Northwoods Memories Multimedia Productions

Early last July we made a trip to the Beaverhouse pictograph site.  We had been there several times before.  But this trip was special.  As many of you know we made the commitment six years ago to revisit every pictograph site we had visited in the last few decades and to visit every known site we had not visited.  During the course of that incredible challenge, we have met some wonderful people who are interested in pictographs and the culture and religion of the people who put them there.  A few years ago we made contact with Jon Nelson and his wife Marie.  They were rangers in Quetico, first at the Beaverhouse entry and then at Cache Bay and finally at Prairie Portage.  After leaving the Ranger position, Jon reentered graduate school, completed a master’s degree in archaeology, and worked as an archaeologist in Quetico for some time.  He recently published an incredible book, Quetico: Near to Nature’s Heart.  That book is reviewed in an earlier post here.

Jon put me in contact with Glenn Nolan, who was also a Ranger at the Beaverhouse entry some time ago.  Glenn is Native American.  He first reported the pictograph image at the Beaverhouse site that is up high on the cliff and is multicolored.   It is a white and red image of a caribou.  When we first visited this site, we did not find the image.  On corresponding with Jon, he told me of conversations with Glenn that resulted in Edwina and I meeting up with Glenn and his wife, and Jon and his son and daughter-in-law at the Beaverhouse site.  (more…)

We are writing a book utilizing our nearly 4 decades of studying the pictographs in Canoe Country.  It will include sites in both Quetico and the Boundary Waters as well as a few sites near the borders of the two parks.   During the last 6 summers we have revisited every site we visited during those decades and visited every other site of which we were aware.  During that time we have learned about sites not known to us before.  We discovered a site ourselves.  We have visited two sites that we are convinced are  not authentic.  The book will document 63 sites based on our own personal visit to each site.  Several of these sites have not been reported in writing before.  They will be completely new to the majority of readers.  Material in this book should be complimented by the series Northwoods Pictographs presented elsewhere on this site.

We have documented the exact location of every site.  We have carefully studied the cliffs to find all images possible.    We have done extensive photo analysis and using those tools we have identified many images that cannot be seen at all with the unaided eye.  We have clarified a number of images where the unaided eye only sees some red coloring on the rock.    While some would object to photographing the sites, and doing photo analysis,  these images are going away.  They are being removed from the rock surface by a number of erosion processes.  Water running down the cliffs washes the pigments small amounts at a time.  Wind carrying minute particles of sand and dirt acts like miniature sand blasting.  Lichens grow over the images.  We hope we will be providing a complete and accurate record of all known sites.  We are positive others will be discovered in the future, but we will report all currently known to us.

  We have personally benefited  from the study of the culture and religion from which the images have come.  It has been very rewarding learning about these images and the messages they convey.  We have decided to share our learning experiences with others who are interested.

This category will keep interested visitors to our site up to date.  We will write a chapter on each lake known to have a site.  We will post when each chapter is started and will post interesting things about each lake.  We hope to add a new page to the web site which will keep track in tabular form the progress on the book.  We hope you will become interested enough to follow along on the progress.