As a service to North American Juntunens, Margaret Smith has agreed to act as the distribution agent for the first volume of the Juntunen Sukukirja covering 1500-1800. The price of the book in the United States will be $90 if purchased in advance. This price covers the book (which is hardbound), shipping from Finland to the US, exchange rate costs, customs charges, state sales and US postage. The Juntunen Society anticipates that the book will be released this fall. Information on ordering the Sukukirja can be obtained by clicking here. We anticipate that the books will become collectors items.

As we search for Juntunen immigrants from Finland who settled in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, what particular events in North American history and prehistory were particularly influential in creating a cultural foundation for these ancestors to build upon after their 19th and 20th century arrivals in North America?

Our ancestors found North America to be as ancient and complex a place as the Finland and Scandinavia they had left behind. From long before the American Revolutionary period of the 1770's, Native Americans and fur traders had traveled the far northern reaches of the North American continent. Native Americans hunted as far north as Alaska and the Canadian arctic, bringing out enormous quantities of fur pelts in birch bark canoes. Their trade route from the distant northwest wilderness came down through Grand Portage, Minnesota. From there they crossed Lake Superior in huge lake canoes and continued east through a portage at Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Huron.

This early fur trade route ran south through Lake Huron to Lake Erie, then northeastward through Lake Ontario to Montreal, and along the St. Lawrence River to sailing ships waiting to carry the baled furs across the Atlantic to Europe. A heavily populated Europe had an insatiable market for imported beaver pelts that were sewn into fur coats for a population needing protection against the cold European winters. At that time, Europeans were willing and able to pay for furs whose origin was beyond a transatlantic voyage---as far as 3,000 miles into the North American continent. Centuries of prior exploitation of Lapland's furs had already diminished those resources in Europe. The need for furs became a major reason the French became involved in fur trading, and ultimately became among the owners of North American lands. Frenchmen had followed other early European explorers and conquerors, including the Vikings, west across the Atlantic.

In the 1500's, the French had begun to trade with Native Americans----people who had inhabited North America for some 20,000 years. After the last great ice age, Asian inhabitants had crossed a land bridge from Russian Siberia to Alaska and migrated over thousands of years by a circuitous route through southwestern North America. From there, some peoples migrated northeastward to the St. Lawrence River area, and from there along the southern shores of the Great Lakes toward Michigan and Minnesota. The Iroquois people became three tribal groups that were already engaged in fierce territorial competition and warfare with other tribal groups prior to the arrival of the French. The names of Native American tribes, words from their languages, and the names of French explorers were eventually preserved as place names all through the north country.

By 1755, the French began to lose their hold on "New France", their North American colonies. In the fall of 1761, British Major Rogers took command of Ft. Pontchartrain. By the spring of 1762, the British had control of Lake Huron, Ft. Michilimackinac, Sault St. Marie, and Green Bay. Michigan's, Wisconsin's, and Minnesota's wilderness population of Native Americans, French trappers and traders became subjects of England's King George and hardly knew what had happened to them. Confusion existed over what would become of their prosperous fur-trading livelihood that had worked so well with the French. At the time, Native American lore also told about rich copper lodes hidden in the bluffs of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, but there was no way to exploit the copper since birch bank canoes were the only mode of water transportation on Lake Superior at that time.

In the exchange of furs for food and supplies, Native Americans along the Great Lakes had gradually given up their ancient patterns of living and had become entrepreneurs, totally dependent on the French for survival. But the French exploited Native Americans in a relationship of largely mutual admiration making an effort to understand them. However, when the British took control, they brought a concept of manifest destiny into their dealings with Native Americans. They did not understand the need of the Native Americans to survive by trade and showed little respect for the natives, nor gave the customary gifts the French had regularly provided.

Much of the unrest in the western territories prior to the American Revolution occurred because the British were negative, inhumane, and often disrespectful in their dealings with the Native Americans. In 1763, the powerful Ottawa Chief Pontiac's sieges of forts at Detroit, Michilimackinac, Sandusky, Maumee, Wabash, and Ft. Pitt foreshadowed future difficulties for the British with their colonies. After the British made peace with France, it was Pontiac's leadership that in the end forced the British to maintain permanent garrisons at such places as Detroit, Michilimackinac, and later Mackinac Island. When the British shifted large numbers of troops to frontier forts after the French threat no longer existed, the British realized that gifts to Native Americans were needed to help keep the peace. The costs of maintaining forts in wide-ranging locations and the cost of gift giving were ultimately extracted from the American Colonies in repressive taxes. Taxation was eventually a major cause of the American Revolution.

