The concept of place is a longstanding facet of geography. Carl Sauer (1925) was instrumental in showing how to approach it. For him, the physical setting consisting of terrain, climate, soils, minerals and vegetation was a stage upon which various cultures imprint such their own symbols. In The Great Columbia Plain (1968) and his Imperial Texas (1969), Donald Meinig showed how geographers use physical and/or cultural surroundings to explore regional distinctiveness. Finally, geographers John Jakle (1977, 1987) and Martin Mitchell (1997, 2008) have excelled at conveying qualities of place by reading the landscape as a set of visual symbols packed with cultural and/or physical meaning.
I hope to do the same here for the Minnesota Driftless Area. The Driftless is a roughly 15,000 sq. mile doughnut hole of non-glaciated terrain set in the midst of the heavily glaciated Upper Midwest, surrounded by another 5,000 sq. miles of moderately glaciated terrain that was missed by the last two glacial events, i.e. the Illinoian and Wisconsin (Figure 1) (Fenneman 1938). Located mostly in southwestern Wisconsin, the Driftless Area spills over into northwestern Illinois, northeastern Iowa, and southeastern Minnesota (Hunt 1967).
Within Minnesota, the Driftless Area stands in vivid contrast to: (1) the glaciated till plains that dominate southern Minnesota that yield a landscape dominated by intensive agriculture, most notably corn and soybeans, (2) the Lake Agassiz bottomlands of the Red River Valley where intensive sugar beet cultivation, wet peatlands and aspen parkland prevail, and (3) the heavily scoured and forested uplands of the Canadian Shield (aspen, spruce and pine) along with the Lake Superior basin in northeastern section of Minnesota. Instead, the Driftless Area remains replete with hills and ravines, a well-defined dendritic drainage system, and is covered with a temperate deciduous hardwood forest consisting of oak and hickory, along with black walnut and the Kentucky coffee tree peppered with conifers, most notably eastern white pine (Figure 2). Moreover, its extensive Karst terrain results in caves and disappearing streams, features which are not found elsewhere in Minnesota.
The subtlety of geography lies in the intersections between the physical and the cultural, here illustrated in the history of the reintroduction of native wild turkeys and recovery of native brook trout. Their tales blend the region’s distinctive terrain, vegetation, and water quality characteristics with evolving cultural practices and attitudes related to hunting and land use. Cultural difference also appears in the evolving ethnic communities that since around 1990 have included a rural-based old-order Amish community, who differ in importrant ways from the traditional Minnesota Scandinavian and German immigrant groups, largely Catholic or Lutheran, or other more urban relative newcomers, the Hmong and Somali communities located mostly in the urban core of Minneapolis-St Paul.
Upon Euro-American settlement in the 1850s, the region’s steep slopes were quickly deforested. Unregulated hunting of game commenced in earnest as settlers sought to fresh meat supplies from local sources in an era when transportation and refrigeration systems were either much cruder or simply non-existent. Its small population of eastern wild turkey was particularly vulnerable to overhunting because the Driftless Area was at the far northern end of its North American range. Extirpated from Minnesota by 1886, Missouri was the only Midwest state to retain a wild population (Snyders et al. 2011).
Attempts to reintroduce wild turkeys involved a series of failures, followed by ultimate success. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing until the 1980s, a series of releases utilizing game farm birds occurred. These birds failed to establish a sustainable population because captivity effectively bred out the characteristics needed for survival in the wild. During the 1960s, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MnDNR) began a live trap and transplant program centered on relocating Merriam wild turkeys from Nebraska and South Dakota to the Whitewater Wildlife Management Area located within the northern periphery of the Driftless Area. The population soon expanded, but then crashed because the exotic Merriam subspecies was unable to adapt to Minnesota’s hardwood forest and severe winters (Snyders et al. 2011).
But eventually, the trap and transplant strategy proved successful with a different subspecies, and today Minnesota has a population of roughly 75,000 eastern wild turkeys that are native to the Driftless Area and the Minnesota River Valley, yet exotic in other regions of the state. The turning point came in 1971 and 1973 when twenty-nine eastern wild turkeys from the Ozark Mountains were released near Caledonia in the extreme southeastern part of the Driftless Area. Available habitat was also critical for its success. By the 1970s, many of the hillsides had reverted to hardwood forests that provided ample roosting sites and a steady supply of acorns. Predicated on a habitat consisting of 1,000-acre blocks of hardwoods with interspersed agricultural operations, these initial releases successfully utilized waste grain from farming operations still located in the bottoms of the area’s numerous incised valleys. By the late 1980s, the Driftless Area became restocked and possessed greater densities of wild turkeys relative to pre-Euro-American settlement (Snyders et al. 2011).
