Editor’s note: Every Saturday through October, The Journal will feature columns on the journey of Ernest Oberholtzer written by Beth Waterhouse, executive director of the Oberholtzer Foundation. The columns commemorate the centennial of Oberholtzer’s epic canoe trip with Ojibwa companion Billy Magee. In 1912, Oberholtzer, known as “Ober,” and Magee traveled by rail from Ranier to Winnipeg, then on to La Pas.

By BETH WATERHOUSE

Executive Director,

Oberholtzer Foundation

Week No.1

June 15-21, 1912

What does it take for a young German from Davenport, Iowa, to launch a 2,000-mile canoe trip to a land he’d never seen? One answer was that it also took the willingness and effort of a certain Billy Magee, an Ojibwe living near Mine Centre, Ontario, then age 51.

Ernest “Ober” Oberholtzer was working and traveling in England when he began to envision this trip. He studied maps and routes in the British Museum Library, influenced greatly by the exploration and writing of J.B. Tyrell. It’s clear from Ober’s comments that he intended to get “off the known map” and into a region where few white men had traveled.

After canoeing extensively with Magee in 1909 and 1910, Ober knew that he needed Magee in order to attempt this summer’s exploration. He wired Louis Hamel, trader at Mine Centre, and explained how extensive and grueling this trip might be. “In due time,” wrote Ober, “before I left England, I got (Billy’s) reply. Louis Hamel wrote and said that he’d explained it all to Billy and that Billy had replied, ‘Guess ready go end earth.’”

This might have been a statement of devotion, or it might have been a statement showing an air of resignation. As these columns unfold, it will often be up to the reader to determine the exact nature of this friendship between the two paddlers, Magee and Oberholtzer. What I can say is that they needed each other absolutely. Neither without the other would have made it home in early November, and it is possible that neither without the other would have made it home at all.

So, 100 years ago this week, Oberholtzer left Davenport with his mother, Rosa, and his friend, Harry French. They took the train to Minneapolis, and planned the connection to Ontario. In Fort Frances on June 17, Magee convinced Ober that they needed a deeper chestnut canoe, and Ober took his word for it. In Winnipeg, Magee and Ober bought more supplies. The modest cash during the summer was in Ober’s hands. By the end of their first full week, Ober had already run up against changes and delays — a different canoe, heat, mosquitoes, and a delay getting a train to Le Pas.

As I read of this beginning from the pages of “Bound for the Barrens,” a book about the journey, I am struck by the whole enormous idea of motivation. What does it take to begin? Nothing can happen without those first steps — that first train ride, the investment in a canoe. And after one begins, as in life, it then often comes down to flexibility, to an element of patience, not with what you have carefully dreamed and planned but with what actually unfolds in front of you, day by day.