and towns. Later we moved to the opposite seats and watched the new world pass slowly with the steam and smoke behind the train. We decided then that we would rather be in the motion of adventure, chance, and the future.
The Mississippi River rushed with great energy and memory over Saint Anthony Falls and created a spectacular spirit world of mist and light around the many flour and lumber mills near the Milwaukee Road Depot. The waterfall spirits had started out as a cold trickle at the source of the Great River and months later became a misty light in the city.
The riverfront was overrun with railroad tracks, engines, and boxcars. We had never seen so many railroad tracks and engines in one place. The engine smoke and coal power of the mills poisoned the air and the river. The gichiziibi, the great native river at the headwaters in Lake Itasca, became a hazy and murky shame of greedy commerce in the cities.
Blue ravens were hard to imagine in the heat, smoke, and commotion. Only my words could describe our adventures, the roar of machines and deadly scenes on the riverfront, a spectacle no native totem, animal, fish, or bird could easily survive. I wrote about our first experiences on the river, and my report was published a few months later in the Tomahawk.
Aloysius was inspired, however, by the majestic curves of the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River below Saint Anthony Falls. He painted a row of three blue ravens perched on the bridge with enormous wings raised to wave away the poison coal-fire smoke and hush the strange whine, clack, and other machine sounds along the river.
The Milwaukee Road Depot was enormous, a great mysterious cavern of massive railroad engines. The building was granite with a great tower. We were already transformed by the city, only thirty minutes after the train moved slowly through the alphabetical street names, and then into the sooty, smoky rows of warehouses and railroad tracks.
Indians, are you Indians?
The station agent asked about our reservation when we only wanted to check our bundle of newspapers. He was in uniform, pressed his hands on the counter, and examined our clothes. Our mother made new white shirts and dark trousers for our journey. My brother stared back at the man but refused to answer his question. Not a glare, but a stony stare, and the appropriate response to his inquiry. My brother waited for the agent to continue, and then turned away. We were natives on the road, traveling without permission of the federal government, and we had good reasons to worry that the station agent might notify the federal agents.
Augustus was our champion only on the reservation. He had visited the city many times, and he arranged for us to stay at a hotel managed by one of his close friends, but he could not protect us once we left the reservation.
The station agent leaned closer, over the counter.
No, we are artists on our way to the museum.
What museum?
The Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, said Aloysius. He had read about a collection of art in the new library. My brother showed the station agent several paintings of blue ravens perched at several stations between Ogema and the Milwaukee Road Depot.
Where is that?
North of Detroit Lakes.
No, the museum?
The Minneapolis Public Library, said Aloysius. The station agent tested our knowledge about the public collection of fine art that was located at the time in the city library.
Artsy books?
No, original art at the library. The station agent was wary, we were not old enough to be artists, and he had no conception of creative art. So, we told stories about the train stations and recent news reports in the Tomahawk.
What are these newspapers?
Our family newspaper, said Aloysius. The Tomahawk is owned by our uncle, Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, and we are hawking the newspaper to people in small towns, people who have never heard of international news.
No, not on a reservation, said the station agent. He turned away and refused to believe that natives could publish newspapers on reservations. Luckily there was no way to overcome his mistrust, so we told him that the newspaper was an experiment in the distribution of national news stories, an unusual investment by the bishops of the Episcopal Church in the newsy prospect of education, assimilation, and civilization. The choice was strategic, but even so the testy station agent might have been a Roman
Catholic.
Gateway Park near the train depot became the second scene of blue ravens in Minneapolis. That afternoon the sun shimmered in the perfect rows of pruned trees. Aloysius painted several abstract ravens over the pavilion, one enormous blue beak above the arcade and classical colonnades on each side of the entrance. We had never seen so many warehouses, so many motor cars, electric streetcars, horses, carriages, and so many great stone and brick buildings.
The Minneapolis Police arrived on patrol wagons drawn by horses. Two were parked near the construction site of the new Radisson Hotel. Every major street was obstructed with carriages and motor cars. The Model T Ford was the most common, of course, but there were cars that we had never seen on the reservation, such as the Pierce Arrow, Stanley, Hudson, and the practical Mason Delivery Wagon.
Commission Row, the center of wholesale groceries, vegetables, fruits, and perishables, was one of the few quiet places in the city that afternoon. The white and brown horses were harnessed to empty wagons. The deliveries were done and the horses were waiting to return to the stable.
Nicollet House, an old hotel with four stories, was across the street directly behind the park pavilion on Washington and Nicollet avenues. The entrance was spacious and shabby, and it was the first time we had ever been in a grand hotel lobby. Many dignitaries had stayed there over the years, and we sat in the very same leather chairs as the ordinary and grandees. Oscar Wilde, the poet and playwright, who we later learned more about from a trader on the reservation, was pictured alone in the lobby. He posed for the photograph with long hair, and he wore a heavy fur-trimmed coat.
Oscar Wilde had lectured about decorative art at the Academy of Music near Nicollet House. The Tribune newspaper review of his lecture was framed and mounted near his photograph. “Ass-Thete” was the headline of the review dated March 16, 1882, thirteen years before we were born. The reviewer noted that Wilde was “flat and insipid,” and from “the time the speaker commenced to his closing sentence, he kept up the same unvarying endless drawl, without modulating his voice or making a single gesture, giving one the impression that he was a prize monkey wound up, and warranted to talk for an hour and a half without stopping.”
Actually, as we read, we thought his lecture was learned, more than a jerky vaudeville lecture. We could not understand at the time his traces of irony. Wilde lectured, for instance, “The truths of art cannot be taught. They are revealed only—revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by the study of and the worship of all beautiful things.” Reading the story for the first time at the hotel we understood only the first part of his lecture, “art cannot be taught.” Rather, and we agreed, art can be “revealed,” and that was an obvious description of the inspired blue ravens painted by my brother. Aloysius wanted to meet the great Oscar Wilde but he died when we were five years old.
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Minneapolis was a commercial center of great lumber and flour mills built on the shores of the river. Most of the lumber came directly from the reservations, White Earth, Red Lake, and Leech Lake, and the grain was delivered by railroad from the plains. Our father was a lumberjack, a timber cutter for the agency mill on the reservation. Honoré continued to cut timber with older men because he could not survive in the new reservation communities. He was a calm and quiet man. The white pine was his natural