Hunting is a long-standing Minnesota tradition. Each year over 450,000 white-tailed deer permits are issued to hunters in a state containing a human population of roughly 5.4 million. Wild turkeys are unique in that they are hunted mostly in the spring, though in recent years a limited fall season was established. In 2022 slightly over 54,000 permits were issued with 12,309 birds harvested statewide, a majority from the Driftless Area (MnDNR 2022). A 2008 study found wild turkey hunting produced roughly $1 million in income and sales tax revenue and pumped another $19 million into the state’s rural economy, which equates to $1.4 million and $26.6 million when converted into 2022 dollars (Snyders et al. 2011). The importance of wild turkeys is evident when entering Caledonia where the attachment to this bird, provides a sense of meaning and place, both to locals and those visiting from elsewhere (Figure 3).
Native to the clear and cold flowing streams of the Driftless Area, brook trout thrive in shaded, clear, and cold waters averaging 48-50°F (Figure 4) which forms a contrast to the warmer and muddier till plain streams or the root-beer colored tannin streams of northern Minnesota. Brook trout have experienced a rather stark up and down history since Euro-American settlement. Although not extirpated, their numbers and range were reduced greatly by early agricultural practices from 1870-1920. The upland forests were cleared with the wood being used to construct homes, barns, fences, and other structures. Cultivation soon ensued on the cleared land as settlers plowed without regard to the terrain. Other uplands not plowed were often subjected to intense grazing by livestock, most notably by dairy cattle, which resulted in soil compaction. Taken together, these agricultural practices resulted in reducing rainwater infiltration rates into the soil (in some cases by over 90%) relative to the natural forested landscape (Trimble 2013) (Figure 5). Consequently, numerous cold-water springs either dried completely or experienced significant flow reductions.
As Trimble (2013) noted, enhanced surface runoff from intense springtime or summer thunderstorms and/or stagnate fronts fueled by humid and unstable maritime tropical (mT) air masses resulted in floods, increased sedimentation, and turbidity. Overall, these variables increased water temperatures, lowered its dissolved oxygen content, and silted-in the gravel beds requisite for natural brook trout reproduction. Moreover, high nutrient non-point runoff from livestock wastes also entered the local streams. Consequently, the native brook trout population plummeted (Surber 1922).
Attempts to address the decline in native brook trout began in the 1880s with the issuance of fishing regulations and restocking with hatchery fish, brook and rainbow trout, the latter being native to the mountain streams of western North America. By 1920, the repeated failure of the stocked brook trout to re-establish a sustainable population led to a series of field investigations by Thaddeus Surber (1922), a biologist with the Minnesota Department of Conservation, who found roughly 50 percent of the Root River’s watershed (the main watershed of the Minnesota’s Driftless Area) was not suitable for sustaining a brook trout population. Instead, Surber recommended stocking European brown trout, which possess a higher tolerance for variations in water temperature (50-80°F) and turbidity. Introduced in earnest in the 1920s, brown trout presently comprise the dominant trout species in the Driftless Area. Surber’s poignant findings relative to the effects of deforestation implicitly laid the foundation for habitat improvement programs that followed some 30-40 years later.
Land use changes beginning in the 1950s centered on contour plowing and long-term agricultural set-asides associated with the federal Soil Bank Program proved critical in arresting brook trout habitat decline. In addition, the state began acquiring easements along streams both for access and habitat improvement in the mid 1950s. Other habitat improvement projects included riprapping stream banks to prevent bankside erosion and allowing trees (natural and planted) to provide shade that cooled water temperature. By 1970, 280 miles of riverine habitat on 76 streams throughout the Driftless Area were classed as cold water.
In 1971, the Minnesota DNR quietly released 25,000 brook trout fingerlings into area streams with the intent of re-establishing a wild population on a more widespread basis throughout the Root River watershed. The lack of fanfare was deliberate as hatchery raised stock is far more prone to being caught by anglers than their wild counterparts (Spangler and Haugstae 2010). This situation was apparent when visiting one of the three fish hatcheries located in the Driftless Area. The rainbow trout attacked their food, whereas the brown trout were far less aggressive, while the brook trout were essentially passive. By the early 2020s, over 700 miles of suitable trout habitat located on 181 streams prevailed in Minnesota’s Driftless Area (MnDNR, 2023a).
