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Seventy-five years ago this past June, two recently graduated seniors from Minneapolis Central High School headed out on a journey straight from Boys' Life. Walter Port and his buddy Arnold Sevareid (B.A. '35), who would go on to fame using his middle name, Eric, when he worked for CBS News, baptized their canvas canoe, the Sans Souci, in the waters of the Mississippi River near Fort Snelling on June 17, 1930. After paddling a few minutes south, they turned right at the Minnesota River and didn't look back. To the source of the Minnesota River in Big Stone Lake, the young men paddled. From there, they headed on to Lake Traverse and the Bois de Sioux River. Then they navigated down the Red River, which they took all the way to giant Lake Winnipeg. From Lake Winnipeg, they steered out into the wilds of northern Manitoba, toward the ultimate goal of the trip: Hudson Bay. The route they chose to the bay, through rapids and rivers and lakes dotted with hundreds of uncharted islands, had only been traveled in its entirety by Native Americans. When they got back to Minneapolis, Sevareid began his studies at the University of Minnesota and ultimately published Canoeing with the Cree, the story of his and Port's 14-week trip, which has been reissued this year by Borealis Books, an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Unless you count the message on the Runestone in Kensington, Minnesota, Sevareid's is the first fully recorded account of this particular journey in the history of adventure literature: more than 2,200 miles from the heart of Minnesota to Hudson Bay, by water and portage. Reading the story today, it's hard to imagine a more knuckle-headed trip. While the trip from Minneapolis to Lake Winnipeg was primarily long and hard work, the continued journey, on the great expanse of the lake and into the wilderness of Canada, was fraught with so much danger it's a minor miracle these two made it out of the woods alive. Just what made them think they could navigate uncharted waters in a territory they'd seen only in their dreams is a mystery. Sevareid was so green he'd never even been to the northern forest before he entered it. To compound their own difficulties, the young men chose a route to Hudson Bay that not even the most experienced travelers in the region ever chose. At Norway House, at the northern tip of Lake Winnipeg, they took the counsel of a local trapper who told them that the Hayes River, the standard passage from the lake to the Bay, was low that year and that they'd be doing less “wading and dragging” of their canoe if they opted to take a course that included God's Lake and God's River, a route that swung to the east of the Hayes. Bad advice. Within days they were lost-not the last time that would happen in their journey into northeastern Manitoba. With the aid of a pair of Cree Indians, they found their way to God's Lake; but at the east end of this body of water, they found themselves off the map that they'd borrowed from their trapper friend at Norway Bay. Just which outlet from God's Lake was God's River, was anyone's guess. With God's good help they found it, but more terror and misery was on its way: rapids, god-awful portages, a constant rain. “Day and night, the drizzle did not cease for so much as an hour,” Sevareid would write years later. “The woods oozed with water, every leaf held a pond, every dead twig and log was rotten with wetness.” In Canoeing with the Cree, Sevareid records that, time and again, strangers along the way tell the young men that they'll never make it; they'll get frozen in before they reach the bay; or they'll get lost along the way. In Minnesota, these warnings sound overly cautious, but by the time Sevareid and Port reach the northern sections of Lake Winnipeg, those voices sound as sage as the Ancient Mariner's. It's hard, too, to reconcile the
Born in the small town of Velva, North Dakota, Arnold Eric Sevareid was the son of a banker who brought his family to Minneapolis when Eric was a teenager. In the city, Eric attended Central High and began his lifelong career in journalism by working on the school paper and convincing George Adams, the editor of the Minneapolis Star, to underwrite his and Port's canoe trip to Hudson Bay. Adams agreed to pay the two young men $100 for periodic dispatches describing their journey, which were published in the Star through the course of that summer of 1930. These became the basis for Canoeing with the Cree. Once back in Minneapolis, Sevareid took a job as a copy boy with another newspaper, the Minneapolis Journal, and soon entered the University as a night student. At the U, he wrote for the Minnesota Daily and became part of a group of liberal politicos who called themselves the Jacobins and successfully rebelled