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 destiny, not his investment or enterprise.
Aloysius created a blue raven totem in the timber ruins of the reservation. We were cosmopolitan natives by words, by preprinted stories in the Tomahawk. The city was our new world, but we were not worldly by experience. Yet we pretended to be cosmopolitan natives overnight on Hennepin Avenue.
Minneapolis, we learned later, had grown by more than a hundred thousand people in the past decade, a wealthy city of immigrants and newcomers. We were fourteen years old at the time and knew just about everyone in our reservation community. Our uncle was absolutely right that the mind and heart must change to live with so many people. The city was abstract but not aesthetic, rather a strange and exciting creature of fortune and politics. That summer the river city was an unwashed window after a storm, and a noisy scene in constant and unnatural motion.
Aloysius created the aesthetic scenes with blue ravens, the natural presence of great abstract totems. The city was no sanctuary or state of creation for traditional native totems, no natural site or marvelous estate for bears, wolves, plovers, migratory sandhill cranes, kingfishers, or even the stories of the ice woman.
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Hennepin Avenue was already famous for the great theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Every building, every hotel was impressive as we walked up Hennepin Avenue from Gateway Park past the Bijou Theater and the Pence Opera House that had been converted to a rooming house. We might have stayed there, but our uncle insisted that we stay at the more secure Waverly Hotel on Harmon Place near the Minneapolis Public Library.
Napa Valley Wine Company, located in the next block, had sold wine “continuously for the last twenty years.” We were too young to enter the establishment, so we read the advertisements in the window and pretended to be wine enthusiasts. “Our house is the only one in the wine and liquor line in the city catering to the family trade, which has no bar.”
Father Aloysius used sacramental wine at services in Saint Benedict’s Mission Church. Luckily one of our older cousins was an altar boy. He was obliged to share the taste of red church wine from the Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa Valley, California. We were rather conceited about the sacramental wine that was bottled in our family name. Naturally we used that coincidence, the relations of a surname wine, to our advantage when we first arrived as infantry soldiers in France.
Napa Valley Wine could be ordered by telephone, and that was very modern at the time. We knew about telephones