Brown, brook and rainbow trout remain the three dominant trout species with a combination of wild and hatchery stocks sustaining the brook and brown trout populations. The exotic rainbow trout are exclusively raised in hatcheries. Over 98,000 trout stamps were sold statewide in 2022 with the angling divided between the Driftless Area and the Arrowhead--Lake Superior and the cold-water inland lakes of northeastern Minnesota (MnDNR 2023b). Statewide, a 2003 study found trout fishing resulted in roughly 632 jobs and $60 million in recreation revenues in the Driftless Area (MnDNR, 2003).
As noted, the state owns and operates three fish hatcheries in the Driftless Area. One such facility near Lanesboro possesses 48°F gravity flow spring water that does not require pumps and extensive filtering. In addition, the water contains very little iron and has a high dissolved oxygen load of 9.5 parts per million. Consequently, operational costs are minimized. The Lanesboro hatchery raises roughly 475,000 brown and 285,000 rainbow trout each year (MnDNR 2023c). The brown trout numbers have been trending downwards because of better success in natural reproduction, whereas the rainbows do not reproduce in Driftless streams. Indeed, much of the rainbow stock is trucked north for release into reclaimed iron mine pits and North Shore streams flowing into Lake Superior. Even with transportation costs, the fry from the Driftless Area remains more cost efficient than those from hatcheries located further north (Schmidt 2011).
Waters crossing this dissected region with its limestone deposits are prone to flow both above and below the ground with subterranean flows re-emerging to supply the regional drainage network with clear and cold water. Originating as rain or snow, water infiltrates the soil and plant roots and forms a weak carbonic acid that dissolves limestone, particularly along fractures, thus creating ample conduits for subterranean flow. In the Driftless Area, weak carbonic acids have produced a Karst landscape replete with caves, sinkholes and disappearing streams unlike what one finds in the rest of the state.
The largest mapped cave system in Minnesota, Mystery Cave, contains roughly 14 miles of explored and documented passageways. Discovered in 1937 by Joe Petty, Mystery Cave was operated privately until becoming incorporated into the state park system in 1988. Located another 30 miles east, the privately owned Niagara Cave contains an underground 60-foot waterfall. Both Mystery and Niagara caves are roughly 400,000 years old, a date that corresponds generally with a de-glaciation and one of the longest interglacial climates of the Pleistocene (Wilson 2003). Both caves are found in the Dubuque Limestone and Stewartville Dolomite formations dating from approximately 440 million years ago (Mossler 2008). The Dubuque Limestone contains thin layers of inter-bedded shale, which sometimes gives the flowstone a muddy looking appearance.
Protected from elements such as rain, sleet, snow, wind and dramatic temperature change, caves comprise a setting where very weak geomorphic and chemical processes become overwhelmingly dominant. Often coated in flowstone, a rock formed as water flows down or across a rock surface and precipitates out the mineral matter, the cave walls at Mystery and Niagara Caves have a smooth texture that often resemble cloth draperies (Figure 6). Caves generally possess the average mean temperature of the surface and vary little throughout the year. Although bats congregate near the entrance, the lack of sunlight means perpetual darkness negates photosynthesis and the formation of any significant food web, thus leaving very obscure bacteria or microbes as the only life forms found in these otherwise sterile environments.
Both caves serve as destination points for regional tourism. For example, prior to the Pandemic over 24,000 people visted Mystery Cave. Moreover, the State DNR also markets Mystery cave in the context of the Roor River watershed with its population of nearly 5,000 trout per square mile and the nearby Forestville State Historic site, which replicates a small farming town circa 1900 (Goetzman 2016). Niagara Cave averages between 25,000 and 30,000 visitors per year and advertises through billboards stressing its location near Harmony, which also hosts Minnesota’s Amish community (Hahn 2018).
The Amish community established a foothold in the region beginning in the 1990s, finding land available at reasonable cost and a setting that facilitated seclusion. Dating to the Protestant Reformation and specifically the Anabaptist movement in Europe, the Amish comprise a breakaway sect of the Mennonites who were founded in the 1530s by Menno Simons, an ordained priest who left the Catholic Church in part to obtain independence from state sanctioned churches (Kraybull 2001). A series of ensuing persecutions in Switzerland occurred against the Mennonites because of their pacifism and they finally found refuge in nearby rural France and the Palatine (modern day Germany), where they practiced subsistence agriculture and kept a low profile (Hostetler 1993).
