A bit of personal history - and derring-do!

The View from Sequin Heights. May 5, 2013

A bit of personal history and derring-do!

On Friday, May 3, 2013 William J Cronon gave the annual Ralph Hall Brown Day Lecture to a packed auditorium in the Carlson School of Management. The event was sponsored by the University of Minnesota Department of Geography, Environment & Society. Among many credentials, Dr. Cronon is a past president of the American Historical Society, a former recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, and is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wi.

His topic, astonishingly, was “The Portage: Time, Memory and Storytelling in the Making of an American Place”. The ‘Portage’ he explored with us was none other than the portage and subsequent significance of the near-juncture of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers at what is now Portage, Wi. 

Having spent several years growing up in Portage, this was almost embarrassingly familiar. I did take occasion to interrupt the proceedings right at the conclusion of Professor Cronon’s talk to tell the assembly anonymously that I was essentially an avatar – germane to the topic in many ways consonant with the good professor’s affection for the significance of personal anecdotes and other informal approaches to that German ideal “Die Gelegenheit wie es eigentlich war”. 

I was able to inform the speaker and the hall that I was turning 75 years old this summer and had given guided tours of the Indian Agency House when I was 7 years old. I indicated that my relatives had been in custodial control of the House and its environs for the past seventy-odd years, were still in that role, and that I hoped to visit them in Wisconsin this very summer. I gave a few anecdotes from my own early years in Portage, thus confirming by my own testimony the value of first-hand accounts over the often dry and uncertain narratives written by historians and others at one or more removes from the time and place of interest. 

Dr. Cronon had new information for me as well. Frederick Jackson Turner and John Muir grew up just a few miles downstream from the Agency House and their influence later in life was profound in the evolving life of our nation and that of the Native Americans. The lessons they drew from their early years remain with us as well as recollection of a third individual who worked for years to reforest what had been cleared for cultivation in this same vicinity. Young Lieutenant Jefferson Davis – hailing originally from Mississippi - was stationed at Fort Winnebago in the early 1830s, also nearby, and went on to become a member of Lincoln’s cabinet and still later, the President of the Confederate States of America. 

Given the recent fascination with numbers and number theory, it was briefly instructive to learn that the ancient portage trail was/is 2600 paces long. A bit over a mile in all. I described how I would ride my bike down the levee on the Wisconsin end of this wonder en route to the county fair in the first ward. I indicated that the city fathers had had to build the levee to keep the first ward from flooding every spring. Ah, yes, quoth the good professor, Irish immigrants had settled on that low ground. 

I had been invited to attend this event as an alumnus of the U of MN Geography Department. My summa degree dates from 1993 and the intervening years have seen much community activity on my part and almost no contact with the faculty of that earlier time. Attrition has understandably sharply reduced their ranks and I only recognized a couple of faces – Will Craig, with whom I worked briefly in the later 1990s on the emerging utility of GIS technology in neighborhood settings, and John Adams, long emeritus, a former chair of the Geography Department, and a teacher from whom I learned much about the geography of the Twin Cities as such was then understood. 

I left before the body was gearing up to adjourn to a nearly reception because, alumnus cum “avatar”  notwithstanding, I have been pointedly distant from the department ever since I was advised at the beginning of my graduate career also in 1993 that I ought rather go live with “those people” in San Francisco and give no thought to following up on my summa thesis “Are Gay Studies on the Map”.

This unfortunate ignorance uttered by a former editor of the Annals of American Geography, known for his ruthless practices as an editor of student writing, when coupled with the non-response from a number of seasoned faculty who really should have known better, convinced me that whatever my various attainments within this realm have been or may yet be, I would never lend my good name to such intellectual garbage as was clearly ascendant at that time in that otherwise highly prestigious department in the heady international world of such scholarship.

Events continue to create their own headlines and histories in these matters and I regret that my sharp recollections of the first three decades of my own life are unavailable to the good offices of such later generations of scholars as have recently emerged around much of the globe. Actually, the next four decades in my life – moving now toward the appellation”octogenarian” in the fifth such subsequent decade – have quite their own story to tell. Should I move to write a formal memoir, the early years that I touched on at the Brown Day lecture episode will have their place in such a narrative.  

Just not under the auspices of the Geography Department that would have relegated me to the presumed fleshpots of the West Coast. 

I’m just not that forgiving.

Fred Markus