Part 1 of 2 of a Voices of Minnesota interview with Justine Kerfoot, author of "Gunflint Stories."
Part 1 of 2 of a Voices of Minnesota interview with Justine Kerfoot, author of "Gunflint Stories."
SPEAKER 1: I told mother-- she was helping to finance my college education, and so she wondered if I'd help her summers. And I said, well, sure, I'd be glad to help her summers. And she wanted me to have a picture of the area. So she hired a guide.
And so the guide-- and I brought a girl up from college with me. And he took us on a overnight canoe trip. It was up the Granite River to Saganaga and back again. I learned a lot about camping.
Following that time, there was no moose season on the American side. The moose season was only open on the Canadian side. And mother thought that maybe I should experience hunting for moose.
And so she hired the same guide, and I got another girl from town to accompany me. And we went to his trapping shack for a week. And in that week, I saw 36 moose. And so I shot a moose-- big deal-- and hauled it all the way to Chicago really
SPEAKER 2: Good heavens.
SPEAKER 1: The meat and the head and so forth.
SPEAKER 2: At that time, you were a young woman. And you had spent all that time in and around the Chicago area, right?
SPEAKER 1: That's right.
SPEAKER 2: Had you ever done any of that hard physical carrying of things?
SPEAKER 1: And it was, of course, the guide sort of played the situation up. He asked me if I didn't want to help clean the moose. And I said, oh, I was interested in, yeah, I would. And so he said, well, you just lift this leg up and roll it over on it's back. Well, jeez, I got hold of the leg and lifted the beet hell. And I didn't even move it,
SPEAKER 2: Of course--
SPEAKER 1: --because it was real big. And it was heavy, several hundred pounds. And then I insisted upon taking everything out, the legs and the head, the whole rack, the whole business. And he said, well, wouldn't you like to pack the rack out? And I said, yeah, that would be real exciting.
And so he loaded me up. And when a moose goes through the woods, their rack lies at an angle. And they lay their head back and it's just like a snowplow going through. They can go through the woods like you wouldn't believe it. It's part of the way and no, no trouble at all.
But when you put a whole head on your shoulders and the rack and you start to carry, you tangle with everything that the Lord ever produced. And so by the time I got that down, I was much wiser on accepting big loads. Then following that whole situation, the mother wanted a real nice resort. And so she had hired carpenters to build additions on to both ends of the so-called store and make a big dining room and make a big lounge.
SPEAKER 2: Did you-- did you get a lot of guests at that time? How long did it take to get to the--
SPEAKER 1: No, it didn't-- as fishermen, the word spreads rapidly. New area just opened up, fish just biting like crazy, and you had no trouble. They came from as far away as Chicago, Minneapolis, Duluth. And it was they came in.
SPEAKER 2: How did they get there? Did they--
SPEAKER 1: Drive. Our roads were-- the road came only as far as Gunflint as our lodge. The clientele was fishermen that came in, and they often came in big buses like the bus that we have now. And the buses had one horrible time because as they followed the terrain, the ups and the downs, the bottom would want to scrape on the ups. And so it was always a big hassle getting them in and getting them out.
SPEAKER 2: How did you learn to do the guiding that you ended up doing? How did you learn to carry canoes and what to pack and--
SPEAKER 1: At that time there was nothing on canoe outfitting. For instance, there was nothing but canned goods. The first thing that was developed, to my knowledge, was something called Knorr-- K-N-O-R-R-- Soup
SPEAKER 2: Oh, sure. They still make that. I still bring that camping.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. That was the one type of dehydrated foods that we had. And from that developed other dehydrated foods.
It then became-- then it was kind of a contention among all of the operators to see how much lighter you could make your packs. And so it wasn't a case of holier than thou of us making a big move to keep the campsites free of cans and junk that was accumulated. It was just to have it lighter so that people could carry easier.
SPEAKER 2: How did you learn the basics, the how to paddle a canoe and how to not get lost, that sort of thing?
SPEAKER 1: I did get lost. And it's a terrible situation, a terrible feeling, I tell you. But it was Fisher and Company from Eveleth that put out maps of that country. The only trails between lakes actually was made by the Indians originally then and by those that dealt in fur and so forth.
SPEAKER 2: The voyageurs?
SPEAKER 1: The Voyageurs and the trappers. And it was always a benefit to the trappers or they didn't want to let anybody know where they had gone. So they would land on bear rock and follow that bare rock as far as they could before they ever, you might say, started the portage. So when you landed, you didn't know where the devil the portage was until you really hunted for it or got to know it.
And Fisher then wrote to the resort few people that were doing outfitting at that time to upgrade their maps constantly. As soon as we'd find a portage, we'd tell them and then they'd mark it on the map. And then it became more usable.
SPEAKER 2: In, I think, 1929, it was your family ended up losing both of its houses in Illinois.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. My dad was a very heavy bank stockholder. And at that time, there was no government coverage. The responsibility was up to the stockholders.