The process of becoming the ''United States of America'' was complicated and lengthy. Building a consensus between all the former colonies was a difficult task. It took until the summer of 1794 for President George Washington to gain real control over all the western land that was to be included in the first Union. Washington sent Revolutionary War veteran Anthony Wayne with an army to engage Native Americans at Ohio's Maumee Falls. There the Battle of the Fallen Timbers became the decisive frontier ratification of the Treaty of Paris. The French and British who were holding out at various outposts in Michigan left the area, and the Stars and Stripes flew over Ft. Detroit. The American Union then stretched west to a border that ran up the Mississippi River to Lake of the Woods in the Boundary Waters country of northern Minnesota and Canada.

Businessmen were ready and waiting in the American east to move into the frontier fur trade. In Michigan in 1808, John Jacob Astor founded the American Fur Company. With the backing of his financial resources, he essentially inherited the Great Lakes fur trade started by the Frenchman Etienne Brule. In Canada, the British turned over fur trading to the Hudson's Bay Company and Scottsmen from Montreal. Competition came from the Northwest Company out of Grand Portage, Minnesota. In a climate of intense fur trade competition, the US Congress created the Michigan Territory in 1811. Lewis Cass became its first governor. The War of 1812 served for a time as a diversion preventing Cass from promoting Michigan's development.

Battles in the War of 1812 at Ft. Detroit, Ft. Mackinac, and Ft. Dearborn (at modern Chicago) resulted in US defeats on the Great Lakes by forces of the lurking British fleet. When the Native American Tecumseh, fighting with the British, outsmarted the US forces at the mouth of the River Raisin near modern Monroe, Michigan; the cautionary slogan "Remember the River Raisin'' was born. General Harrison of Tippecanoe fame was poised to move up the Ohio River with assistance when word arrived that General Perry had defeated the British fleet near the Lake Erie Islands. Once again, Americans claimed their land from the British.

In 1819, only the southeast corner of Michigan was surveyed. Lewis Cass began a process of treaty making with the Native Americans that by 1842 had secured title for the US government to all lands in Michigan's Lower Peninsula and to half of the Upper Peninsula. Cass was well liked and respected by the Native Americans who called him "Big Belly'' because of his portliness. They called the US government the ''Long Knives''. Cass lined up surveyors who measured out the Michigan lands acquired by treaty, and divided the entire territory into townships and sections. These were drawn on a map from a line that ran east and west across the northern border of modern Wayne County, Michigan. This line eventually became a busy road in Detroit called ''Base Line Road''. The base line crossed at right angles to a meridian of longitude running north and south through Michigan. Every property description in Michigan resulted from the point where this base line crossed the meridian.

A Federal law passed in 1820 allowed settlers to purchase Michigan Territory land for $1.25 an acre. It was a bargain when 80 acres could be acquired for $200. But creating a farm from the wilderness meant willingness to spend a lifetime at very hard work. At first there were eastern rumors that there was no suitable farmland in Michigan. It had been reported in the East that the Black Swamp around the mouth of the Maumee River at modern Toledo was difficult to cross. But after 1825, settlers came to Michigan in large numbers when the Erie Canal opened a water transport route for farm products from Detroit to eastern markets along the Hudson River. Land sales accelerated when the Weland Canal between Lakes Erie and Ontario opened in 1829.

Farms were carved out of the Michigan forests using the same practice that had been in use in Finland and Sweden---that of slash and burn farming. There were so many takers for this grueling pioneer life that by 1826 Governor Cass had pushed his survey parties through ten million acres in the Detroit region. A booming land office in Kalamazoo, Michigan coined the phrase ''doing a land office business''. Detroit became the destination for wagon trains that traveled by boat from Buffalo, NY. Others came from Ohio and Indiana by more difficult overland routes passable only in midsummer. North of the dreaded Black Swamp, settlers found in southern Michigan a beautiful rolling prairie land. Word spread quickly about the stretches of open land with rich soil and stands of hardwoods. Publicity turned favorable as farm numbers increased and farmers produced surplus grains and other farm products. Soon roads and railroads were needed to supplement water transportation.

Roads and the acquisition of Minnesota's Indian lands were on Lewis Cass' mind when in 1831 he became President Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War. In addition to oversight of the military, he was in charge of military road building and supervision of Indian affairs. His Indian agent to the Chippewa at Sault Ste. Marie was Henry Schoolcraft. Cass and Schoolcraft determined that their first priority was gaining more specific knowledge about the topography of the vast lands to the northwest. Earlier in 1820 they had made a historic voyage from Detroit to Minnesota's Cass Lake. Cass was convinced it was the source of the Mississippi River, but Schoolcraft had doubts. It was Douglas Houghton who was the geologist who assisted their expedition. Houghton had migrated to Michigan Territory from Troy, NY and later became Michigan's state geologist, becoming instrumental in developing Michigan's mineral wealth.

