Lake Wobegon Days (11 page)
Authors: Garrison Keillor
On a Sunday evening in May 1880, persons came to the window of the Shaw residence while members of the family were eating supper and fired a Winchester rifle and a shotgun loaded with buckshot, killing Mr. Horace Shaw and his young son, Charles, while severely injuring Mrs. Shaw who was pierced by several bullets but survived in a crippled condition. Two daughters, Mary and Agnes Shaw, fifteen and seventeen years of age, had gone to the kitchen to cut a blueberry pie and were uninjured. A detective from St. Paul was called in on the case and, following up various clues, he put the finger on two men from St. Cloud who had been seen in the company of the Shaw girls at a dance only a week before the murders. The girls admitted to authorities that they had agreed with the young men to marry them if they killed their parents so the girls would inherit the house. Reprehensible as the crime was, the girls were put on a train to Minneapolis to live with an aunt. The young men were tried for murder and found not guilty by the jury, which felt that the girls were equally culpable, whereupon a man named Conway shot and killed a juryman. He was never apprehended.
The following August, a newborn child was found in a privy, and in October, the decomposed body of what appeared to be a young woman of wealth was found in a field during plowing. A string of pearls was around her neck, and the bones of her right hand clutched a Bible. That winter, a man was stabbed and left to die in a ditch north of town. Nobody could identify the body. Mr. Thorvaldson offered a gravesite and a stone. The body was buried under the name “Oscar Thorvaldson,” though the deceased was no relation to him.
Doctors came and went. Four had hung up their shingles in five years and then left, taking the shingles with them. One of them was all right if you believed in that sort of thing (roots, mainly, and leaves), one was a drunk, one peddled snake oil, and the other didn’t get much business, so there was no telling about him. A fifth man, Dr. Thompson, was good and left after the diphtheria epidemic of 1866, his own health shattered.
When Dr. Louis Holter, E.D.D., set up shop in 1872, the town had lost faith in the current officeholder, a Dr. Pfeiffer, who dispensed white powders and brown liquids that put his patients in a stupor. Once, after a massive outbreak of dysentery, he dosed them with a combination of the two, and half of New Albion lay flat on its back, seeing faces in the wallpaper.
Dr. Holter brought the most advanced equipment of the day: an electrical chair, solid oak, with a crank in back that the physician turned to create magnetic energy that entered the body through wires and straps and achieved a more perfect balance of forces within the corporal field. The electrical chair, he instructed them, was no
interventive measure
to be called on when illness struck but rather a
preventive
and
restorative
device, meant to be employed on a weekly basis. The patient would notice the benefits only after a serious and sustained program of treatment.
The electrical chair produced a pleasant tingly sensation. One could actually feel things happening in the legs and up the spine, as negative power came into balance with positive, and the flow of
positivity was redirected
to
and
from
the cranial extremity, making vibrations in the peepers and leading to tremendous benefits that one was already beginning to imagine.
Word-of-mouth built Dr. Holter’s trade, and he took over the Albion House, which became the Holter Sanitarium. Three more electrical chairs were brought in and two trained magneticists to crank them, and by 1874, upwards of a hundred persons were taking weekly sittings. The treatment was especially popular among the New Englanders, Dr. Holter being a Maine man. The Germans and Norwegians, having recently arrived, couldn’t afford him, and so their health was not affected.
For the regular customer, the dosage of magnetism needed to make one feel things happen soon got to be quite a jolt, and then one noticed other things happening, such as headaches and fatigue. The doctor’s supporters grew pale and listless. One magneticist left and then another as trade declined, and finally Dr. Holter retired to Wyoming. Mr. Getchell was his last patient that day. He sat in the electrical chair, bound with straps and wound with wires, as the doctor cranked away, and for a moment, Mr. Getchell sensed that he was on the verge of feeling good again, and then he felt a numbness at the top of his head and briefly forgot his own name. When he stood up, he almost fainted. When he walked out the door, the town seemed dim, insubstantial, and filled with an ominous low hum. On the streets were strange people who spoke a foreign language.
New Albion became Lake Wobegone in 1880, a change voted by the City Council to celebrate the fact that Norwegians had gained a 4-3 majority. Then the City Council voted to become the Town Council. The New Englanders bitterly opposed both changes, arguing—even shouting—that they were undignified, unprogressive, and would make the town a laughingstock. “Woebegone means dismal, unhappy, dilapidated, bedraggled!” they said. “You can’t do this!” The Norwegians just sat and smiled. To them, Wobegone was the name of the lake they loved and nothing more. They liked the sound of it.