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, allowed local princes to determine the religion of those under their domain, which usually meant Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed Churches became the only viable or legal options. Those opting for an alternative were subject to varying sanctions and often intense persecution (Hostetler 1993). The Amish hymnal Ausbund contains material steeped the persecution of those years, while the Martyr’s Mirror, another Amish publication, features the testimonies of the persecuted and includes more recent confrontations with American school boards (Hoines 2007). Past persecutions generally failed and instead resulted in two outcomes that persist today: (1) the need to maintain self-sufficient communities, and (2) the Amish desire to actively pursue a bona fide separation from the evil world surrounding them.
The separation of the Amish from the Mennonites dates from a disagreement with Mennonite leaders in 1693 over the practice of shunning. Specifically, Jacob Amman, for whom the Amish are named, strongly believed shunning should extend to day-to-day life and not merely be confined to church services or components thereof. In addition, Amman advocated: (1) plain dress, (2) non-trimmed beards, (3) the refusal to take oaths, (4) a literal following of Jesus’ teachings and New Testament doctrine, including a strict separation from the fallen or evil world, and (5) an adherence to non-violence. The latter three beliefs preclude military service or holding any civil office (Hoines 1993, Kraybull 2001).
As with other European sects that either faced persecution or felt insecure becauae of their religious practice, the Amish immigrated to the then British Colonies of North America, most notably to Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County beginning in the 1720s and 1730s. Other colonies were later added in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Circa 1990, Amish migrants from adjacent Iowa established settlements in Minnesota’s Driftless Area (Dawley 2009).
Settlements, districts, and affiliations comprise the organizational structure of present-day Amish society. A settlement consists of roughly 12 families, while a district contains 25-30 families. An affiliation is an agglomeration of districts in fellowship with one another. Within Minnesota, 12 districts numbering about 2,300 people existed in the early 2000s (Kraybull 2001). Amish children upon turning 18 must decide whether to join the Church and effectively remain in Amish society. Most join for obvious reasons: It is the only life many know; family relationships are deep and well-developed as are other social connections within the community. On the contrary, a decision to leave an old-order community means being shunned permanently and embarking on a personal foray into an unfamiliar world.
Language, an important defining attribute in any culture, also operates in the Amish context where Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of German originating in the Palatine region of southwestern Germany, is the mother tongue spoken among Amish and used in their Church services (Hostetler 1993). English is a second language learned in Amish schools and is used to communicate with the outside English world (Hoines 2007). From a religious standpoint, their language usage reinforces separateness in two ways. First, the Amish do not proselytize and there are no missionaries to connect with the wider culture (Hoines 2007). Second, someone with an interest in the Amish faith is unlikely to visit, let alone join, an Amish Church, where services and conversations are conducted in an obscure German dialect. Moreover, the Amish hold services every other Sunday and their services take place in peoples’ homes, not formal church buildings. Consequently, their churches do not stand out on the landscape, thus making them more difficult for a casual visitor to locate, even on a Sunday.
House churches are nothing new in Christendom and have a long history of being used in times of persecution, whether in ancient Rome or contemporary China. Indeed, the Amish tradition of house churches is a carry-over from their European persecutions. Their existence in rural Minnesota is different relative to the numerous and easily recognizable structures of the Catholic and Lutheran denominations located both within and outside the Driftless Area.
The Amish adherence to a technology level suggestive of 1910 can appear bewildering to an outsider. For example, an Amish family will use someone else’s phone but will not have one at home. Similarly, a stationary gasoline engine is permissible, yet one mounted on a rototiller or propelling a small tractor is not. Many of these prohibitions, including the lack of electricity, reinforce the slowness of daily life and preclude worldly distractions such as the Internet, video games, and so forth.
Email, texting, and social media platforms, which abound in secular society (Minnesota included), and increasingly constitute more impersonal forms of communication, comprise examples of communicating in a low-context culture where rational thought, abstract models, and logical progression work to define one’s place and relationship to his/her surrounding environment (Hostetler 1993). By contrast, the Amish stress face-to-face communication indicative of a high-context culture where people become more deeply involved with one another. Indeed, their place and relationship to their surrounding environment are derived from finding one’s role within a larger social group setting (Hostetler 1993). Such communications are reinforced further in Amish schools where class sizes are small and multiple ages freely intermingle and work together, a situation that builds lasting and meaningful relationships in the context of being taught by one teacher. As one Amish writer stated, individualism needs to be “curtailed in order to preserve community, contentment and continuity” (Hoines 2007, 104). Such a scenario forms a stark contrast from Minnesota’s age and subject segregated public-school model, with teachers changing year-to-year, if not by subject as well.
