story is an ancient legend of the Algonquian peoples that has been passed down orally over the generations before finally being committed to print, the Woksis and Moqua story is the 19th century work of the imagination of a European-American story teller from Vermont by the name of Rowland E. Robinson.

Robinson’s 1896 article in The Atlantic magazine.

The first time the Woksis and Moqua story appeared in print was the April 1896 edition of the magazine The Atlantic,  appearing in a six-page article written by Robinson, titled “Old-Time Sugar-Making.” In introducing this origin story, Robinson initially makes note that Native people may have learned to tap the maple tree for its sap by watching the spring time actions of the red squirrel nibbling on the smooth bark of young branches of the maple tree, before moving on to the legend of an Algonquian man Woksis and his wife Moqua, and declaring “the true story of the discovery of maple-sugar making is in the legend of Woksis, the mighty hunter.”

Picking up in the middle of Robinson’s text, he first notes that Moqua was aware that the maple tree, when wounded, would produce a sweet water. Robinson then goes on,

Happily, she bethought her of the great maple behind the wigwam, tapped merely for the provision of a pleasant drink, but the sweet water might serve a better purpose now. So she filled the kokh (container) with sap, and hung it over the mended fire. In spite of impatient watching it presently began to boil, whereupon she popped the ample ration of moose meat into it, and set a cake of pounded corn to bake on a tilted slab before the fire. Then she resumed her embroidery, in which the sharp point of each thread supplied its own needle.

The work grew more and more interesting. The central figure, her husband’s totem of the bear, was becoming so lifelike that it could easily be distinguished from the wolves, eagles, and turtles of the other tribal clans. In imagination she already beheld the moccasins on the feet of her noble Woksis; now stealing in awful silence along the war-path; now on the neck of the fallen foe; now returning jubilant with triumph, or fleeing homeward from defeat, to ease the shame of failure by kicking her, in which cases he felt herself bearing, as ever, her useful part. So she dreamed and worked stitch by stitch, while the hours passed un-heeded, the shadow crept past the mark, the kokh boiled low, and the cake gave forth a smell of burning. Becoming aware of this obvious odor, she sprang to the fire. Alas, the cake was a blackened crisp, and lo, the once juicy piece of meat was a shriveled morsel in the midst of a gummy dark brown substance!

She snatched kokh and cake from the fire, and then, hearing her husband coming, she ran and hid herself in the nearest thicket of evergreens ; for she knew that when he found not wherewith to appease the rage of hunger he would be seized with a more terrible one against her. Listening awhile with a quaking heart, and catching no alarming sound, but aware instead of an unaccountable silence, she ventured forth and peeped into the wigwam. Woksis sat by the fire eating with his fingers from the kokh, while his face shone with an expression of supreme content and enjoyment. With wonder she watched him devour the last morsel, but her wonder was greater when she saw him deliberately break the earthen pot and lick the last vestige of spoiled cookery from the shards. She could not restrain a surprised cry, and discovering her he addressed her : —

“O woman of women! didst thou conceive this marvel of cookery, or has Klose-kur-Beh been thy instructor?”

Being a woman, she had the wit to withhold the exact truth, but permitted him to believe whatever he would.

“Let me embrace thee!” he cried, and upon his lips she tasted the first maple sugar.

1920 painting by artist Clark Fay titled “Legend of Woksis”

The discovery was made public, and kokhs of sap were presently boiling in every wigwam. All were so anxious to get every atom of the precious sweet that they broke the kokhs and scraped the pieces, just as Woksis, the first sugareater, had done. And that is why there are so many fragments of broken pottery, and so few whole vessels to be found.

A complete copy of the story in The Atlantic can be viewed at this link.

Following Robinson’s publication in The Atlantic, the Woksis and Moqua story was widely circulated and republished in New England newspapers like The Rutland Daily Herald and The Greenfield Recorder, and the Brattleboro Reformer, as well as a variety of national newspapers and magazines in both the United States and Canada.

