The Dakota Cipher

HISTORICAL NOTE

On November 8^th, 1898, an immigrant farmer named Olaf Ohman was clearing land near the village of Kensington, Minnesota, when he unearthed a stone slab the size of a grave marker that was entangled in the roots of a poplar tree. Upon inspection he realised the stone was carved with Norse runes, or letters, eventually translated as:

Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of acquisition from Vinland, very far west. We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and death. AVM save from evil.

And on the stone’s side:

Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days journey from this island. Year 1362.

The authenticity of the Kensington rune stone, on display in a small museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, has been hotly debated for more than a century. Did Norse explorers really reach the upper Midwest some 130 years before the first voyage of Columbus? Or was the stone a clever forgery? The farmer never profited from his find and insisted to the day he died that he didn’t carve it. If a forgery, was it planted decades earlier, to give the tree time to grow around it? No white settlers lived there then. If real, was it moved from its original location? Why would medieval Scandinavians travel to a geographically nondescript place in western Minnesota?

Scholars who once scoffed at the idea of any pre-Columbian contact between Europe, Asia, and the Americans have in recent decades been inundated with fragmentary evidence and imaginative theories suggesting that transatlantic and transpacific voyages in fact took place. The most compelling find is the 1960s discovery of the L’Anse aux Meadows Norse settlement site in Newfoundland, which proved that stories of medieval Viking explorers reaching America are indeed true. Rune stones, meanwhile, have been found in Maine, Oklahoma, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. So have metal fragments of European weaponry and tools. Some two hundred boulders with mooring holes that are similar to the type medieval Scandinavians used to moor their boats have been discovered in North America.

As this novel indicates, theories that other Europeans – or even Israelites! – preceded Columbus to America go back to Jefferson’s day and earlier. The lighter colouring of some Mandan Indians, and the fact that their agricultural settlements were more reminiscent of a medieval European village than a typical Plains Indian encampment, was commented on by French explorer Pierre de La Vérendrye in 1733 and artist George Catlin in 1832. Their women were reputed to be among the most beautiful on the continent and were generously shared – a reputation that influenced the decision by the Lewis and Clark expedition to winter over there. All this fuelled speculation that Norse or Welsh genes, at least, had made their way to the Missouri River. Unfortunately, the Mandan and their Awaxawi cousins were entirely wiped out by smallpox and Dakota raids by the 1840s before any systematic scientific inquiry could be done.

There are legends that a Prince Madoc of Wales set out for the New World with ten ships in 1170, and that Saint Brendan sailed west from Ireland to the ‘Isle of the Blessed’ in 512. There has been debate that the volume of prehistoric copper mining in the Great Lakes is too great to be attributed to aboriginal use.

Anthropologists have also considered theories that America could originally have been populated not just by Asians crossing the Bering Sea land bridge during the Ice Age but by European ancestors island-hopping across the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, the date at which humans first appeared in the Western Hemisphere continues to be pushed back as new finds are made.

The odd notion that the Norse (or Welsh) made their way to the middle of the continent is at least possible because of the North American river system. Kensington is between the headwaters of the Red-Nelson river system, which runs north to Hudson’s Bay, and the Mississippi, which eventually drains into the Gulf of Mexico. The Saint Lawrence–Great Lakes system provides another route from the Atlantic, with short portages making it possible to paddle across Minnesota in the manner described in this story. Possibility does not make probability, of course, but the exploration theories of Magnus Bloodhammer are not as completely fantastic as they first might seem. There are widespread legends among Native American people from Peru to Canada of white-skinned visitors in the distant past and global legends of a lost golden age in which mythic figures bequeathed knowledge to humankind. Does myth have a kernel of historical truth?

I owe the idea that the Minnesota Norse could have been Templars escaping from Scandinavia – and a possible translation of curiously marked letters that make a cipher within the stone – to Kensington rune stone investigators Scott Wolter, a geologist, his wife Jan Wolter, and engineer Richard Nielsen. The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence, provides an analysis of the stone’s geology, script, and history. They’ve done extensive research on the island of Gotland to attempt to establish the medieval authenticity of the particular runes Olaf Ohman found. A briefer and balanced introduction to the controversy is The Kensington Runestone by Alice Beck Kehoe.

The intriguing correlations between Freemasonry, the origins of the United States, and the design of Washington D.C., have been explored in a number of books and documentary films. Jefferson’s curiosity about woolly elephants, Missouri volcanoes, and mountains of salt is taken from history.

The White House did not earn that name until the British burnt it during the War of 1812 and its repaired shell was repainted.

Norway would not regain its independence until 1814, during the tumult of the Napoleonic wars.

The references to Norse myth are taken from the actual legends. But what of the botanical freak found by Magnus and Ethan? There have been a number of experiments in ‘electroculture,’ or the study of the effect of electrical fields on plants, including Bertholon’s electrovegetoma machine of 1783. Later experiments allegedly show roots growing in water turn towards electric current, or seeds germinating more quickly in an electric field. My ‘electric’ Yggdrasil is obviously fiction, but since the height of trees is limited by the difficulty of lifting water and nutrients up the trunk against the pull of gravity, I had fun imagining a ‘lightning-powered’ tree that has excess energy to overcome the obstacle.

Finally, while many Indians in this story are menacing in accord with the history of the time, I should note that contemporary accounts of Native Americans indicate they were every bit as varied, complex, and capable of good and evil as the Europeans writing about them. White captives portray a native world of astonishing freedom, humour, vigour, and gentleness, combined with a constant threat of famine, exposure, war, and torture. We have only fragmentary ideas of the ‘natural’ state of Native American societies because they were so rapidly affected – and infected – by the European invasion. The seeming emptiness of the west was the result of epidemics of germs that destroyed Indian populations before most explorers even got there. Firearms revolutionised tribal warfare, and all the tribes were in motion as they fled west from the European assault. The Dakota (or Sioux) became high plains horsemen only after being pushed out of the eastern woodlands by other tribes such as the Ojibway (or Chippewa), who got guns first. The horse came from the Spanish. Ethan Gage travels west of the Mississippi three years before Lewis and Clark, but even his unexplored west is profoundly changed from whatever it was before Columbus. If there ever was an Eden in America, its door had been closing for three centuries before Ethan Gage got there.

Or maybe, as Pierre and Namida suggest, Eden is where we make it.