Church had been active in the selection of the agent and dominant in the administration of federal reservation policies. The native police had refused to arrest or remove our relatives from the reservation.
The obvious constitutional issue of freedom of the press was decided a year later by a federal court. The court ruled in favor of my relatives, who had a right to publish a newspaper on the reservation, or anywhere in the country, without the consent of a federal agent. The native and constitutional rights of my relatives and other citizens were restored on the White Earth Reservation. The second edition of the Progress was published on October 8, 1887.
Augustus Beaulieu changed the name of the weekly newspaper to the Tomahawk in the early nineteen hundreds, and the content of the newspaper changed, along with the name, from local reservation stories and editorials to national and international news reports. The readers must have wondered what happened to the local stories, and at the same time marveled at the publication of national news stories. Straightaway the reservation became a new cosmopolitan culture of national and international news.
White Earth became a cosmopolitan community.
The readers of the Tomahawk could not understand how the publisher was able to gather so much news from around the world every week. The national news was seldom timely, never daily, but the readers were not concerned because most stories on the reservation were seasonal. Sometimes national stories were read a month or two later as current events, and in this way national news was always current on the reservation. The sense of time was created by native stories, not in the urgent political reports of newspapers. Later, the Tomahawk published on the first page regular editorial and news stories and by Carlos Montezuma, or Wassaja, one of the first native medical doctors.
We learned much later that natives on the reservation were more literate than the general population of new immigrants, and natives read more newspapers because the federal government established schools on reservations. Federal assimilation policies forced most native children to learn how to read and write long before national compulsory education. We were required to attend the government school on the reservation, and too many native students were sent away to boarding schools.
Augustus subscribed to preprinted or patent inside newspaper pages, the actual pages were printed somewhere else and delivered to the reservation for publication. Theodore Beaulieu, once the actual printer and editor of the Progress, was superseded by the patent inside pages of the Tomahawk. Many newspapers were published around the country with the same patent stories of national and international news reports and advertisements. The pages of the patent inside were selected editorial tours of world news, not local native issues or reservation rumors, but a parcel of disaster reports and other stories from obscure and marvelous places.
“Everyone knows the strange old stories of the reservation,” our uncle declared. “The Tomahawk needs new strange stories, and the newer and stranger the outside stories the better for reservation readers.”
Augustus was right, but in time we became better at creating our own strange native stories of the reservation than hawking the content of some faraway story by a writer who constructed the news of the world for hundreds of weekly newspapers. The patent inside pages displayed national advertisements. Mostly the advertisements were for fast medicine cures. Some blank sections of the newspaper were reserved for local promotions.
“Paxtine Toilet Antiseptic for Women” was a regular patent advertisement in the Tomahawk, but the use of a douche remained a mystery. We were callow about the need and the actual usage, so we never hawked the douche promotion to women at the Ogema Station. We were not hesitant, however, to declare the news, wave our newspapers, and shout out about other advertisements.
“Ladies can wear shoes one size smaller after using Allen’s Footease, a certain cure for swollen, sweating, hot, aching feet.” We never sold one paper with that announcement, so we learned to hawk discreet news and to avoid any laughable promotions of patent medicine cures.
The Hotel Leecy, the largest and “most commodious hotel” on the reservation, was advertised on a side column in almost every issue of the Tomahawk. The hotel served daily communal meals with seasonal fish, game, and vegetables, and provided a livery stable. John Leecy, the proprietor, allowed us to ride free on the horse carriage between the hotel and the train station because we always promoted the hotel to arriving passengers. Leecy admired our ambition and hired us a few months later to feed and groom horses in the hotel livery stable.
Aloysius painted two blue ravens perched on the back of a roan stallion owned by John Spratt. Two years later he invited us to work in his harness shop. That was a very good job at the time, one of the best, because we continued to care for horses and at the same time learned about the harness business. We learned how to forge and fashion metal, but later we returned to work in the livery stable at the Hotel Leecy. Daily we encountered travelers and government bureaucrats who stayed at the hotel, and every visitor talked with us about horses and the future. No one ever talked to us about the forged parts of a harness. The blue ravens my brother painted and my tricky stories would become the crucial totems and portraits of our future service in the First World War.
The Leecy, Hiawatha, and Headquarters were the only hotels on the reservation, and there was a summer boarding house in the community of Beaulieu. Louis Brisbois, the proprietor of the Hotel Headquarters, rented clean rooms, according to the newspaper advertisements, and the “tables are always provided with fish, game and vegetables in their season.” Aloysius sold Brisbois a blue raven perched on the peak of the hotel, and he invited us to work in the kitchen for food and money. The invitation was very tempting, the food and pay, but we were more interested in horses at the time, and naturally we were loyal to our uncle and to John Leecy.
The Pioneer Store, established by Robert Fairbanks, and many other merchants and traders in groceries, lumber, and sundries, advertised in every issue of the Tomahawk. The Motion Picture Theater, the first and only theater on the reservation, was promoted on the back page of the newspaper. Movies were shown twice a week. The tickets cost ten cents on Tuesday and twenty cents on Saturday.
Augustus treated us to our first movie, short scenes about trains and cowboys, but the tiny theater was musty, crowded, and the actors were crude and dopey. The cost of a single movie ticket was about the total income for a day of newspaper sales at the station, so we saved our money to travel on the Soo Line Railroad to Winnipeg, Minneapolis, or Montreal.
I started to write scenes and stories that summer, and imitated the newspaper style of the patent insides. Later, the government teachers corrected my style, and they would not believe the sources of my literary inspiration. My first written scenes were tightly packed with descriptive, imitative, derivative images and analogies. Most of my scenes were not yet original expressions or even creative enough to be considered unintended irony or mockery.
Aloysius painted blue ravens posed as the engineer of the train, as haughty passengers, and enormous ravens seated in the caboose, perched on the water tower, and blue ravens waiting at the station. Later he painted ravens with blue bluchers, blue women with raven beaks, and the station agent with blue wings. I wanted to write in the same way that he painted.
Together we sold an average of ten copies of the Tomahawk two or three times a week at the Ogema Station. We earned a total of about thirty cents a week, and after three months of hawking the newspaper that summer at the station we had earned less than two dollars each. Not enough to buy two train tickets to Winnipeg or Minneapolis.
The Feast of Good Cheer was our deliverance.
Aloysius sold several portrayals of blue ravens on newsprint but together we sold only four copies of the Tomahawk to relatives at the fortieth anniversary of the treaty settlement of the White Earth Reservation on May 25,