Who was Rowland Robinson and how did he come to write this story? Rowland E. Robinson (1833-1900) was a well-known and once popular nineteenth century farmer-writer and illustrator from Ferrisburgh, Vermont. Robinson wrote both fiction and non-fiction, specializing in novels and short stories that featured characters and folklore from life in Vermont. He also frequently made drawings to accompany and illustrate his stories.

As a farmer and rural resident of 19th century Vermont, Robinson was well-aware of the details and legends of maple sugaring and wrote about it often in his works on Vermont life. In his 1895 story “A New England Woodpile,” he wrote, “here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the butt, with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as passable tools for this purpose as any they had for another.”

In his short story, “In the Spring Woods,” Robinson shared his observations of squirrels intentionally wounding and sucking the sweet sap of the maple tree in the spring. Robinson wrote, “if you wade into the woods — and it is easier wading without a gun than with it — about the time the sugar-makers are beginning their work, you may see that someone has been before them, tapping nearer the sky than their augers bore, and where the sap has a finer and more ethereal flavor. You can see little trickles of it darkening some of the smaller smooth branches, and if your eyes are sharp enough, the incisions it flows from. These are the chisel marks of the red squirrel, the only real sap-sucker I know of, excepting the boy. Make yourself comfortable on some patch of ground that the spring ebb of the snow has left bare and keep still long enough, and you may see him stretch himself along a branch and slowly suck or lap the sap as it oozes from the wound. Evidently he enjoys it greatly, and it must be grateful to his palate, for all winter, save in a thaw or two, he has had nothing to quench his thirst but snow, and eating one’s drink is a hard and poor way of taking it. Was he the first to discover the sweetness of the maple, and did the Indians take the hint of sugar-making from him? If so we are under obligations to him…”

Interestingly, these words relate to an earlier maple origin story published in 1882 by Robinson that uses the same narrative and storyline as the later Woksis and Moqua legend. In March 1882, Robinson published The Story of Maple Sugar in Wide Awake magazine. Wide Awake was a monthly American children’s magazine that published between 1875 to 1893 before it merged with another magazine called St. Nicholas Magazine. A complete copy of the story in Wide Awake magazine can be viewed at this link.

Robinson 1882 article in Wide-Awake magazine.

In his 1882 story, Robinson told the tale of how Native Americans came to learn about the sweet sap of the maple tree and went on to make the accidental discovery that maple sap could be made into maple sugar by boiling. In this telling of the story, the characters are an Indian man named Awahsoose, the bear, and his wife, Wonakake, the otter, and a young son called Wungbasahs, the woodpecker.

 

The story begins when the son is out hunting and encounters Mekwaseese, a little red squirrel. When the squirrel was cornered by Wungbasahs with his bow and arrow, the squirrel offered to tell the boy a secret in exchange for his freedom. Robinson wrote,

“Let me hear your great secret, and then I will see.”

“Well,” sighed Mekwaseese, “I suppose I must tell, whether you kill me or not. When you first saw me here I was sucking sweet water from this branch!”

“Sucking sweet water from this branch? You lie, Mekwaseese! There is no sweet water in trees.”

“Yes,” said Mekwaseese, “sweeter than the juice of the sata (blueberry), and ever and ever so much of it. Put your lips here where I have bitten through the bark, and taste for yourself. If I have lied I hope to be shot.”

So Wungbasahs lay down upon the limb, and putting his mouth to the wound, got a few drops of a very sweet and pleasant liquid. The squirrel, having no great faith in Indians, big or little, took advantage of his enemy’s position, and jumping upon his head, scampered along his back, and gaining the trunk of the tree, got behind it in almost no time at all. The boy was angry enough at being played such a trick, and made all sorts of murderous threats against him; but the squirrel asked, peeping from behind the trunk,” Did you not find it as I told you?”

