I’m awake listening to the gentle lapping of waves just a few feet beneath me. My bed is cantilevered over Rainy Lake, on Mallard Island in the uppermost part of Minnesota. This converted houseboat once ran booze and prostitutes across the U.S. and Canadian border, just a half mile away. Now it houses visitors like me, seeking inspiration on the north coast of America.
The walls are lined with shelves of books. Old books (an 1883 edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days & Collect); unusual books (a delicately hand-drawn vintage guide to sea creatures); titles on Native Americans, Thoreau, Theodore Dreiser, birds, music, philosophy, architecture, poetry. Among his many fascinating qualities, Ernest Oberholtzer—the man who beached this boat a century ago and built the other quirky wooden buildings on Mallard Island—was an avid bibliophile.
He was also one of the most important, if overlooked, environmental activists in American history, who waged a relentless fight to preserve 14,500 square miles of forests, lakes, wetlands, and rivers straddling the border between the U.S. and Canada.
This slightly built bookworm, who preferred playing the fiddle and paddling canoe to big city politicking, led the battle for the Shipstead-Newton-Nolan Act of 1930, the first U.S. legislation to require wilderness protection on federal lands. Without it, there would likely be no Boundary Waters, beloved by canoers, or Voyageurs National Park, with its moose and eagles—let alone all the other government-owned lands where the nation mandates a seat at the table for nature.
Sadly, 1930s broken ground is shifting beneath our feet as the Trump administration and its allies in Congress open more public land to those who want to profit from it rather than preserve it. As of last week, that includes the precise wilderness Oberholtzer, or “Ober,” as his acolytes call him, fought to preserve.
Ober isn’t the most famous Midwestern environmentalist—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson all worked in the region—but his work may have had the greatest impact, at least in terms of acreage. After growing up in Iowa, he headed to Harvard, where he was one of the first master’s students in landscape architecture, studying under Frederick Law Olmsted. Ober never completed that degree, but Olmsted’s balance of the needs of human and nature clearly influenced him.
Ober returned to the Midwest to write for a newspaper in Rock Island, Illinois. He first came to Rainy Lake on a junket in 1909, to spend the summer canoeing the waters of the newly established Quetico Provincial Forest of Canada and the adjacent Superior National Forest in the U.S. This vast northern wilderness of riparian routes winding through towering pines, where moose chewed on lake grasses, hooked him.