In 1882, Lake Wobegone became New Albion again, Mr. Fjelde
having lost his seat to Mr. Weeks by two votes. Mr. Fjelde got back on the Council two years later, and then it was Lake Wobegone again. State statute permits four name changes, after which a name is considered permanent and can be changed only by the legislature, so the Council changed it one more time, from Lake Wobegone to Lake Wobegon. Mr. Getchell resigned in protest and was replaced by Mr. Oskar Tollefson. Businessmen didn’t order new stationery right away, however, not even those who favored the change, but used all their New Albion stock until it ran out.
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T
he manuscript, subtitled “Thoughts, Composed A Short Distance Above Lake Wobegon,” was discovered in the Boston Library by Johanna Quist in 1916, who actually was searching for material on Manichaeanism for a class oration and had looked under “Mechanism” by mistake. She copied the poem out by hand and mailed it to her aunt Mary Quist, secretary of the Lake Wobegon Thanatopsis Society. The poem Henry wrote in loathing as he beat off mosquitos and dreamed of renown back East received its first publication, in Lake Wobegon, by the Thanatopsians (1921), who hailed Henry as “Our First Poet” and placed a picture of him, looking weary indeed, in the library. Five hundred copies of “Phileopolis” were printed, of which fifty remain wrapped in waxed paper in the library basement. For years, students of the senior class were required to read it and answer questions about its meaning, etc. Teachers were not required to do so, but simply marked according to the correct answers supplied by Miss Quist, including: (1) To extend the benefits of civilization and religion to all peoples, (2) No, (3) Plato, and (4) A wilderness cannot satisfy the hunger for beauty and learning, once awakened. The test was the same from year to year, and once the seniors found the answers and passed them on to the juniors, nobody read “Phileopolis” any more.
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I
n the spring of 1851, as the Ojibway near Lac Malheur were preparing to cede vast tracts to the government, several chiefs who smelled the deal coming had decided to sell out early to Bayfield’s group of Yankee investors who they met two years before on a buffalo deal. The chiefs didn’t like the looks of the federal agents who came to parley. They were big hearty men who clapped the Ojibway on the shoulders and told them how they, the agents, considered themselves deep down to be really Indians at heart and, when questioned about the value of the paper they offered in exchange for land, were hurt. “We are your friends,” they told the Ojibway, tears welling up in their eyes. “We go back to Washington and defend you to the Great Father and make the very best treaty that we possibly can for you—and now you question our honesty! We are deeply offended. Very deeply offended.”
Most of the chiefs much preferred Bayfield who never claimed to be interested in anything but making a pile and who came to meet them in an immense canoe paddled by fourteen French-Canadians, and offered three times the agents’ best price plus a large gift for signing, a walnut dresser with three drawers and an oval mirror, brand new. In the fall, three Ojibway chiefs signed with his New Albion Land Company, for the sale of almost five hundred square miles, including the present site of Lake Wobegon. The sale was opposed by the agents, who felt it could lead to a bidding war, with wealthy Eastern oligarchs tempting the Ojibway with large sums and purchasing vast lands for the pleasure and profit of the few. Minnesota should be opened up to the common man, they said, and should be settled on the basis of equal opportunity, not on the ability to pay. So the deal with Bayfield was cancelled by a squad of soldiers from Fort Snelling, the Ojibway received the standard
from the government for the Albion tract, which the government gave in 1852 to the Albion Land Company. The Indians didn’t hold a grudge against the Yankees for making the best deal they could, though, and during the “Sioux Uprising” of 1862, when Little Crow’s band was eliminating white settlers wherever they could be found, in New Albion the Indians only took thirty-four hostages and redeemed them later for cash. Bayfield’s son James bargained hard for the hostages, which included his two young daughters and several elderly aunts, finally talking the Indians down to $35 per head, $20 for children under sixteen.
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T
hus the name “Lake Wobegon” was introduced into public print. In Bayfield’s promotions, “Lake Victoria” was used, though the lake was more commonly referred to as “Mud Lake” or “Green Lake,” particularly after a bolt of lightning disturbed the lake bottom and half the water drained out, a situation that only gradually remedied itself. “Lake Victoria” no longer seemed appropriate for what was left, a brackish puddle surrounded by mud flats that for months stank of dead fish. “Lake Wobegon” apparently was an attempt to be accurate while still putting the best face on things. To scholars of the Ojibway tongue, “Wobegon” or “Wa-be-gan-tan-han” means “the place where [we] waited all day in the rain,” but some translated the word as simply “patience” and it was used by the
Star
in that sense.