Wunghasahs admitted that it was sweet, but so little of it that he could never get enough to satisfy him.

“But if you will promise never to shoot me, I will tell you how and where you can get a bucketful in half a day.”

Yes, Wungbasahs would promise, if what was told him proved true.

So Mekwaseese told him to take a gouge and cut through the bark of the trunk near the ground, and stick a spout of senhalon wood just below for the sap to run through into a pkenmojo. a birch-bark pail, which should be set at the end of it.

Then Wungbasahs got down from the tree and went home to devise means to carry out the squirrel’s instructions.

He could make a pkenmojo and spout easily enough, but he must borrow the gouge. He knew where his father kept his stone gouges and knives and axe, in a pesnoda, or deer-skin tool-bag, hung in the back side of the wigwam; and he knew as well that he could not get the precious tool for the asking; so he took it-the very best and sharpest one of the lot; for I am sorry to say Wungbasahs was not quite so good as the best boys nowadays. Then he cut a slender stick of senhalon wood, ‘which we call sumac, where it grew on a barren place by the lake shore and where he had often gathered its leaves for his father’s smoking, and whittled out a spout; then peeled a sheet of bark from the mask-wamozi, the white birch, and made a pail; and with these he set forth to the tree where he had found the squirrel, for that, he thought, must be better than any other.

With a good deal more labor than he liked, he cut a furrow through the bark and into the wood, and below it made a slanting cut with the gouge and stuck in the spout. It was a soft, half-sunny day, following a frosty night, and the sap came dropping out of the spout into the bark pail at such a lively rate that there was soon a good draught of it, which Wungbasahs swallowed with great relish.

In an hour or so he had got his fill of drink, and began to wish for something to eat. A bright thought struck him. Only two days before, his father had come back from a hunt, hauling home on his dobogan half the carcass of a moose. Would not a chunk of moose-meat, seethed in a kettle of this sweet water, be better than cooked in any other way? So home he went, and added to his sins by purloining a bit of meat half as big as his foot, and one of his mother’s kokws, or earthen kettles, with a handful of live coals in it, and made off with his booty to his one-tree sap-works.

Here he started a fire with the coals, and, by a cord of bark about its rim, slung the kettle over it filled with sap and the piece of meat.

They say that a watched pot never boils, and this one did not till the watcher had fallen asleep with his back to a tree and his feet to the fire. When he awoke the sun was down and the snow was blue with twilight shadows. His first thought was for his cookery. There was nothing left of the fire but ashes and embers; but the kokw had boiled almost dry, only in the bottom was a gummy mass, out of which rose, like the barren rock, wojahose, the shrunken remains of the moose-meat. Wungbasahs was hungry as a wolf, and, tearing it out, set his teeth into it without waiting for it to get cooler. His delight and astonishment raced with each other over the most luscious morsel he had ever tasted. Sweeter than the minute drops in the bags of the columbine, and a whole mouthful of it, to say nothing of what was left in the kokw!

Drawing by Rowland E. Robinson of the maple sugar origins story to accompany his 1882 article in Wide-Awake magazine.

He was so delighted with his discovery that he ran home with what was left of its results as fast as he could, and told the whole story from beginning to end. When Awahsoose and Wonakake had tasted, and then licked and scraped the kokw cleaner than it had ever been before since it was first made, Wungbasahs was forgiven his theft and unauthorized borrowings, and named, with solemn rites, “The-one-whom-the-squirrel-told-how-to-get-the-sweet-water-and-who-himself-found-out-how- to-make-it-better,” which in Indian is so very long a name that I have not paper enough left to write it on.

And so began the making of maple sugar. This story was not told me by the Indians, but by the Blue Jay; and so I cannot vouch for it, since it is said that, blue as he is, the jay is not true blue.

But I do know that to this day, the red squirrels spared by Wungbasahs suck the sap of the maples.

A complete copy of the story in Wide-Awake magazine can be viewed at this link.