against, among other things, the requirement that all male students at the University have military training. Sevareid studied political science at the U with a minor in economics. He wrote a column for the Daily and took a number of journalism courses after his 1935 graduation. He hoped to spend that year as editor of the Daily, but another student won the position, a fact that left Sevareid bitterly disappointed, even after he'd climbed to national prominence as a journalist. Already his brow was getting heavier. “[W]hen I read a novel of American campus life, or see a Hollywood version with its fair maidens in lovers' lane, dreamy-eyed youths in white flannels lolling under leafy boughs or lustily singing,” Sevareid wrote in his 1946 autobiography, Not So Wild a Dream, “I am astonished and unbelieving, or I have a faint twinge of nostalgia for a beautiful something I never knew. I remember only struggle, not so much of 'working my way through' as the battle, in deadly earnest, with other students of different persuasion or of no persuasion, with the university authorities, with the American society of the time. I remember emotional exhaustion, not from singing about the 'dear old college' but from public debate.” It was perhaps only natural for someone with such a deep interest in public debate and journalism to wind up in the maelstrom that was Europe in the years before the war. After his graduation from the U and a further stint with Minneapolis newspapers, Sevareid and his first wife, Lois, moved to Paris in the late 1930s. There, he worked for a time as editor of the Paris edition of the New York Herald before being hired by CBS News to report on the escalating crisis in France as invasion from Hitler's Germany neared. Sevareid scurried around Europe, describing the looming war and impending fascist rule. When the French government capitulated, he joined Edward R. Murrow, his boss at CBS radio, in London, where he continued to report on the war until being sent home in January 1941, where he was assigned the CBS news desk in Washington, D.C. When the U.S. joined the allied war effort, Sevareid badgered Murrow for an assignment in the field. He was sent, in 1943, to India to cover the American Air Force's attempt to supply Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese army over the Burma “Hump”-the Himalaya mountains. On one of these dangerous flights into China, the plane
Out of China by the end of 1943, Sevareid returned to Europe and traveled with the U.S. Army during its invasion of Italy. He wound up the war with the Army back in France and into Germany as the fighting came to an end in early May 1945. By June, he was heading home, where he took a leave of absence from CBS and immediately began working on Not So Wild a Dream. The book was published to much acclaim in 1946. Meanwhile, Sevareid continued his work with CBS News and in the 1950s made the transition to television with Murrow and others from that famed corps of CBS war journalists known as “Murrow's Boys.” He worked in Washington and London before joining Walter Cronkite in the 1960s as a commentator on the CBS Evening News. Sevareid became, after Cronkite, the most visible face of the most-watched news program on television. To some, his essays, delivered to camera with no accompanying images (a lost form in the world of television news), could be frustratingly vague, offering a look at all sides of a question while refusing, ultimately, to answer it. To others, however, Eric Sevareid was an icon of sober judgment in wild times, a symbol of maturity and considered opinion in an age when these traits seemed sorely lacking. Sevareid had come a long way from that summer spent canoeing toward Hudson Bay, a fact that he had recognized early on in his career. In Not So Wild a Dream, Sevareid was hard-pressed to find any great meaning to the trip he and his buddy Port had made. “We had paddled a canoe twenty-two hundred miles, had survived, and had proved nothing except that we could paddle a canoe twenty-two hundred miles, a capacity of extraordinarily small value for the future,” he wrote. “My chief return on this investment, outside of a fleeting notoriety which got me a job on a newspaper-as office boy-was that for several months thereafter, until sedentary habits softened my flesh, my older brother could not lick me.” At the start of Canoeing with the Cree, it's pretty easy to agree with Sevareid's assessment. There seems to be no great purpose to this journey; we're simply traveling through a familiar land with a pair of pleasantly callow young men. Sevareid's descriptions of the landscape are vivid but offer few insights. His prose is clear and simple and very readable, but its most charming feature today is its description of a world gone by, where 17-year-old boys smoked pipes; wore