They had to sell their land and so forth to try to not have all of the customers at a total loss. My dad had a number of farms and in our home, we lost the whole works. The only thing that we had left was up at Gunflint.
SPEAKER 2: So you had to move.
SPEAKER 1: So we had to move. That was our only home, so to speak. It was a big adjustment for my mother because, I mean, looking at that background at Barrington and what she had done, we moved up to the Gunflint trail where the only neighbors we had were Indians.
SPEAKER 2: Your mother had been kind of a society lady in some ways, hadn't she?
SPEAKER 1: Kind of.
SPEAKER 2: And you, too. I mean, you moved in relatively wealthy crowds.
SPEAKER 1: That's right. I mean--
SPEAKER 2: So, what was that like? Were you--
SPEAKER 1: Not meaning any snootiness or anything, but I mean, we had a cook. We had a maid always at our home. And it was simply a way of life at that certain-- people that had certain amount of money had that type of thing. And that's the way I was raised to start with.
And then you're thrown to your own resources. And with the-- it was quite an adjustment also for me, but I'm sure not as much as for my mother. So I lived through one winter, and I kept thinking, well, this depression isn't going to last too long. And so next year, by that time, I was doing graduate work. And I kept thinking, I did one year of graduate work, and I had the second year to go.
SPEAKER 2: What were you studying?
SPEAKER 1: I was getting a background for-- hoping to get a background to go into medicine, which was at that time was very difficult for women also to be accepted in medical school. And so I specialized in-- I did graduate work in parasitology, which is like malaria and all that type of thing. And I when I graduated, I graduated a, a major in sociology and a minor in chemistry and a minor in philosophy. They don't let you jab it up quite that bad now, but that's the way it was then.
SPEAKER 2: So there you were on the end of the Gunflint Trail, thinking some day the depression will--
SPEAKER 1: I thought, well, next year things will break. And then the third year, yeah, I can still go back. Well, after five years, then you're so far behind. Science doesn't wait for you to catch up on something like that. You got to be right in with it and advance as the technological changes are made.
And finally, I realized that I was way behind, and I'd have to go and make it all up. And I thought, well, I'll give this a whack and see how far it goes. And so I learned then to paddle a canoe very fairly well with all over the country.
And I learned, no, I didn't learn. I toughened into being able to carry a canoe. And I learned from the Indians the easiest way to do it, the easiest and right way to paddle so that after a while you get strong enough, so you can do it.
And you don't have much option. I mean, it was a case of survival. So I guided canoe parties. And I made a lot of portages. And the canoes didn't seem so heavy after a while. [LAUGHS]
SPEAKER 2: Well, I know at that time, it must have been very unusual for people to have a female guide. And I really thought it was funny when I read in the introduction to your first book. Les Blacklock tells a story of you taking a party out fishing.
SPEAKER 1: Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 2: And you came back late, you ran into some weather and came back late, and your mother scolded and scolded the men you had been with because you were pregnant. And she said, what do you mean keeping a pregnant woman out in this? And the men were so shocked, not because they didn't know you were pregnant, but because they didn't know you were a woman.
SPEAKER 1: That's right.
[LAUGHTER]
I did. I ran into that.
SPEAKER 2: Did you mind that, being mistaken for a boy?
SPEAKER 1: Well, you see, the whole picture changes when you get up in a place like that. When you operate a resort like that, there isn't such a thing as women do this and men do this. The men that were in that era because they trapped and so forth, they could bake and cook, not fancy, but good plain food just as well as a woman could.
And the woman could paddle and carry just as well as a man could. And so there wasn't that differentiation. It was simply a good guide, a bad guide, a good responsible person, or somebody that's too lazy. I mean, that was the kind of division that was made, not man, woman kind of a thing.
SPEAKER 2: So you didn't run into people who--
SPEAKER 1: No.
SPEAKER 2: --didn't want a female guide?
SPEAKER 1: No. No.
SPEAKER 2: How interesting?
SPEAKER 1: It was is she a good guide? Yes, she's a good guide. She knows the lake.
SPEAKER 2: So you didn't run into, I mean, you talk to men now who want to have a male fishing trip. They just want to go out and be just guys for a week.
SPEAKER 1: Well--
SPEAKER 2: It wasn't.
SPEAKER 1: They don't-- and there aren't as many now. There are very few women guides.
SPEAKER 2: So there were in more years ago than there are now?
SPEAKER 1: Yes.
SPEAKER 2: Oh, really?
SPEAKER 1: It didn't make any difference what the-- it was the whole thing was a very equal thing. I mean, when it came time, for instance, we had to saw wood and the women were out sawing wood right along with the men.
They went into the woods and sawed by hand for wood for the camp. They produced meals and kids, too, in between times. But nobody paid any attention to it because that was just-- that was kind of the way the Indians did things, too.
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