By Min Ezotah

Staff Writer

The northern lake area in Minnesota shares its geological history with the rest of the upper two thirds of the state. The landscaper was a glacier—a vast sheet of ice, miles thick, which periodically over the course of millions of years inched down from Canada and tore through the land like a gleaming white bulldozer. In front of its blade of ice, huge boulders, rock chips, and other debris were carried along. When warmer temperatures returned, the material, locked din ice for hundreds of years, was dropped in stages as the ice withdrew. These rocky moraines can still be observed around northern Counties. The smooth stones and large boulders piled in front of cottages for decoration, skirted by lake boaters, or used as chairs by anglers and children, are glacial droppings, and may have originated thousands of miles away.

Most of the rock around lakes is granite, and one of it came originally from Minnesota. Granite is usually a combination of three minerals, feldspar, quartz and mica. Granite boulders look different from each other, however, because these three ingredients do not always appear in the same proportions, and one may be missing entirely.

Writers have speculated over the years on hopes of finding valuable natural resources like oil or gold in Becker County. In 1937, Ray A. Colton wrote in the Detroit Lakes (Minn.) Tribune, “The theory that gold is here in western Minnesota is well substantiated.” Other writers have noted that since Becker County’s rocks have come from distant corners, it is possible to find a gold fleck here and there. But the gold was not formed here,and is a glacial intruder, so optimistic lakeshore owners apparently cannot count on a gold vein under a picnic table.

Digging operations in Becker County have uncovered remains of mammoths, prehistoric elephant-like animals, now extinct. But more important was the discovery in 1931 of the Minnesota Man three miles north of Pelican Rapids.

First Lake Dwellers
The “Man,” actually a skeleton of a 15- or 16-year-old girl, was believed to have drowned in glacial Lake Pelican sometime during the Pleistocene age, perhaps 20,000 years ago. The bones were found by state highway workers digging a roadbed on what is now State Highway 59. This was the first prehistoric skeleton discovered in North America complete enough to be adequately studied.

Some writers have over the years disputed the age of the find, contending it was actually a modern Sioux Indian and a fairly recent death. However, the primitive shape of the bones differed from modern humans, and new conclusions reaffirm the age of the skeleton.

It is probable, then, that human beings roamed the lake area 20 millennia before the birth of Christ, and they roamed very close to the cold trailing edge of the retreating glacier.

More modern residents of the area were Sioux (Dakota) Indians and later Chippewa (Ojibway) Indians who arrived around 1750. Those Indians were particularly interested in the wild rice and maple sap for syrup, still plentiful today in or around Big Sugarbush Lake. The entire area was designated as a reservation in 1867. Here is an explanation taken from a granite marker on Tamarack National Wildlife Refuge, a tract of cutover forest land comprising 42,500 acres in 1963, and covering much of the area.

In 1889 Congress passed the Rice Treaty which assigned allotments of land within the reservation to individual Indians. The passage of the Clapp Act in 1906 permitted Indians with mixed blood to dispose of their allotted lands.

Thereupon, most of the Indian landowners quickly sold their lands—many of the tracts holding stands of virgin white and red pine. Logging companies proceeded to remove the valuable timber and then allowed many of the tracts to revert to the county for delinquent taxes.