A few writers, across the years, have tried to put pen to paper in biography of Ernest C. Oberholtzer.  In 2001,  Joe Paddock published the most known biography for “Ober,” as he was called in the north country, and to this day, KEEPER OF THE WILD is the best place to start when you are trying to understand this multi-faceted and interesting life.  (Published by the MN Historical Society Press)

Ted Hall, friend to Ober since Ted’s young age of 12 or 13 years, wrote biographical information in a commentary piece for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, published in September 1983.  Ted also published a 21-week series of articles for his own Rainy Lake Chronicle, called “A Clash of Giants,” written by R. Newell Searle.  The Chronicle later featured another 4-part series called, “Atisokan: His Rainy Lake.”  

Joe Paddock begins his introduction with words that stand the test of time: “We have too few environmental heroes to allow one so important as Ernest Oberholtzer to slip from our collective memory.” Not all call Ober “hero,” yet it is true that he stands with a few strong leaders in our north country who have given their lives to the larger causes– to the care of the Earth, the careful watching of water levels, and the call for federal protection of wild places.  

All agree that Ober’s life started in Davenport, Iowa.  Most would say that his young life carried more than his share of grief and loss.  “Ernest Carl Oberholtzer was born of the marriage of Henry Reist Oberholtzer and Rosa Carl on February 6, 1884.” A ten-pound baby boy would grow up to be a man of small stature, and as Paddock continues, “a man of quick intelligence, warmth, humor and kindness,” a man with a magnetic personality that “drew a complex community of people to gather around him for his presence and to support his goals.”  

Ober’s small family would break apart after the death of a younger son and brother, Frank, and later the divorce of Rosa and Henry in 1890.  Grief and loss. Ober and Rosa went to live with her parents, and after their fairly early deaths, Ober’s heart was weakened by rheumatic fever.  Rosa became a closely devoted mother. Though his doctors once gave him only a year to live, Ernest Carl Oberholtzer would go on to live a long and productive life, dying at the age of 93 in the year 1977.  A Harvard education featured boldly in his young story, and he traveled widely including to England and Germany, to the far north of Canada by canoe, and eventually to Rainy Lake.

Ted Hall says more about Ober’s journey north: “Ober came to the Minnesota Ontario boundary waters area at the age of 25 to see for himself the country then being called our last frontier. The year was 1909 and he was fresh out of Harvard…”  

“Ober had studied to be a landscape architect, a trade of little promise in a country already landscaped satisfactorily by a passing glacier, and he fell easily into another trade—that of writing about this new frontier that he now considered home… Ober was in his tenth year of borrowed time when he staked out his own little sliver of granite in this granite land. It was called Mallard Island, one of a picturesque group of five islands…” in the border lake called Rainy Lake.