knee-high, lace-up boots as they canoed; and were shy about their bare chests as they paddled into populated areas. Even seen as a whole, the book lacks the traditional elements of a great adventure story. These young men could not have made it without the help of strangers, who guided them at various times along the way. But they are not “saved” on their journey. Nor are there any real heroics to be found. Nor does anyone seem to have a lot more wisdom coming out of the woods than going in. The highest moment of drama comes in the last few pages of the book, up in deepest, darkest Manitoba, when the two friends finally become fed up with each other and their own grand adventure. Lost once more on God's River, wet and chilled to the bone, Sevareid and Port wind up rolling around their camp in a wrestling match that somehow seems only natural given their dire circumstances and the fact that they have only each other to blame for how they arrived here. In the end, however, the two young men muddle through. And it's in the simple description of that muddling, faithfully reported by Sevareid, that Canoeing with the Cree transcends its Boys' Life roots and becomes not only
From these plain descriptions of desperate circumstances, however, comes a poignancy that kicks in subtly and flows all the way through the end of the book, when the boys, who've had to hitch a ride home from Canada, quietly return to their hometown. “On the eleventh of October Walter and I reached Minneapolis. We had left when the city was in the bloom of spring, buds were sprouting into new leaves and the grass was turning green, and the air was soft like rain water. As we walked toward home, our boots kicked up dead leaves that covered the sidewalks, the grass was turning into the drabness of fall, the smell of bonfires was in the sharp air, and smoke arose from the chimneys. “We went by the school, sitting on its terraces among yellow trees. As we drew nearer and nearer to home, high-school boys and girls passed us on their way to classes. We realized that we were looking at them through different eyes. We realized that our shoulders were not tired under the weight of our packs. It was as though we had suddenly become men and were boys no longer.” Port and Sevareid returned to Manitoba in 1980, three years after Sevareid's retirement from CBS News and 50 years after their initial canoe trip. Port had spent many of the intervening years living in Bemidji, where he worked as a photographer. Sevareid had been hired by Audubon Magazine to write a retrospective of their journey of 1930, and it was on the magazine's nickel that the pair traveled-by float plane, hopscotching from lake to lake-all the way to Hudson Bay. Not just men now, but old men, the two of them got socked in by a fog for four days on the bay. They fished, talked, and got reacquainted after years of not being in touch. If there were any lingering problems between the two of them, stemming from that fight that marked the end of their first trip in this country, they were now gone. In Audubon, Sevareid wrote of dozing off for a moment and feeling Walter “arranging the fallen blanket over my exposed feet.” Even so, it was the last time the two voyageurs would get together, and there is a haunting sense of irony about the whole return visit. So near death on their first journey to God's River, their return trip, even in the relative comfort of airplanes and lodges, suggests their shortening days. Port went home to Bemidji and died in 1994; Sevareid went back to a waning career in New York. Through the next decade, he would work on a pair of PBS documentaries, do some commentary for National Public Radio's Marketplace, along with voice-over work and personal appearances. On July 9, 1992, Eric Sevareid died in New York. Through one of the century's most distinguished careers in journalism, he'd won three Peabody Awards and two Emmys, along with a host of other honors. In 1980, the University of Minnesota further honored him by christening the Eric Sevareid Library at the School of Journalism in his name. That same year, he put a period to his first real writing assignment, that trip to Hudson Bay. In Audubon, he describes flying over God's River 50 years after that first trip. “Rapid after rapid after rapid fled past us and I thought, 'My God, my God, how did we do it in the darkness and rain, in our innocence and ignorance?' The religious feeling does not often possess me, but now it did. Surely, Walter and I had rushed along those currents in company with some special blessing.” On the plane leaving the path of the river, he writes, “God's River slipped behind us. I knew I would never see it again or need to.” Tim Brady is a St. Paul freelancer. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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