While Winchell’s participation in the 1874 Black Hills Expedition was his most famous geological exploration, his next-best known excursion occurred closer to home. In 1878, Winchell explored Minnesota’s North Shore and Arrowhead regions and his canoe voyage, through the Arrowhead region into the present-day Boundary Waters and from there down to Minneapolis, became a part of Minnesota lore. Winchell did not complete the trip on his own, but with two Ojibwe guides in a newly fashioned birchbark canoe.
Although Winchell’s eulogists later extolled his good relations with Indigenous people, Winchell was still a product of his time. Winchell typically took great care to acknowledge those who helped him in his survey efforts, especially the names of prominent citizens. However, Winchell never named the two Ojibwe guides who brought him safely through his Arrowhead journey. Those men not only transported Winchell across some of the Midwest’s most difficult terrain but also portaged his constantly growing collection of rock samples. Anyone who has ever acted as a geology field assistant can attest to the unfairness of Winchell’s silence.
Although one larger sample found another way back to the University.
Beginning in early September, Winchell’s party traversed a challenging countryside, starting with an eight-and-a-half-mile Grand Portage along the Pigeon River, the first of innumerable portages across rugged terrain. The three men headed north to the Canadian border and followed the border west through the present Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness area to Basswood Lake before turning southwest to Lake Vermilion, reaching Vermilion in October. After investigating iron ore deposits on the lake’s southeastern shore, Winchell and his guides moved down the Pike and Embarrass rivers to explore the Mesabi Iron Range. Winchell’s party then continued down the Embarrass River to the St. Louis River before heading west to Big Sandy Lake and the Mississippi River. This last traverse was called the Northwest Trail and was considered by early voyageurs as one of the most challenging portages of the fur trade network.
Route of Winchell's 1878 canoe trip through the Arrowhead Region and down to Minneapolis.
Once on the Mississippi River, Winchell continued downstream to the campus area, still travelling by canoe. It is less clear how Winchell’s two Ojibwe guides found their way home.
Safely back in Minneapolis, Winchell added his canoe to the archaeological collection of the University of Minnesota’s General Museum in Old Main. The canoe and two paddles comprised entry 26 in the museum’s archaeological catalogue, which also noted the canoe was built at Grand Portage and gave a brief summary of the expedition’s route. However, the canoe’s travels were not completely over. In 1889, the General Museum moved from Old Main to the east end of Pillsbury Hall. There the canoe was put on display, perched atop a large cabinet towards the back of the museum.
General Museum in photograph from 1897 Gopher.
At least once, the canoe left the museum’s shadowed interior to bask in sunshine again. Sometime before 1911, Winchell had the canoe carried out and placed beside the base of Pillsbury Hall’s iconic round tower. There he photographed the canoe and published it as Plate II between pages 588 and 589 of Part VII of Winchell’s regrettably titled The Aborigines of Minnesota.
Winchell's canoe outside Pillsbury Hall.
Although published in 1911, Winchell never gave the date of the photograph itself. Winchell’s association with the University of Minnesota ended in 1900 and the image could have been taken any time after Pillsbury Hall’s construction in 1889. However, the photograph contains a clue suggesting it was taken later, close to the start of Winchell’s time with the Minnesota Historical Society. In the photograph, thin scanty vines have begun to snake their way up the tower’s stone wall behind the canoe. Photographs of Pillsbury Hall taken prior to 1900 when Winchell left the university show the starkly clear stone walls expected of a recently constructed building. Even images from 1903 and 1904 lack any hint of greenery. However, a 1908 photograph of Pillsbury’s tower shows a network of vines far thicker than those in the canoe’s photograph and by 1920, Pillsbury Hall had become the quintessential ivy-covered university tower. Hence Winchell’s photograph was taken close to 1906 when he began his archaeological work with the Minnesota Historical Society.
Composite image of the base of Pillsbury Hall's tower in 1890, 1903, and 1908. There is little evidence of vine growth in the two earlier images, but by 1908 a network of vines covered the west side of the tower's base (the site where the canoe photograph was taken).
Despite Winchell’s canoe having historical importance in its own right, my interest in it arose for another reason. Among the holdings of the General Museum was a collection of several hundred objects known as its archaeological collection. That collection included many objects the General Museum should never have held, including skeletal remains and funerary objects taken from burial mounds across Minnesota.
