Photo Album: 1930s

In the early 1930s, Ernest Oberholtzer emerged as a national leader in wilderness preservation, joining Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall and others in founding the Wilderness Society in 1935.

Oberholtzer, known by his friends as "Ober," has been described as "an elf"--not just because he stood five feet six inches tall, weighed 130 pounds, and had protruding ears, but because he had a lively spirit. He was a great story-teller who loved to entertain guests at his rustic island home on Rainy Lake, along the Minnesota-Ontario border northwest of Sigurd Olson's home in Ely.

Oberholtzer first saw the canoe country in the summer of 1908, right after he graduated from Harvard University with a degree in landscape architecture. Soon he was exploring the far north in Canada with an Ojibwa guide who became a close friend, Billy Magee. They found old Hudson's Bay Co. outposts and traveled through land that no white man had seen in well over a century. By 1912, however, Oberholtzer began to confine his wilderness travels to the Rainy Lake watershed, which included Quetico Provincial Park and Superior National Forest. More interested in learning Ojibwa culture and history from Billy Magee and his people than in holding a steady job, Oberholtzer settled on Rainy Lake and lived a quiet and simple life.

Quiet and simple, that is, until the canoe country was threatened by a waterpower development scheme. Ober's inspirational speeches and articles to save the canoe country attracted men with the contacts and money to help Ober work toward his larger goal: a treaty between the United States and Canada that would establish a land management program for the entire fourteen thousand square miles of the Rainy Lake watershed. He wanted most of the watershed to be preserved as wilderness, which in turn would be surrounded by a buffer zone of government-owned land that would be leased to private camps; beyond the buffer zone would be the homes and highways and cities. The two countries would jointly manage the watershed, with an eye toward maximizing fish and wildlife populations and practicing modern forestry. Logging would be allowed anywhere except near the shorelines of lakes and streams, where it would be visible to passing canoeists.

By the end of 1927, Oberholtzer had received support for his plan from the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and the Izaak Walton League. He and his friends from Minneapolis then created the Quetico-Superior Council as an organization associated with the Izaak Walton League but with the express purpose of seeking the international treaty. Oberholtzer became its president.

Sigurd first wrote to Ober in December 1930 (click here to read the letter), and they first began to have regular contact with each other at the end of 1933, began to bring Olson into active involvement with the Quetico-Superior Council.

Most of the surviving correspondence consists of carbon copies of Oberholtzer's conservation letters that he sent to a number of people; Oberholtzer made enough copies that those receiving the last one sometimes found the type on the green onion-skin paper difficult to read. There is no personal correspondence between the two men, nothing that might indicate a genuine friendship.

It seems more likely that their relationship was that of a mentor and his pupil. Oberholtzer was fifteen years older than Olson, and had received a far superior liberal education. Despite the rustic simplicity of his home on Rainy Lake, Oberholtzer was sophisticated to a degree that Olson undoubtedly admired and possibly envied. Oberholtzer was friends with a number of East Coast intellectuals, including Samuel Elliot Morison, Van Wycke Brooks, Conrad Aikens and Max Perkins. He knew millionaires, and had ties to the White House through his friendship with the mercurial Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.

Not only that, Oberholtzer had explored the far north that Olson had longed to see for himself, and wrote articles that spoke a language with which Sigurd could identify. "Men want the simplicity, the healing peace, the imaginitive stimulus of the wilderness," wrote Oberholtzer, who added in another article that "while some attempt has been made to guard and restore a small part of the material resources [of the Quetico-Superior], scarcely anything has been done until lately even to recognize--much less protect--those far more unique and precious factors involved in the spiritual resources."

Elizabeth Olson recalled a number of occasions when she and Sigurd visited with "Ober" at his Rainy Lake home; if it was summer, they usually would sample some of Oberholtzer's homemade ice cream. Certainly during these visits, or perhaps other times when Sigurd came alone, Sigurd and Oberholtzer would have discussed their common interests in the canoe country's history. (Oberholtzer undoubtedly showed his passion for Ojibwa culture, while Olson displayed his primary interest in the legendary exploits of the voyageurs.) And at times they must have talked about the meaning of wilderness as they each saw it, and the attendant problems and opportunities for preserving wildlands.

(For more on Ober, go to the Oberholtzer Foundation website.)