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Toward Magnetic North

Photo art book of Ober & Billy's 1912 canoe trip route to Hudson Bay, photos by Ernest Oberholtzer

In the summer and fall of 1912, a short, slight Iowan with a bad heart and an experienced Ojibwe canoeman carried out what Canadian historian R. H. Cockburn has called “one of the most commendable canoe voyages in history.” In this era before the Kevlar canoe, easy radio communication, the GPS, and the rescue helicopter, Ernest Carl Oberholtzer and Billy Magee traveled alone and unsupported in their 18-foot Chestnut Guide Special across wild, unpopulated, and largely unmapped territory, from Le Pas, Manitoba, to Nueltin Lake and Hudson Bay, completing their historic trip on November 5 after a freezing paddle through snow storms down the length of Lake Winnipeg.

In the hundred and forty-four days of this epic 2,000-mile journey, Oberholtzer recorded landscapes, people, and vanishing life ways in maps, a journal, and astonishing black and white photographs, using a six-pound Graflex camera.

Seventy of the photographs from this journey, with brief accompanying excerpts from Ober's journal, have been reproduced in Toward Magnetic North: The Oberholtzer-Magee 1912 Canoe Journey to Hudson Bay, a “coffee table” book that is also a historical document of a lost time and place.

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Keeper of the Wild:
The Life of Ernest Oberholtzer

The first-ever biography of wilderness preservationist Ernest Oberholtzer, environmental pioneer, explorer, and caretaker of Minnesota and Ontario's boundary waters region.

Until recently, Ernest Oberholtzer (1884–1977), one of the great heroes of the American conservation movement, has remained unsung. A friend and contemporary of both Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson, and one of the founders of The Wilderness Society, “Ober” was the central figure in the early struggle to preserve the last great wilderness east of the Rockies—the Quetico-Superior region of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario. Keeper of the Wild documents and explores the life of the man who first led the fight to save the area that eventually became Voyageurs National Park, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (today the most visited wilderness area in the United States), and Quetico Provincial Park.

Drawing on a lifetime of notebooks, letters, and speeches, as well as interviews with the people who knew him best, Paddock maps Ober's transformation from a daring young outdoorsman and adventurer to an equally fierce defender of our country's disappearing wilderness areas.

Innovative and insightful, Joe Paddock's biography allows Ober, a renowned storyteller, to tell of his own life through carefully selected journal entries and excerpts from oral history interviews. The result is a stunning collaboration full of Ober's wisdom and Paddock's deep research that resurrects the vision and the legend of Ernest Oberholtzer.

Author Joe Paddock is a poet, oral historian, and environmental writer. A founding member of the Land Stewardship Project, he is the principal author of Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture. His poetry collections are Handful of Thunder: A Prairie Cycle, Earth Tongues, and Boars' Dance.

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The Old Way North:
Following the Oberholtzer-Magee Expedition

An exploration of the Oberholtzer-Magee expedition and the hidden history—both natural and human—of this vast and beautiful wilderness.

In the spring of 1912, Anishinaabe guide Billy Magee received a letter from future conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer asking Magee to accompany him on a journey. Soon after the two set off on a five-month canoe expedition following the old way north, a largely unmapped territory that would test both their endurance and their friendship.

Tracing the route of the Oberholtzer-Magee expedition, The Old Way North transports readers through the history of this challenging wilderness and introduces them to the mapmakers, fur traders and trappers, missionaries, and Native peoples who relied on this corridor for trade and travel. Through Oberholtzer’s journals along with historical records, personal interviews with Dene and Inuit, and present-day canoeing accounts, wilderness and conservation writer David Pelly reconstructs the many tales hidden in this land.

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This Northern Nonsense:
Ernest Oberholtzer and Mallard Island

With these poems, I hope to get some of those words out, words not only from Ober but also from me—a tree-hugging wilderness lover who has canoed the boundary waters region for more than 30 years and whose enthusiasm for language, writing, teaching, and life knows no boundaries.
—Stephen Wilbers

Dedication

To Joe Paddock, Jean Replinger, and Beth Waterhouse, with thanks for introducing me to Mallard Island.

To Ernest Oberholtzer, who cherished the natural world and felt a special kinship with its native inhabitants.

And to my readers, whether you already know Ober’s story or are curious to learn about this remarkable person, a gentle man who was, and is, loved by many (including some, like me, who never met him).

Ober cherished the natural world and felt a special kinship with its native inhabitants. A little man possessed of the courage to defeat an industrial giant, he devoted a major portion of his life to protecting the U.S.–Canadian boundary waters region, the Rainy Lake watershed, a place of "unsurpassed beauty," from those who would plunder and transform it.

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