Link to the General Museum's Archaeological Catalogue
In five of his annual reports (1880, 1881, 1882, 1884, and 1885) Winchell faithfully recorded additions to the General Museum’s archaeological collection. Beyond 1885, there were no listings of archaeological additions in Winchell’s annual reports, yet the archaeological collection continued to grow. Recently, Matt Edling of the Anthropology Department found microfilm images of a thin registrar labeled ‘The General Museum of the University of Minnesota - Archaeological Catalogue - 1881.
Like so many items associated with the General Museum, it is unknown whether the original registrar still exists. However, the images of the handwritten catalogue include an additional thirty-two entries beyond those cataloged in Winchell’s annual reports. The microfilm images also record two sets of annotations to the catalogue. The numbers of fifty-six of the 230 entries are circled and have a check mark in front of them, sometimes with a number indicating how many items were present. Those circled entries comprised Accession 212, a transfer of objects from the Geology Department to the Anthropology Department that occurred in 1939. In the early 1990s, thirty-two entries from Accession 212 were transferred to the Minnesota Historical Society, but at least five objects still remain in the Anthropology Department collections.
Title page of the General Museum of the University of Minnesota's Archaeological Catalogue.
In the Anthropology department’s register, Accession 212 is described as items ‘Given to Anthropology from collections of the University General Museum.’ This accession occurred while Clinton Raymond Stauffer curated the Geology Museum, a descendant of the original General Museum after its zoological and botanical collections had been split off - separations that began in 1890. Stauffer collaborated with Professor Albert Ernest Jenks of the Anthropology department on various archaeological activities including the misnamed ‘Minnesota Man,’ the skeleton of a young Indigenous woman discovered in 1931. At the time, Jenks was off plundering Mimbres sites in the Southwest, so it was Stauffer who collected the young woman’s remains which had been discovered by a highway crew near Pelican Lake. After Jenks retired in 1936, Stauffer continued to collaborate with Professor Lloyd Alden Wilford, Jenk’s protégé and successor. Accession 212 may have been an attempt to cull the Geology Museum holdings of its remaining non-geological materials.
However, besides those Accession 212 items, thirty-one entries in the Archaeological Catalogue had a horizontal line in front of them, including Winchell’s canoe. Those entries include almost all of the skeletal materials from the General Museum’s collections and many of the known funerary objects, along with other questionable acquisitions such as braids of hair from a Montana man whose name was recorded as ‘Dirt in the Face’ and braids of hair from natives of the Hebrides. When the microfilm was rediscovered, I initially assumed these items were a second accession, but one to an unknown institution as no records show them going to Anthropology.
List of Items Associated with Winchell's Canoe
I was already painfully aware of the existence of some of these materials, having found and repatriated partial skeletal remains from seven individuals in 1997. Those remains, which included one of the three skulls Winchell had taken from a burial mound at Big Stone Lake in 1873, had been added to the department’s teaching collection and used by paleontology classes up through the 1980s. In the aftermath of that unfortunate discovery, I scoured the department’s collections and already knew no other skeletal remains, nor any archaeological materials, remained in our general collections.
Page 4 of the General Museum's Archaeological Catalogue with Winchell's canoe and other items marked by horizontal lines.
However, one of the requests of the 2023 TRUTH Report, Oshkigin Noojimo'iwe, Naġi Waƞ P̣etu Uƞ Ihduwaṡ'ake He Oyate Kiƞ Zaniwic̣aye Kte, was to not only acknowledge past misappropriations but to try to determine what had subsequently happened to them. Keeping faith with the TRUTH Report request meant that simply knowing we no longer held any skeletal materials or burial materials was insufficient, we needed to make a good faith effort to track down what had happened to the materials we once held.
Therefore, I embarked on a search for all the human remains and burial items marked by horizontal lines in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalogue. Realizing the search’s sensitive nature, I hesitated to simply cold call other institutions, blunting asking if they had skeletal materials from the old General Museum. Instead, I hoped to use Winchell’s canoe as a proxy, a large, easily-tracked item with no obvious implications other than its historical significance. If found though, Winchell’s canoe might reveal the path taken by the other similarly marked materials.
My plan seemed particularly achievable as I already ‘knew’ where Winchell’s canoe was. The first time our family visited the new Science Museum of Minnesota in its home along the Mississippi River, I was delighted to see Winchell’s canoe survived. It was on the museum’s fifth floor in a display of Minnesota geology, close to remains of the Hollandale Mammoth and the Shadow Falls Giant Beaver skeleton, with a placard describing the canoe’s role in Winchell’s 1878 expedition. Years later, the canoe was more appropriately moved to the We Move and We Stay display, highlighting the canoe’s Ojibwe origins.