In saying that “the story was not told to me by the Indians but by the Blue-jay” and that the words of the Blue-jay are less than reliable, Robinson freely admits that his story is a tale that sprang from his imagination and not a part of the oral traditions of Native peoples that were passed down through the ages or to Rowland Robinson.

In truth, 14 years before Robinson’s imagination brought the world the Woksis and Moqua story, he published essentially the same story. For his 1896 version of the story, Robinson changed the names and roles of the characters but stuck with the narrative of the squirrel sharing the knowledge of sweet sap and the accidental discovery of boiling sap down to make sugar by neglecting a pot of meat cooking in maple sap.

There are those who will claim with great certainty that the Woksis and Moqua story has deep roots in the oral history and traditions of Native Peoples of New England. I will admit that there is always a possibility that I have made a mistake and my research in incomplete or has led me astray. I would love for another researcher to produce a well dated earlier example of a close version of this story gathered from the oral traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America. As a historian of the maple industry, it is important to try to be objective and dispassionate and take an empirical approach when looking at the past. I have learned to question our assumptions about long-held beliefs and to look a little deeper to see if there is in fact a story behind the story, like with the Woksis and Moqua story.

Is it plausible that there is some truth in this legend as far as the way humans learned to make maple sugar? Yes, it is a plausible tale, but at this point we just do not know how or who first made maple sugar. Was an “authentic” Native American legend passed on to Rowland Robinson for him to put to paper and share with readers of late 19th century magazines? Almost certainly not.

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.

The Gooseneck Metal Pipeline: Wisconsin’s First Tubing System?

This article originally appeared in a 2004 edition of the Wisconsin Maple News.

Plastic tubing and vacuum pumping continue to grow in popularity in Wisconsin sugarbushes with a few more miles added every year.  But long before the invention of plastic tubing in the late 1950s, early twentieth century Yankee farmers wanting to reduce the labor of gathering sap invented a metal gravity-fed pipeline system that carried sap directly from the tree to the sugarhouse.  This metal pipeline system consisted of three sizes of tubing, each constructed from long narrow sheets of English tin folded and crimped at the top and slightly tapered at the end to be inserted tightly into another piece of tubing.  The system also included spiles made from conical sheets of tin with a metal tube soldered to the bottom like a drop line.  The spile was either inserted directly into openings on the top of pipeline or into connecting pieces that fit into the pipeline.  This connection from the spile to the tubing was made by a shorter, tapered piece of tubing with a curve at the narrow end, similar in appearance to the neck of a goose.  In fact, it was this piece that gave this system its common name of “gooseneck system”.  The weight of the rigid metal pipeline was supported by heavy gauge wire strung through the woods, with a hook at one end of each piece of tubing to hang the tubing on the support wires.

The gooseneck system in use in a Vermont sugarbush circa 1930. Source: Vermont Maple Sugar and Syrup, Bulletin 38.

The gooseneck system was patented in 1916 near the village of Mayfield, New York along the southern margins of Adirondack State Park by William H. Brower, Jr.  Brower, who was described by his grandson as a mechanic and tinkerer, developed the system with his neighbor and syrup maker, Edward L. Lent.  Today, the workshop where it was invented still stands on land owned by the Lent family and is noted by a roadside historic marker.  According to Lent family history, Brower and Lent later sold the patent to one of the larger Vermont maple syrup equipment makers.  Amazingly, through four generations of syrup making, the Lent family has never stopped using the gooseneck system.  At one time, the Lent family’s mountainside sugarbush was using as many as 2500 taps on the system and boiling on a 3 foot by 16 foot wood fired evaporator. In recent year the family has reduced their tapping to around 300 to 400 taps and downsized to a 2 foot by 10 foot evaporator.  According to the Lent family, the metal pipeline will occasionally freeze during cold spells, but thaws out quickly on south and east facing hillside of the their sugarbush.  At the end of the season, the network of support wire is left strung through the sugarbush but the tubing is taken down.  The pipeline sections are washed and boiled in the evaporator in the last sap of the year then set upright to dry, coating them with a thin layer of sugary sap that prevents rust from developing in the off season.

