The white pines are mostly gone. So, too, are the Chippewa Indians, whose smoky huts hugged the north shore of Gunflint Lake when Justine Kerfoot and her family became their only neighbors in the wild Minnesota Boundary Waters area almost 70 years ago.
Sturdy proof of Darwinian theory, Kerfoot, 92, has become as indigenous to the land of the loon as the loon itself. This displaced white woman with a will of iron learned how to survive from the Chippewas and has outlasted them all.
But at first she hated life at the edge of the world.
The stock market crash of 1929 turned Kerfoot’s life upside down. A Northwestern University graduate student in chemistry, planning on becoming a doctor, Kerfoot was forced to give up her dream and move to Gunflint Lodge because it was the only home her wealthy Chicago-area family had left after the crash.
“I can remember sitting on our dock, realizing I wasn’t going to be able to go back (to graduate school). After five years, it suddenly dawned on me I was getting further and further behind. I knew it would take a lot of catching up.
“I didn’t throw away any of the books and scientific stuff I hauled home because I was sure I was going to be able to use it again. But then I finally decided I couldn’t go back. It was a hard time for me,” she said quietly.
Today, the Boundary Waters, a vast network of unspoiled lakes bordering Canada, attract thousands of canoeists and nature lovers. But in the early 1930s only the hardy ventured there.
Kerfoot’s ambitious mother, always up for a new challenge, had purchased Gunflint Lodge, a barebones fishing camp on the south shore of Gunflint Lake, two years before the crash. Kerfoot was to help her operate it in the summers. At the lonely end of the then-treacherous Gunflint Trail, a road that slices across Minnesota’s northeast finger, the camp was snowbound in the winter.
Plans changed sharply when her father lost the family fortune in 1929, including a comfortable home in the affluent Chicago suburb of Barrington and a summer home in Lake Zurich.
Kerfoot, who had once enjoyed servants, found her lifestyle abruptly changed, cleaning her clothes on a washboard in Gunflint Lake while struggling to keep a debt-saddled fishing camp afloat as the Depression deepened.
Kerfoot said she became the family backbone.
“It broke my dad not only from money, but it broke him mentally.
“I wasn’t going to let it beat me. We owed so much money from buying the lodge. Mother had wanted a nice place so had fixed it up. Business had been good so it was logical. But when it all exploded, we were really badly in debt.
“The thing that really saved my soul was the banker in town who told people who wanted to foreclose to just leave us alone and I would finally pay everybody off. Which I did.
“I finally got married and had some children and carried on from there,” she said.
Today Kerfoot is the oracle of the Gunflint Trail. Author of three books, her weekly newspaper column for the Cook County News-Herald in Grand Marais has chronicled life on the trail for the last 30 years.
“Justine’s column has always been my connection to the Gunflint Trail,” said Bud Beyer, chairman of Northwestern University’s theater department, who was responsible for inviting Kerfoot to lecture at her alma mater recently about her wilderness life — canoeing, guiding, mushing and surviving.
Kerfoot wrote her first book, “Woman of the Boundary Waters” (University of Minnesota Press, $14.95), now in its second printing, because “I couldn’t stand to listen to all the lies that were being told about the way things were. They were exaggerated. They told a lot of stuff that you’d have to use your imagination to believe.”
Her son, Bruce, and his wife, Sue, now operate the Gunflint Lodge, which has become one of Minnesota’s premier resorts.
Kerfoot, whose home is on the resort property, never tires of relating the stories of the early days, when dog mushing and snow shoeing were their only means of transportation during snowbound winters.
“We were green people who came in from the outside. We didn’t know anything about anything.”
Her Chippewa neighbors first learned to trust her and then taught her everything about the wilderness: how to carry a canoe, how to find her way in the woods, how to harvest ice from the frozen lake in temperatures that often reached 20 below and make it last all summer. The Chippewa families gradually moved away as their income from fur trapping disappeared during the Depression. Free food and public assistance drew them first to Grand Marais and later to Duluth.
“I thought I was never going to survive, but I did and finally it became a way of life. Finally I became very much attached,” she said.
All the fuss over her, including a PBS special “Lady of the Gunflint,” doesn’t impress Kerfoot.
“I don’t pay any attention to it,” she said, her throaty voice strong. She still wears her hair in the same close-cropped man’s style she adopted at Northwestern. “I guess I was rebellious as much as anything.”
Indeed, a staple of the Kerfoot lore is how guests always mistook her for a boy.
“We still have guests every summer who remember hiring Justine as a guide and not realizing that she was a woman,” said Jennifer Walsh, manager of Gunflint Lodge.
“She was little and she did everything a man did. She trapped, she felled trees, she fixed motors, she was a guide, she shagged her pants at the boot tops with an ax, just like the men did,” said Beyer.
Nonetheless, he was amazed to discover after meeting Kerfoot for the first time after years of knowing her only by reputation that in spite of the oft-quoted stories, “She is this charming, delightful diminutive woman who is incredibly feminine, the gentlest of people.”
But also tough.
“Oh geez, it hurt,” Kerfoot said about her early years in the wilderness. “My shoulders hurt. My back hurt. I hurt all over. But you finally toughen in.”
Her ultimate accomplishment was packing a canoe a mile without putting it down. “I was almost accepted by the local people after that.”
She told other favorite stories, such as the time she was eight months’ pregnant but didn’t bother mentioning her condition to the deer-hunting party she was guiding. When bad weather delayed their return, it didn’t faze the men, figuring the overall-clad Kerfoot “was a fella.”
But her “mother hit high C” when they finally made it back. “And the men just about died” when they discovered their deer-toting guide was not only a woman, but a very pregnant one.
Her initiation as a plumber is also vintage Kerfoot. Determined to install indoor plumbing in the entire lodge and surrounding cabins, Kerfoot arranged for mail-order blueprints from “Monkey Wards” and assured the salesman that “I have a brother who knows how to do this stuff” when he wanted to know who was going to install the two truckloads of piping and plumbing equipment that were to be delivered at Gunflint. “Of course, I didn’t have a brother. I just bulled it through.”
Lodge guests, many of them professional people, helped keep her mind keen. They also helped broaden the world for her three children: her son, Bruce, and daughters, Pat, a retired high school teacher, and Sharon, a San Francisco lawyer.
Kerfoot and her husband, Bill, partners in the lodge, were divorced in 1959.
Traveling has kept her wilderness life in balance. Kerfoot has visited every continent, most of them at least twice, including Antarctica.
“I don’t know. There’s not much left that I haven’t seen,” she said when asked about her next trip. “Besides, some of my friends are getting old, and I’m having a heck of a time trying to shake them up onto their feet so they won’t think they’re old.”
“It’s been an interesting life,” she said. Her favorite Indian proverb — “No man can live among the pines who is not at peace” — is a good fit for her.
And yet her recent visit to the Northwestern campus surprised her. It opened the old wound slightly.
“You know, underneath, there was still that `Oh, I wish I could have’ feeling,” she said. “It was a funny reaction at this time. It was sort of a feeling of having lost a big gap.”
