Category: Native American

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.

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.

—————————–

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.

 

 

Nineteenth Century Native American Sugaring Photographs

By Matthew M. Thomas

The role of Native Americans is a popular topic to those interested in the broader history of maple sugaring. Since one of the themes of this website is examining and sharing new evidence and studies of maple history, looking at early lines of Native American maple sugaring is always on my radar, in particular, accurate images and representations from the sugarbush.

Seth Eastman 1853 watercolor titled “Indian Sugar Camp”

While there are a number of engravings  from the mid-19th century showing what the artist imagined or was told a Native American sugarbush looked like, these images were not created from real-life experiences or in the field and are often woefully inaccurate. Artist Seth Eastman brought real-world experience to his water color paintings of Native American activities in Minnesota and created a much more realistic scene with a 1853 image of what are probably Dakota people at a sugarbush near Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Unfortunately, we do not know if this image was painted “en plein air” on site, in the moment, or was a facsimile of what Eastman saw and remembered after visiting a sugarbush.

In most cases, the best way to preserve an image of Native American sugaring was through photography. Interestingly, photographs taken in Native American sugarbushes in the 19th century are surprisingly rare. Estimated dates, that are probably decades off, sometimes get assigned to an old looking image that lacks a verifiable date. Because the Western Great Lakes are the area where Native American maple sugaring was most actively being pursued during the time when photographers began to capture Native Americans at work, the best and earliest examples of sugarbush photos come from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

After examining hundreds of photos, the earliest reliably dated photograph of a Native American maple sugaring scene I have come across is an image from Crawford County, Michigan that was published in the First Report of the Directors of the State Forestry Commission of Michigan for the Years 1887 and 1888, published in 1888.

Scene of Crawford County Native American sugaring camp from 1888 Michigan State Forestry Commission report.

The caption in the report reads “Indians making sugar in Crawford County. Three young bear are playing in the foreground.”  and lacks any attribution to a photographer or studio.  The photo appears as a plate between pages 16 and 17 and is not directly connected to any article or text in the Forestry Commission report. We do not known when the Forestry Commission report photo was taken, only that it was published in 1888.

In this image we see three girls, one middle-aged woman standing in front of a rough plank lodge, and one older woman sitting nearby. A pile of folded birch bark sap collection pails is visible to the left of the image along with a large iron boiling kettle suspended on a pole over a fire. In the front center of the image a tapped maple tree is evidence, with a diagonal hatchet cut above a wooden slat tap protruding from the bark and a folded birch bark sap container slightly askew below it. Two of the females stand next to wooden barrels possibly used for the storage of maple sap. A stack of cut poles, possibly for firewood, is in the foreground of the right side of the image. Patches of snow in the woods in the background attest to the spring- time nature of the photo.

Framed photo of Shoppenagon sugaring camp that hangs in the International Maple Museum Centre in Croghan, NY.

Further investigations have discovered that another photograph of this same camp and sugarbush hangs on the wall in a hallway of the International Maple Museum and Centre in Croghan, New York. Fortunately this image has a great deal more information to share about the subject matter and the source of the photo.

Close up view of the Shoppenagon sugar camp photo from International Maple Museum Centre in Croghan, NY.

Donated to the Maple Museum by Michigan State Professor of Forestry Putnam Robbins in 1983, the caption on the label of this image reads:

Like the image described from the 1888 Forestry report, this photo shows the same wood lodge and forest, but from a slightly different angle. This image includes two girls, the daughters Nancy and Mary, one middle age women, Shoppenagon’s wife Irene stirring an iron kettle, and an older women, his mother. Unlike the first image, David Shoppenagon appears seated in the left of the image working on a pole with with a draw knife.

It is an interesting challenge to see what different items, like the kettle, and snow shoes, and wood barrels, that one can recognize in both photos.

David Shoppenagon was a well known Native American figure in the lower peninsula of Michigan in the latter part of the 19th century. Of Ojibwe descent, Shoppenagon was born in the Saginaw Valley in 1809 or 1818 and lived a very long life passing away in 1911. Often referred to as Chief Shoppenagon by the white community, Shoppenagon supposedly never referred to himself as such nor was he known to be a representative of any particular Ojibwe community in Michigan.

Undated studio photo of David Shoppenagon and presumably his wife Irene and one of his daughters. https://michpics.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/grayling-legend-david-shoppenagon/

A historical marker for Shoppogen in Grayling, Michigan, in Crawford County, not far from Frederic Township notes that he settled in the Grayling Michigan area in the 1870s where he trapped, hunted, and served as a well-respected and knowledgeable sportsmen’s guide on the Ausable River and across the lower Peninsula of Michigan.

In later years Shoppenagon appears to have embraced and monetized his local persona even going so far as lending his name and image in full Indian regalia to a local timber company and mill, receiving compensation for his work in promoting their wood products.

The caption attributes the photograph to a glass plate negative originally taken in the late 1860s by Dr. W. Beal, Head of the Botany Department, Michigan Agricultural College. Dr. William J. Beal was one of the earliest botanists at Michigan State University and was the founder of what is now named the Beal Botanical Gardens at MSU, the oldest of its kind in the United States.

I believe the date on the caption stating the image was taken in the late 1860s is incorrect since Beal was away from Michigan at Harvard University for graduate school in the 1860s and didn’t begin working as a professor at Michigan State until 1871. Moreover, Shoppenagon and his family didn’t move from the Saginaw Bay area to Crawford County until 1876.

It is possible, maybe even probable, that the photos of the Shoppenagon sugar camp were taken in the late 1870s or early 1880s, but for now, the oldest we can confidently say those images are is 1888.

Another early photograph of a Native American maple sugar camp was taken by John Munro Longyear, a well-known land surveyor that worked in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the later half of the 19th century. On one visit to the Lac Vieux Desert Ojibwe community he snapped a photograph of the contents of a maple sugaring cache and later preserved the photograph in an album that was dated October 26, 1888.

Photo of maple sugaring cache taken by John M. Longyear and Lac Vieux Desert Ojibwe community. John M. Longyear Library, Marquette, MI.

The Longyear image is an excellent snapshot of the items that were in use and stored from season to season at a Great Lakes Ojibwe sugarbush. One can recognize many iron kettles and pots, snow shoes, birch bark sap pails, reed mats, sheets of rolled-up and reinforced birch bark, and heavier duty sewn birch bark containers.

There are other images in collections and museums that may very well predate the images described here, but a careful investigation and documentation of their source and dating is needed before we should accept any estimate or approximation of the their antiquity. If anyone has a well dated photo of a native American maple sugaring scene as old or older than the images discussed here, please let me know. I would be very happy to share that information on this site.

References

Robert M. Hendershot, “The Legacy of an Ojibwe ‘Lumber Chief’ ” Michigan Historical Review  vol. 29 no. 2 (fall 2003) 40-68.

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.