Amish agriculture eschews tractors and petroleum-chemical based products and instead relies on horse-drawn implements and organic fertilizers, along with their abstention from any government farm programs because they are too worldly or sinful (Hoines 2007). Three important meanings arise from this situation. First, the Amish possess more control over their economic situation because the major reasons for obtaining lines of credit (finance equipment, fuel and petroleum-chemical fertilizers) simply do not exist. Second, from the standpoint of sheer physical sustainability or survivability, the Amish are essentially free from the effects of an OPEC boycott or an economic collapse predicated on oil that could otherwise spell total devastation for a secular modern farmer. Finally, the slower older ways, allow more time for contemplation (praying) and facilitate occasions for cooperative action with ample face-to-face communication. For example, compare the Amish use of a stationary machine to thresh several farmers’ grain, which results in a cooperative effort versus an individual driving an enclosed combine and only talking occasionally through a radio to a truck driver, as on most Minnesota farms, including those in the Driftless Area.
To experience the Amish imprint upon the landscape, one must keep a sharp eye and be willing to travel off the main highways. Driving along a gravel road one late summer afternoon, I slow down and pull to the right as a horse-drawn carriage approaches and then passes (Figure 7). Scanning the adjacent fields, I notice rows of chopped hay tied into bundles resembling oversized pylons. Nearby, a rusting horse-drawn hay rake sits idle. We continue onwards and pull into the driveway leading to a plain-looking white clapboard house with no connections to the power lines paralleling the road (Figure 8). Stepping out of the air-conditioned car, the humid air and then the flies literally hit me in the face. Numerous farm animals penned nearby, which comprise the immediate meat, dairy and egg supply are the source of the annoying flies and the somewhat rancid smell of manure and urine.
An Amish farmer, his wife and four children greet us at their porch. As my wife examines their homemade organic jams and pies, I discuss hay and alfalfa with the Amish man. I mention that I used to cut and bale alfalfa and timothy hay on a ranch out West. He smiles and begins explaining how his haying equipment operates and points with satisfaction to the two rusted implements that only moments ago, I was staring at through the car window. The conversation moves on to horses and specifically to the Percheron draft horses he uses on the farm. Likewise, I state that our ranch in California used a team of Percherons to pull a hay wagon in the winter when feeding cattle. The advantage of the horses was their knowledge of the routes through the pastures and as such, we did not need to hire a third man to operate a tractor. I conclude by noting “the Percherons also started easier on cold mornings.” He nodded his head and turned to me with a smile that was almost as wide as the brim of his hat.
On another occasion, we stopped for a breather near the Root River where an Amish woman was selling homemade baskets. We talked briefly about the Standard Bred horses which the Amish use for pulling their buggies. I spied a couple of buggies parked in the trees over by the stream. Upon arrival, I was greeted by an Amish girl who was perhaps 10 years old and was looking after the horses. We talked a bit about buggy rides and life on the farm, but she had to translate to her younger brother who she said had just started school and “can’t speak English.”
The Driftless Area with its incised terrain and intervening hills provides a landscape that parallels and reinforces the Amish desire and need for separateness even though nearby neighbors may consist of English farmers (to use the Amish term for non-Amish). The mixture of farmed land and the presence of significant hardwood forest cover also adds to the feeling of separateness especially when compared to Minnesota’s vast agricultural till plains that are nearly devoid of arboreal cover. Moreover, the Driftless Area forms an appropriate setting for an Amish society that is highly resistant to assimilating into its surrounding cultural milieu because the Driftless Area itself remains somewhat removed from the mainstream Minnesota mindset; it is not the North, the Red River Valley, the Corn Belt, or the Cities.
The Driftless Area’s heavily incised terrain with a combination of tilled bottomlands and forested uplands reinforces a distinct sense of place. The region is replete with cold springs and clear water, differing widely from the warmer and muddier waters of the till plains or the tannin-stained waters of glacially scoured northern Minnesota, making it a stronghold for brook trout and good habitat for Eastern wild turkeys. The presence of Karst terrain with its caves, disappearing streams and numerous springs further molds a landscape that provides day-to-day meaning to an ethnic group that interprets Biblical themes, including its numerous references to “living water,” quite literally. Overall, the fusing of the physical and cultural environments together produces a synchronistic whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and adds yet another variable to Minnesota’s diverse landscape.