'Winchell's Canoe' in the Science Museum of Minnesota's We Move and We Stay display.
Hence, it seemed a simple matter to reach out to the Science Museum of Minnesota to confirm the other materials had come to their collection with Winchell’s canoe and discover what happened to them after their arrival.
However, a last glance at the photograph of the canoe in the General Museum revealed something I had missed, despite being painfully obvious in retrospect. The canoe featured so prominently in the General Museum photograph was not the same canoe Winchell photographed against Pillsbury Hall’s tower. It was another canoe, of unknown origin, its exterior sectioned in rectangles distinct from the irregular pitch pattern of Winchell’s 1878 birch bark canoe. Winchell’s canoe was in the photograph but was largely hidden. It lies on the far side of the display cabinet’s top, with only part of its prow extending beyond the unknown canoe. Naively, I had assumed the prominently visible canoe in the photograph was from Winchell’s 1878 expedition. Unfortunately, that would prove to be only my first surprise in the quest for Winchell’s canoe and the General Museum’s skeletal remains.
Winchell's canoe in the General Museum (circled) nearly hidden by another canoe.
Having been mistaken once, I set out to verify the canoe in the Science Museum of Minnesota was actually Winchell’s 1878 canoe. However, that identification was handicapped because Winchell only photographed one side of his canoe and the museum’s canoe was mounted so close to the wall that only one side was visible. Comparing Winchell’s photograph to the side of the canoe visible in the museum display, there were obvious differences. Because of the way they are built, the pitch patterns of Ojibwe canoes are unique to each canoe, functioning like riverine fingerprints. While the museum canoe had lost some pitch patches of pitch, the remaining pattern on the visible side did not match up with Winchell’s photograph. The photograph might have been of the museum canoe’s other side, but that side was inaccessible in the display.
Winchell's canoe (bottom) compared with the Science Museum of Minnesota canoe on display.
At this point, luck intervened. Bad luck actually for the Science Museum of Minnesota, albeit good luck for me. A catastrophic plumbing failure damaged a large area of the Level 4 carpeting, so the We Move and We Stay display was temporarily closed. Knowing of my interest in their canoe, museum staff generously offered to take it down during the repairs so both sides of the canoe could be photographed. Once down, it was obvious the pitch patterns of the museum canoe did not match those of Winchell’s canoe.
Winchell's canoe (middle) compared with both sides of the Science Museum of Minnesota's canoe.
Despite a strong institutional belief they held Winchell’s 1878 canoe, the Science Museum of Minnesota’s canoe had a different origin. Subsequent deeper dives into the University’s Anthropology department records revealed the museum canoe was donated by the Roos family of Taylor Falls in 1954. Museum staff also verified that none of the items associated with Winchell’s canoe in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalogue matched anything they once held. With the Science Museum of Minnesota an apparent dead end, the search for Winchell’s canoe moved on to the Minnesota Historical Society.
In 1906, six years after leaving the University of Minnesota, Winchell joined the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) as an archaeologist. His primary duty was to continue, expand, and publish the work of Jacob Brower who had died the previous summer. His work culminated in Winchell’s 1911 publication, The Aborigines of Minnesota, A Report based on the collections of Jacob V. Brower, and on the Field Surveys and Notes of Alfred J. Hill and Theodore H. Lewis. This was the publication with the canoe photograph. With Winchell’s close ties, it is not surprising that the historical society not only holds many of his papers and field notebooks, including his 1878 and 1879 explorations, but even some artifacts from his home - although admittedly finding his commode among those artifacts was unexpected. Sue Leaf, in her well-researched biography of Winchell, Minnesota’s Geologist, also included the image of the canoe and in her caption wrote ‘The canoe is still in the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society.’ For my own part, I had assumed Winchell’s canoe was at the historical society until my kids found the ‘Winchell Canoe’ display in the Science Museum. Hence, once it was known that the museum’s canoe was not actually Winchell’s, the Minnesota Historical Society was the logical place to look.
When contacted though, Minnesota Historical Society staff warned me they did not think they had Winchell’s canoe. They offered to let me see all their stored canoes. Only one of which was an Ojibwe canoe of similar vintage but again the pitch patterns did not coincide with Winchell’s photograph and the society records attributed it to a different donor. Society staff also checked the list of items associated with Winchell’s canoe in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalogue and again found no matches to anything in their present or past collections.
