Big Elk: Indian herbalist

By Mike VanBuren
From the late February edition of The North Woods Call

    When Herbert Gleason Mingo was born on February 22, 1851, Millard Fillmore was president of the United States and Abraham Lincoln was still a prairie lawyer nine years from the White House.
     It was the year that Yosemite Valley was discovered in California, Herman Melville published his classic novel “Moby Dick” and abolitionist Sojourner Truth addressed the first Black Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
     By the time Mingo died on February 25, 1957—at the enviable age of 106—automobiles and airplanes were in widespread use, America was rushing headlong into the space age, and the mighty  Mackinac Bridge would soon make Michigan’s Upper Peninsula more easily accessible to hunters, fishermen and tourists.
    Better known as Big Elk, Mingo was a Native American medicine man—a skilled herbalist whose extensive knowledge  was based in years of hand-me-down mentoring from tribal elders, and an expert eye for wild plants and potions that were proven cures for human ailments.
     I have vague memories of Big Elk—perhaps because I may have seen him once as a small child, but more likely from family stories about his legendary powers as a traditional healer.
     I have clearer memories of visiting his home south of Stanwood with my parents and sister in the years following his death, and talking to Mrs. Arnold—Big Elk’s longtime assistant, understudy and housekeeper—who at the time was still dispensing herbs to legions of loyal customers who came to her door.
     On one such occasion, Mrs. Arnold was angry with the medicine man because, she said, he had appeared to her when she visited his grave at the White Cloud Cemetery and told her there was no reason for her to do so.
     “I’ll never go back,” she said.
     Our family became acquainted with Big Elk when my great-grandfather, Phillip Spalla—a Sicilian immigrant with asthma who used to spend the annual pollen season picking fruit on farms in the Traverse City area—learned of the herbal healer and sought help with his breathing problems.  Spalla was so satisfied with the results that he began referring friends and relatives to Big Elk.
   According to my father, my grandmother was once so deathly ill with an unknown malady that  medical doctors had given up on fixing the problem.  Spalla and other family members wrapped her in a blanket, put her in the back seat of a Model A Ford and hauled her to northern Michigan.  There Big Elk brewed a concoction of herbs and had her drink the aromatic liquid as hot as she could stand it.  A few hours later—after napping and sweating out the illness—she was feeling well enough to drive part-way home.
     Big Elk liked my great-grandfather and other family members, and sometimes would cook up several of the large catfish that he raised in a small pond behind his house on Mecosta County’s 177th Avenue along the old Pennsylvania Railroad tracks.
     He was reportedly a soft-spoken and friendly man of relatively few words, who stood tall and straight, even as an old man.  I remember an over-sized wooden chair at his home that seemed—to a small child, at least—to have been built for a giant.
     Even as he neared his 101st birthday, Big Elk was “surprisingly agile, hears remarkably well, reads without glasses and retains his own teeth,” according to a February 20, 1952, story in the Big Rapids Pioneer newspaper.
     He told the reporter that he expected to live significantly longer, thanks to “the strength, faith and trust sent to him from his friends in various parts of the world, consumption of his own herbs and faith in the Great Spirit God.”
    Big Elk knew the land on which he lived and the medicinal quality of the plants he found there. He gathered them in the woods and fields surrounding his house, then dried, milled and packaged them in another small building next door.  His office was usually closed on Mondays while he searched for the herbs.
     Today, the beginnings of a residential housing development have appeared in the nearby woodland  where the medicine man found his plants.  And Morley-Stanwood High School and football stadium occupy the property just across the railroad tracks from the two-story clapboard house where Big Elk lived for the last 27 years of his long and storied life.
     Born in Mashpee, Massachusetts—the son of a Pequot chief—Big Elk was already nearly 80-years-old when he settled in Mecosta County.  Prior to that, he had reportedly traveled over most of the American continent, as well as portions of Siberia, Australia, China, Japan, Africa and the South Pacific islands.
  As a young man, he was a courier from Fort Simcoe, Washington, traveling to Wanatchee, the Powder River basin, Okanagan in British Columbia, and Penderilla—a route of about 700 miles.  It was a six-week trip that he usually made on horseback over Indian trails through wild and hostile country, requiring significant physical strength, endurance and courage.
     There is little else I know about Big Elk—or his life and times—except that his house still sits at the dead-end of 177th Avenue between Morley and Stanwood, along what is now the White Pine Trail Linear State Park.  Another family lives there now and I wonder whether they are aware of the rich legacy of herbal medicine that their home represents.
     It’s a fine history of a memorable man—connected in a small way to my own family’s story.
    I think there’s still much to be learned from Herbert Mingo, as we journey through life and seek to heal our own bodies and souls.