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.

Early March edition

Hot off the press!  The early March issue (Vol. 60, No. 7) of The North Woods Call goes in the mail March 6, 2013.  (electronic subscribers have already received their copies).  See stories about Great Lakes water levels and dredging, the continuing wolf-hunting debate in Michigan, "Cops in the North Woods" (conservation officers), and much more.  Subscribe now and don't miss a single issue!

Late February edition

     Look for your late-February edition of The North Woods Call later this week
     Read about the governor's proposed hikes to hunting/fishing license fees and fuel taxes, as well as the "biodiversity bill" currently making its way through the state Legislature, a multi-disciplinary "fracking" study guided by the University of Michigan, the continued battle over wolf hunting and much more.
     Also, a look at Stanwood's Native American herbalist Herbert Mingo, known widely as "Big Elk" while he gathered and sold medicinal herbs in Mecosta County from the late 1920s to the late 1950s.

The ghosts of Deward

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

     Ongoing debates over open pit mining and hydraulic fracturing in drilling operations have made me think of earlier times when Michigan’s resources were under assault—particularly during the late 19th and early 20th century logging of the Deward tract in the state’s upper Lower Peninsula.
     I first visited the site near the intersection of Antrim, Kalkaska, Crawford and Otsego counties in 1978 with the late Ford Kellum, a retired Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist and somewhat of a legend among Michigan’s conservationists.
     Kellum was irritated at developers and oil companies that day, which he said were continuing the abusive practices that turned the fragile land surrounding Deward into a case study of mismanagement.
     As one of the last remaining stands of virgin white pine near the end of Michigan’s fabled lumbering era, the majestic forest offered tremendous potential for a hungry industry.  By the late 1970s, however, it could only be described as God-forsaken brush country, punctured by oil & gas wells and scarred by various other development activities.
     What we saw that day was a virtual wasteland of weathered and decaying stumps on soil so delicate that bruises left by horse-drawn wagon wheels more than 60 years earlier could still be seen.
     We walked through the old town site, over long-abandoned railroad grades and past the huge concrete foundations of a sawmill that once ran without stopping day and night, producing as many as 52 million board feet of lumber in a single year.
     The town began to die, of course, as soon as the last giant pine completed its run through the mill.  In March 1912, as suddenly as the town was created, the mill was dismantled and moved away.  The local population gradually diminished until the last resident deserted the site in August 1932.
     Deward had become the last of Michigan’s lumbering ghost towns, leaving behind a prairie-type land mass marked only by the huge white pine stumps.
     Repeated fires and soil too poor to bring the forests back kept much of the land from recovering.
     During the 1920s and 1930s, huge flocks of prairie chickens could be flushed from almost anywhere on the tract, but—due to the fires, natural growth and development—they eventually disappeared.  Sharp-tailed grouse were introduced south of Deward in 1933 and did well for a short time  until they, too, became the victims of growth and development to the point where—at the time of our visit—there were only a few remaining in the area.
     For more than a generation, there was little activity on the Deward tract.  Then a pipeline construction crew moved through the area, uprooting stumps and leaving a large scar on the land.  Later, a large development firm took over 12 square miles of the tract surrounding Lake Harold in Antrim County.  Roads were cut and paved, recreational facilities and an airport were built, and lots were surveyed and sold.
     Elsewhere on the tract, drilling operations continue today.
     Several years ago, I returned to Deward with my then nine-year-old son and a former college roommate.  We camped for two days at the old town site, hiked along the Manistee River and searched for memorabilia.
     Natural growth and a 25-year-old pine plantation were beginning to reclaim some of the land, although large areas remained sparsely covered—sporting nothing more than a few scrub trees and a thin layer of soil and grass.
     The nights were dark and relatively quiet, save for the occasional yip of a coyote and the rhythmic pounding of nearby oil wells.
     On our last morning in camp, while we were packing tents and preparing oatmeal for breakfast, a large explosion shattered the Sunday morning calm.  Each of us jumped a bit—startled by the loud boom and resulting percussion that we felt forcing its way through the trees.
     Then the quiet returned, with only the lingering odor of natural gas to remind us of the disturbing noise we had heard.  We saw no smoke or flames and heard no emergency vehicles responding to whatever had caused the blast—only a gentle breeze rustling through the leaves.
     Just another day in Deward.
    We finished breaking camp a short time later and drove away, never having figured out what had exploded, or how far away it was.  Not much to get excited about, I guess, because we never heard or read anything about it after that.
     I returned home haunted by the strange experience and by memories of my first visit to Deward many years earlier with Ford Kellum—who was a tireless advocate for better resource management right up until his death in October 1991.
   It seems like there is so much that he left unfinished.

Early February call

The early February edition of The North Woods Call was published this week.  Featured are a variety of photos from the north country, as well as stories about invasive species, lake-effect snow, "climate change," wolf hunting and an environmental report card for  Gov. Rick Snyder from the Michigan League of Conservation Voters.  Also, the formal obituary for Mary Lou Sheppard, who published The North Woods Call for many years with her late husband, Glen.

Late-January issue coming soon

The late-January edition of The North Woods Call will be out in about a week.  Featured will be articles on Upper Peninsula mining, gun control, the recent death of Mary Lou Sheppard, the conservation efforts of the late Guy Kistler and much more.

If you don't already have a subscription, get one now!

Mary Lou Sheppard dies

Mary Lou Sheppard, widow and longtime business partner of former North Woods Call publisher Glen Sheppard, died December 29 at her Charlevoix-area home.  She was 79.

Sheppard was preceded in death by her husband in early 2011 and had been battling cancer in recent months.  As of this writing, no memorial services had been scheduled.