The late Edward Lent, grandson of Edward L. Lent, tapping trees for gooseneck system in Lent family sugarbush in March 2002.

The gooseneck system was sporadically used during the 1920s and 1930s in the more hilly and mountainous sugarbushes of northeastern United States.  Until recently, this technology was not known to have made it as far west as Wisconsin.  However, in 2003, cultural resource management staff of the USDA Forest Service in Wisconsin discovered the long abandoned remains of a maple sugaring operation in the hills of southwestern Ashland County.  The remains of this former sugarhouse and storage building included over one thousand, four-foot long sections of the tubing system, as well as the gooseneck connecting pieces, coils of suspension wire and other debris.  Today the site appears as a series of building foundations in an overgrown clearing at the base of a maple covered ridge, a perfect location of the gravity fed pipeline system.

A fallen over stack of thousands of sections of metal pipeline at the remains of an abandoned sugarbush on the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, southern Ashland County, Wisconsin.

Based on the age of the other artifacts at the site, including three sizes of metal syrup tins, the use of this sugarbush roughly dates to between 1915 and 1930.  The U.S. Forest Service acquired the land in 1934, shortly after it had been logged and most of the large mature maple trees removed.  As the only known example of the use of the gooseneck system in Wisconsin, the Forest Service has recognized its historical importance and is protecting the site as part of planned forest management activities. In addition, research into the history of the site and use of the pipeline continues.

Matthew Thomas. “The Gooseneck Metal Pipeline: Wisconsin’s First Tubing System?” Wisconsin Maple News, 2004, volume 20, number 1, page 12.

 

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.

New Book – Meanings of Maple: An Ethnography of Sugaring

In August 2017 an important and interesting new book by the title Meanings of Maple: An Ethnography of Sugaring was released for purchase by the University of Arkansas Press. Written by Professor Michael A. Lange of Burlington, Vermont’s Champlain College, this book takes a sweeping look at the many ways maple is made meaningful in people’s lives. When using the term maple, the author is referring to the broader world of maple sugaring or all things that go into and come out of the making of maple syrup in a modern context.

As an anthropologist, Lange’s ethnographic approach is based on many years of speaking with, observing, and interacting with a broad cross section of the maple producing world.  His research and analysis is written from the perspective of Vermont as the center of the maple universe, some might say for obvious reasons, and the book is as much an exploration of how maple has meaning or is made meaningful to Vermont and Vermonters as it is about the meanings of maple in general.

This is an incredibly thoughtful book, in the truest sense of the word. This book is full of thought and ideas and shows that Lange has taken the time to really think about how and what makes maple meaningful to people both in and out of the maple producing environment. It is a book that will force any reader to think a little deeper and a little differently about some aspect of maple than they probably had in the past. It is one of those gems that forces one to admit that they hadn’t really thought about something that way before and to be glad that you were brought to see the maple world a little differently.

It is not a details book that is heavy with facts and figures or case studies and, at times, is somewhat lacking in a broader geographic and historical context especially regarding the modern role of Quebec in consideration of some of the categories of meaning. But that really doesn’t matter and frankly it would be great to see someone tackle a similar project from the point of view and grounding of the Quebecois traditions and meanings. This is not to say that the book is lacking in accuracy, far from it, rather it is to emphasize and applaud that its focus is more philosophical and its strength is in its narrative.

I strongly encourage anyone with an interest in the maple world, regardless of the connection to Vermont, but especially if they are connected to Vermont to pick up this book. It is not a book that you will necessarily “learn” something new from but it is a book that will even strengthen maple’s meaning that much more and help you better appreciate and understand what you think you already knew.

The book can be purchased from the University of Arkansas Press in paperback for $27.95 or hardbound for $69.95.