How It Was [antikvár]

My Father in MinnesotaOf the fifteen thousand lakes which gladdened the forests of northern Minnesota in the teens of this century, my father's and my favorite was Leech Lake where, summers, he worked and I explored, dawdled and daydreamed. Our other lakes were better named. Lake Bemidji where we lived in the winters means Shining Waters in Chippewa; Tenmile Lake, Cut-Foot Sioux, Bowstring, Kabekona Lake. But they were small and feminine, beginning to be bourgeois resorts with summer cottages along their beaches.Leech Lake, with its six hundred forty miles of shoreline, its deep, irregular bays and sudden shallows, its twelve islands, floating bogs and big storms, seemed masculine and stimulating to a she-child who was bom in a cottage overlooking it and whose first journey was across one of its bays at the age of one month.Among the nation's waters. Leech Lake had one distinction. On a stretch of its shoreline less than ten years before I arrived in Walker, Minnesota, Chippewa Chief Bug-o-nay-ge-shig and his braves fought and won one of the very last battles against troops of the United States government. It was a small firecracker burst in our country's noisy history but still memorable among us local children who learned about it with our breakfast wild rice and milk, and my father who was a bom iconoclast, political liberal and friend