Schoolcraft gained experience with Indian affairs in 1825 when he assisted the Chippewa Indians at a gathering with their Sioux rivals at Prairie du Chien on the Iowa-Wisconsin River border. There hundreds of Native American chiefs met and agreed to a border between the two tribes. The border ran from Chippewa Falls (north of Eau Claire, Wisconsin) northwest to Moorhead, Minnesota in the Red River Valley. Even though the treaty meant little to the Native Americans, it was to shape their future since future land acquisitions by the Federal government were based on the precedents created by the treaty.

In 1832, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, doubting Secretary Cass' claims about the source of the Mississippi, visited the Chippewa in Minnesota. Schoolcraft again attempted to discover the source of the Mississippi. In his prepartions for the expedition, he consulted the partial mapping work and reports of earlier French and British explorers. Among these were the accounts after 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, Pierre Esprit Radisson, Jean Nicolet, Sieur Duluth, Father Louis Hennepin, and Pierre Francois Charlevoix. The accounts of Sieur de Beauharnois and Sieur de LaVenendrye detailed explorations of the rivers from Lake Superior to the Rainy River and to Lake Winnepeg in quest of a route to China. The 1805 report from Zebulon Montgomery Pike had also erroneously reported that Cass Lake was the source of the Mississippi.

Schoolcraft fit comfortably into Native American culture having learned Chippewa from his British-Chippewa wife at Sault Ste. Marie. He collected Chippewa legends that inspired the writing of Longfellow's poem ''Hiawatha''. (Longfellow had acquired the metre for this poem from a study of ''The Kalevala'', Finland's epic collected by Elias Lönnröt.) It was Yellow Head, a knowledgeable Chippewa, who easily guided Schoolcraft to Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi. Known to Native Americans from antiquity as ''Elk Lake'', legend said that Lake Itasca was formed from the tears of a beautiful Chippewa princess who sat beneath the surrounding pines weeping for a lost lover.

In 1849, the name ''Itasca'' was given to one of nine county divisions of the new Minnesota Territory. Itasca County stretched north from Lake Itasca to Lake of the Woods, Canada and east to the shores of Lake Superior. The land slumbered in its extreme remoteness, traveled primarily by Chippewa hunting parties and the occasional trapper trader. The primeval forest stillness remained unbroken until late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when loggers came to harvest the massive White Pines north of the Mississippi's bend at modern Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Farmers and iron miners followed into the cut-over pinelands, and some of these people were our pioneering Juntunen ancestors.

Copyright 1998 by Ruth Stierna and John H. Stierna All rights reserved.
Permission to reproduce this article for publication must be requested from the authors.

(Next month an account of the Sioux wars and how parts of northern Minnesota were settled.)

The following article appeared in the Michigan Memories column of the Detroit Free Press on May 28, 1998. It is written by Jim Pykonen, Margaret Smith's second cousin. It is included here to remind us of our own wonderful memories of summer visits to the Copper Country. Enjoy!

My fondest memories of Michigan are from childhood, when my family and I slipped away from the bonds of suburbia and spent the last two weeks of summer touring and visiting relatives in the Upper Peninsula. Our destination: Atlantic Mine in the northwestern portion of the peninsula.

There, in a one time boom town of copper mining, relatives from my father's side have resided for more than 100 years. From as far back as I can remember, the natural beauty and history that encompass the Copper Country have had a lasting effect on me.

While there, we visited relatives, roughhoused with cousins, explored the local dump and hiked along nearby railroad tracks. My favorite though, was going on expeditions in the family automobile into the far corners of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

But, before we headed out on our journey, my brothers and I would always place pennies on the railroad tracks, which passed in front of my grandmother?s house, in hopes that a train would pass and squish them flat.

We drove out of Atlantic Mine north on Highway 26 into Houghton and linked up with Highway 41 near the old roundhouse just as we began our way across the Houghton-Hancock lift bridge and on into Hancock.

We continued north past the Quincy Mine (Old Reliable) and drove through the town of Calumet, with its beautiful red sandstone buildings, past Ahmeek and up the winding road to the summit of Brockway Mountain. On clear days, and there were many in late summer, the sight of vast Lake Superior was awesome.

After enjoying the spectacular view, we started our drive down into Copper Harbor. We stayed in Copper Harbor to tour gift shops and attractions that included Fort Wilkins.

We slowly wound our way back to Atlantic Mine, passing through once hectic cities like Lac La Belle, Gay, Lake Linden and Ripley. Upon arriving home my brothers and I were eager to check our pennies to see if, indeed, they had been compressed. Yes! There they were, lying shiny and flat, a few feet from where we had left them earlier in the day. Through my childhood years, these pennies were some of my prized possessions and have unfortunately, been lost in time.