On this leg of our journey through the midwest, Karl and I travelled over 1500 kilometres from Chicago, Illinois to Grand Forks, North Dakota.
In August 1899, when Karl started in Chicago, his first experience wasn’t the most favourable. On that day, Karl was robbed of a brand new pair of suspenders for which he had paid 13 cents a mere hour before.
In September 2021, on my first day in Chicago, I was out before dawn with my camera to photograph the sun rising over Lake Michigan. The view was perfect at the Buckingham Fountain, but there was already a photographer crouched on the ground composing her shot. I asked if she would mind if I joined her and that’s when I met Teresa of Tour Through A Lens. Teresa’s company offers exclusive local photo tours of Chicago. This casual encounter led to conversation, and 8 hours later, we had spent the day together. We wandered through the city, stopping to take photos, visiting a museum to buy local art in a vending machine, and having brunch at a spot coveted by locals. And there were no suspenders stolen in this experience!
But things improved for Karl before he left Chicago when he received a Cyclone camera, made by the Western Camera Manufacturing Company, to photograph the rest of his journey. You may recall, dear reader, that there were only 12 glass plates in the camera, grossly limiting the number of photos Karl could take. I was glad not to have this limitation as I took hundreds of photos while I was in Chicago, including one of Don Flesch, the third-generation owner of the oldest camera store in Chicago. In business since 1899, I was honoured to spend time with Don, hearing about his family’s camera business back in the day of Karl’s visit to Chicago.
I picked up a rental car at the Chicago airport to head north and met Blake, who acknowledged that it happened to be my birthday and upgraded my car to travel to Milwaukee, Illinois and Madison, Wisconsin.
From Wisconsin to Iowa, Karl and I travelled through “America’s Dairyland.” When Karl biked through, he had no idea a rope tethered the cows to the fence along his cycling path until he was upended by a taut rope that crossed his path as the cows moved out of his way. As for me, my only “cow encounter” was stopping to see ‘Salem Sue,’ the world's largest fibreglass Holstein Cow.
Then I followed Karls’ route to North McGregor, where he wrote letters to his father and sister in Nova Scotia. I had allocated two days to explore North McGregor, Iowa, except I couldn’t find that particular town. Upon visiting the tourist centre in Marquette, Iowa, it became clear that Marquette was North McGregor. This town and the adjacent Prairie du Chien offered insight into the fur trade and the transportation of grains up the mighty Mississippi River.
Seeing the old Pillsbury Grain Mill in Minnesota I was nostalgic remembering the Toaster Strudel, then travelled north to stay “North of Normal” in Fargo, North Dakota. I compared my first aid travel kit to Karl’s after seeing the medicines available in the general store at Bonanzaville. And while Karl then travelled further north, I sidetracked west to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park to get a sense of the old wild west.
We both travelled parallel to the original Red River Trails used by the Hudson Bay Company, where one of us experienced a lot of risky scenarios with drifters living off the tracks while the other of us stayed cozy and safe in her hotel at night. Then we left that Red River Valley with the lyrics of the famous song bearing the same name playing in our heads as we returned back into the Dominion of Canada.
Dear reader, what was your favourite part of what we saw on the way in our journey through the MidWest?
Stay tuned next week for Leg 6 as we start travelling through the Prairies of Canada.