With both the Science Museum of Minnesota and Minnesota Historical Society dead ends, I was forced to reconsider. Perhaps the horizontal lines in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalogue did not indicate an accession to another institution but instead noted items that had been lost or discarded. Certainly, if the lines had extended through the numbers and description, that would have been the obvious conclusion.
Some of the General Museum’s archaeological items, like cloth, hair, and skin were biodegradable and could have easily decayed or been lost to pests. The General Museum collections were always poorly curated and never existed in a climate-controlled environment so some losses might have been inevitable. Even in Winchell’s photograph, there is clearly a broken thwart (cross brace) in his canoe, suggesting it sustained damage over time. Other items may have been ones whose possession became increasingly questionable as institutions began to be scrutinized for their handling of burial remains.
If correct, ‘discarded’ is a dramatically disappointing conclusion. The goal was to track the path these materials took and an undocumented, uncertain, end is less than desirable. With the lack of documentation, it even seems unlikely we will be able to definitively determine whether they were discarded or destroyed.
Indeed, we know not all those materials were lost as the partial skeletal remains of seven individuals were rediscovered in the summer of 1997 and repatriated for burial that fall. And during the current search, two funerary objects were rediscovered, identified, and are being returned for reinternment. One was item 198 in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalog, an unfinished stone pipe from mounds at the mouth of the Cannon River on the land of Charles Spatz. That item had been found in 2005 by Ronald C. Schirmer, then Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, in the archaeological collections of the Fort Snelling History Center. Schirmer quickly reached out to the Minnesota Geological Survey inquiring about the provenance of the pipe, but it was not until June of 2024, nineteen years later, that his email was forwarded to me. A search of Winchell’s journals and 1885 newspaper accounts confirmed the pipe came from a burial mound rather than a trash midden, so it is currently in the process of repatriation. In June of 2025, during an examination of Accession 212 items at the Minnesota Historical Society, I found item 56, a pearl ornament, described as ‘somewhat heart-shaped.’ This ornament, a polished section of shell, had been donated to the General Museum by John O. Blackiston, a Saint Peter druggist, who had taken it from a burial mound near Saint Peter. Like the unfinished pipe, the pearl ornament is now in the process of repatriation.
Variety of objects from Accession 212 now in the Minnesota Historical Society collections. Because it is a funerary object, Item 56 is not pictured here but is in the process of repatriation.
Our search is not over. With luck, additional documentation may be found that casts light on the disbursement and fate of the other skeletal remains and funerary objects.
But even if it turns out these items were lost or discarded, when did they leave the General Museum? And what happened to the rest of the General Museum’s archeological materials that are not recorded in any known accession list?
Although there is no known documentation of when the ‘lined’ materials left the Geology Museum, the accession records of the Anthropology Department provide some clues. Accession 212 to the Anthropology Department occurred in 1939 and is clearly marked in the microfilm images of the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalogue. There were two other Geology Museum accessions to Anthropology not noted in the images. Unfortunately, in the Anthropology register Accession 328 is undated but was recorded between two 1936 accessions and five from 1950. Accession 397, simply recorded as a ‘Gift from Geology Dept.’ occurred in 1956. Hence the microfilmed images of the catalogue, which include the ‘lined’ materials (Winchell’s canoe and the associated skeletal materials and burial items) were created sometime after Accession 212 in 1939 and before Accession 328, which likely occurred before 1950. If the horizontal lines in the General Museum’s archaeological catalogue indicate lost or discarded items, then the canoe and associated items were undoubtedly gone before 1950 and probably before the time of Accession 212. If the lines indicate objects no longer in the museum at the time of Accession 212, some of those objects may have been discarded long before 1939 although Winchell’s canoe at least was still present in 1906.
The fates of other materials from the original General Museum archaeological catalogue are, as of yet, unknown. There were 128 entries in the original catalogue that are not listed in any known accession, including sixteen entries which included burial objects and three entries with human remains.
List of Items not associated with Accession 212 or horizontal lines
In addition, there are nineteen entries in Accession 212 whose current location is unknown, including six entries which included burial objects.
List of Missing Accession 212 Items
The search for those items is ongoing and any information on these materials, from Winchell’s canoe and associated objects to the remaining archaeological catalogue materials would be appreciated.
After all, until the summer of 1997 and the present search, the assumption was that all of these materials had been lost a century ago. Hence there is a chance some still exist.