He Earned the Right To Talk Big
by Brand Frentz

Cook, Charles Ira Jr. Trapping the Boundary Waters. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 2000. 182 pp. plus maps and illustrations, $16.95.

It seems to me that about three out of four HUT! readers would like this book. The rest would not. It is the story of Charles Ira Cook, a restless, 27-year-old army air service vet with no real north woods experience who bought his gear in Winton in May 1919 and headed into the wilderness to live off the land for a year. He explored and found a site in what is now the BWCA, built a cabin, survived by hunting and fishing, met and worked with the legendary trapper Bill Berglund, took a month-long dogsled trip with Leo Chosa in January that he says almost killed them, and came out after 13 months in good spirits with a hefty profit from trapping and a lifetime of stories to tell. How he did it, how he thrived is quite a story.

So why wouldn’t everyone like the book? Well, without going into the question of violence,* let me say that the book takes some getting used to. Cook wrote the book more than 30 years after the events, so you want to trust his memory as well as his truthfulness. But it is quickly clear that he stretches things—the waves are monstrous, the temperatures are below minus 50, the bear weighs 900 pounds—and when he gives his lengthy observations of a loon family with 11 chicks, his own editor has to add a dry footnote: "Loons normally hatch one or two chicks" (p. 26).

Wow, I thought, fuzzy memory combined with outrageous fabrication, and a pompous style to boot! It was a little hard to ignore the writing when his canoe crossed Basswood "not with surging charges astride spume-topped billows, but wafted gently along on little choppy wavelets" (p. 41). He is saying that the wind died down. The author’s son says in the preface that after retirement his dad "took some writing courses." He probably would have done better without them, but at least that is an explanation for a lot of overdone language in the early part.

Still the book caught my interest. It appeared that Cook himself got tired of all the pseudoliterary fluff; the later parts of the book are much more simply and smoothly written. And, even if only 70-80 percent of it is true, it is an amazing adventure. Cook was a keen observer who gave detailed descriptions of many things—people, wildlife, and the woods and waters—that are revealing and informative to us today. You should filter it through your own knowledge and experience, but the book has an immense amount of down-to-earth information about what he saw and experienced.

If Cook was a "tenderfoot" when he put in at Winton in May 1919, he learned fast and well. In the end I was glad to have read the book for all that I found out about how the country looked and how backwoods people got along in those days. And like him or not, I had to admire Cook. This book was published by the Minnesota Historical Society, and their aim is generally pretty true.

*People who do not want to read matter-of-fact descriptions of killing, skinning, and eating animals will not want to read this book.