Stateside With Rosalea Barker: Minnesota

Talk about yer melting glaciers! Where would Minnesota be without ’em? Still buried under a squizillion tons of ice, that’s where. According to the state’s Department of Natural Resources, by 9,000 years ago, the ice sheets which had been advancing and retreating since 2 million years Before Present had melted completely from the state leaving behind more than 10,000 glacial lakes. In the 1890s, the freezing cold winters in Minnesota justly earned it the sobriquet of “The American Siberia” and explains why today’s bus shelters in Minneapolis have overhead gas heaters in them, and why its sister city across the Mississippi—St. Paul, the state’s capital—has electric heaters in its sidewalks.

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Ole Man River begins in Minnesota, though exactly where is as much a subject of controversy as is the whereabouts of the coldest town in the state. A lovely and informative website about a trip down the Mississippi in 1999, points out that, even if the headwaters of the river do originate from Lake Itasca, they were re-engineered by the Conservation Corps in the 1930s to make the starting point more scenic. According to the writer “Itasca is a fabricated name made up by borrowing and splicing together halves of two Latin words, "veritas caput" which translates as "true head." Henry Schoolcraft made up the name (with a little missionary help) and it has stuck. Mr Schoolcraft was the first person of European descent to visit Lake Itasca or at least the first person of European descent who was expressly searching for the source of the Mississippi when he arrived there in July 1832.”

The portion of the state east of the Mississippi became an unorganized territory of the US after the Revolutionary War; the western part was acquired at the time of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, but it wasn’t until 1849 that there was an actual Minnesota Territory, which lasted until statehood was granted by Congress in 1858, when it became the 32nd state in the Union. The Great Seal of the State of Minnesota is one of only a handful state seals that feature indigenous inhabitants. According to the MN Secretary of State’s website, “the Indian on horseback is riding due south”—perhaps having been denied customary hunting, fishing and gathering rights, despite the treaty that had been negotiated in 1837. You can read about the 1999 US Supreme Court finding in the case Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians here.

One of Minnesota’s other sobriquets is “The Bread and Butter State” because of its wheat and dairy industries. In its early days, the University of Minnesota specialized in dairy science. In a 1937 article available on the Minnesota Historical Society’s website, one Professor Haecker is credited with never having spoken of a dairy cow “except in a tone of reverence and respect. To him, the dairy cow was the most wonderful animal in the world; she was God's special gift to mankind. Again and again, he admonished his classes: ‘Treat the cow kindly, boys. Remember she is a lady—and a mother.’”

Haecker was also a great advocate of the co-operative movement for dairy farmers—something that many of the state’s immigrants from Denmark. Finland and other European nations were already familiar with. It was Haecker’s opinion that the reason Minnesota’s dairy industry made more rapid progress than Wisconsin’s was that Wisconsin “let in outside stockholders who in time gobbled up the creameries and set cooperation back many years.” Alas, Prof. Haecker! In time, even Minnesota’s small, locally-based dairy co-operatives were gobbled up—by an even bigger cooperative. Land O’Lakes is a Fortune250 company and the third-largest cooperative in the nation, encompassing not just dairy but also crop and livestock production.

And then there’s Betty Crocker. Silly me! I thought she was a real person, but she was the invention of a home economist and businesswoman called Marjorie Child Husted who worked for the Minneapolis-based Washburn Crosby Company, which milled flour. In 1928, Washburn Crosby merged with other regional millers to become General Mills, which kept the original company’s Gold Medal flour label and the Betty Crocker trademark. Beginning in 1924, fictional Betty hosted a radio show and, in later years, various actors portrayed her on television.

Her pictorial image has undergone many changes over the years, largely to reflect the changing demography of the United States. In the original “portrait” Betty had “a fine Nordic brow and shape of skull, a jaw of slightly Slavic resolution, and features that might be claimed contentedly by various European groups (eyes, Irish; nose, classic Roman)—the perfect composite of the twentieth-century American woman.” In Betty’s 1990s revamp “her appearance was a bit more Hispanic or Native American than pure Nordic.”

All that, according to an article about Advertising Characters in the Land of Blue Waters in Minnesota History magazine, where you’ll also discover that the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Jolly Green Giant are locals. Who knew my kitchen cupboard was so full of Minnesota! And if I had cortisone cream in my bathroom cabinet, well, it was another MN institution—the Mayo Clinic—that won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1950 for discovering cortisone.

I could go on forever about Minnesota’s place in our everyday lives, but I will leave you with this recent video of the unauthorized use of a 1980 invention by two researchers at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, aka 3M:

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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