Postcards from Chippewa City

On April 22nd the U.S. Postal Service will unveil a series of Forever stamps featuring works of art by our own George Morrison. This is a very proud moment for his hometown of Chippewa City, an Ojibwe village where George developed his own unique way of seeing the world—and in the process changes how others see things too.

It’s always been hard to reach Nishkwaakwaansing, where the standing forest begins. When the village of Chippewa City was growing from the mid to late 1800’s, the U.S. Congress mandated regular mail delivery to rural areas, including the very remote North Shore of Lake Superior.

Sending a postcard to your friends and relatives on the North Shore meant that it would first get funneled to Superior, Wisconsin, and then picked up by another famous North Shore resident named John Beargrease, who would take that postcard across the water by rowboat equipped with a mast and sail, pulled behind a draft horse, or packed onto a dogsled, depending upon the weather. Once that postcard reached the outpost of Grand Marais, another mail carrier named Louis Plante would take it on to Chippewa City, or further east to Hovland or on to Grand Portage.

When the town of Grand Marais was established in 1883, the post office was located along the Harbor on the west side of “Mayhew’s Point,” now known, of course, as Artists Point. This was first an allotment as part of the Treaty of 1854, claimed by a fur trader from Fond du Lac named Francis Roussain.

It wouldn’t be until 1899 that reliable roads were built and vehicles were able to reach Grand Marais, which was when John Beargrease finally retired his sled. By 1909 mail was picked up and sent via Johnson’s Trading Post, where you could also buy a postcard depicting a local scene. These blackand white photos were of white pines on the Gunflint Trail, bear cubs chased up a tree or even residents of Chippewa City, posed in front of their homes, or building a wooden boat in the traditional way, on the beach where North House students now build their own.

When George Morrison was born in 1919, regular mail service was available in Grand Marais, but Nishkwakwansing remained a difficult place to reach unless you knew the walking path between Kitchibitobig (Grand Marais) and the village that some people just called “Chippewa.”

Out of this isolated place and the sometimes, difficult circumstances of his young life, George developed a new way of seeing things– and the things that drifted onto the beach, the patterns within the trees, the rhythmic order of the waves and the bands of color that layered above and below his now iconic horizon, are visions that George carried with him all his life and shared all over the world through his perfectly formulated works of art.

I personally can’t wait to affix these tiny masterpieces onto every bill, letter and postcard that needs to be sent. It’s thrilling to think of all of the places that these stamps will go, like miniature postcards from Chippewa City, the place where the standing forest and George’s artistic vision began.

–Staci Drouillard is the author of Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe (2019) and the forthcoming Seven Aunts (U of MN Press, June 2022).