Ite Maza — “Iron Face” Jack Frazer
Indigenous Lifeways on Southeast Minnesota’s Prairie-Savanna Ecotone
Joseph “Jack” Frazer (Ite Maza — aka, E-tai-muz-zah, or Iron Face) was born about 1806, the son of a Métis Mdewakanton Dakota mother, Haz-zo-do-win, and Scottish fur-trader father, one James Fraser. Jack Frazer was born near the mouth of the Bad Axe River, in southwest Wisconsin, and raised among his mother’s people of Wacouta’s Red Wing (Dakota) band on the western shore of the Mississippi River near Lake Pepin. The span of Frazer’s life cuts across periods of abundant biodiversity and starvation scarcity; from traditional lifeways to “civilization.”
A robust ecotone of tall-grass prairie and bur oak savanna once extended across present-day Olmsted and Winona County borderlands, north of Fillmore County in southeast Minnesota. The Middle Fork and South Fork of the Whitewater River emerge from here, flowing northward to meet the Mississippi at Minnieska. Likewise, the Root River — whose North Branch and Middle Branch converge near Chatfield — drains the plateau’s uplands southward and east. This plateau was the scene of a once-thriving biodiversity, hints of which are noted in Frazer’s stories where hunts of deer, elk and bear appear very successful.
IRON FACE — The Adventures of Jack Frazer — Frontier Warrior, Scout and Hunter, includes tales told by Frazer and recorded by Henry Hastings Sibley in the winter of 1857–58. Originally published as a weekly serial in the St. Paul Pioneer newspaper between December 1866 and March 1867, these tales were collected in book form and republished in 1950, slightly edited and with numerous footnotes. In the Introduction to Iron Face, editors Theodore Blegen and Sarah Davidson state a wish that “Sibley had followed more closely to Frazer’s own words,” rather than dilute the “tang” of Frazer’s speech through “the literary style of Sibley’s day.” Nonetheless, Blegen and Davidson assert Sibley’s telling of Frazer’s tales as authentic: “Enough of Frazer’s exploits are substantiated by contemporary sources to prove that his history… is essentially reliable.”
There are seasonal indicators but no specific dates within the telling of Frazer’s adventures, though the timeframe was likely the 1820s. Included with Blegen and Davidson’s introduction is Sibley’s own introductory note submitted with the manuscript of Frazer’s life story to the St. Paul Pioneer, dated December 1, 1866. In it, Sibley marks Frazer’s age at 35 when he “doffed the habiliments of the savage, and became quite a respectable white man in his dress and habits….” The language of this note demonstrates just how much vocabulary changes over time. Of course, neither “savage” nor “white man” would today be used to describe the complex mix of culture, experience, influences, and evolving ethos of a man like Joseph Jack Frazer.
The upper Root River in autumn provides the setting for a few remarkable days of hunting for Frazer and his uncle Wacouta’s band of forty-three lodges as they harvested regional game. Ascending the valley from near the falls of the Whitewater, across the prairie to “the upper part of Root River,” to set up camp again, a call went out that a bear was seen about eight miles away. On the undulating driftless terrain, a sightline of eight miles or more is not uncommon from certain promontories. As the call went out, the chase was on. Frazer pursued and shot the bear. On the same day, Sibley writes, “more than twenty deer were killed, and the following morning a bear was shot on the prairie, so gross and fat, that he could not move at a faster pace than a walk. Jack represents this animal to have been the largest and fattest bear he had ever seen.” Whether the same day or the next, a heavy rain commenced, but the deer hunt continued. Frazer took his rifle and “moved across the prairie to the body of the woods, bordering one of the branches of the Root River. He had already killed a deer, and was engaged in dressing it, when he heard the tramp of heavy animals.” It was there Jack witnessed an “immense herd of elk” moving toward him. Frazer killed one elk and wounded others before his rifle jammed. Wacouta, who had “gone to trap otters in the stream” was nearby and also firing on the elk herd. He eventually loaned Frazer his gun and told him to pursue the herd. Frazer “pursued them to another branch of the same stream, where the poor animals stopped to drink, with a noise as he expressed it, like a waterfall.” Frazer shot four more before the herd moved out of range. In the meanwhile, Wacouta had harvested seven elk to Frazer’s five.
Over the course of that winter’s encampment, Frazer told Sibley that Dakota hunters harvested 2,000 deer and, in January, another large bear. By spring, Frazer accompanied his wife and her father — Grey Iron, chief of Black Dog village — as far north as Pine Island, on the Zumbro River, then called the Embarras River (meaning river of impediments or obstacles, such as logs and other snags). It was there that Frazer encountered his friend Ta-oya-te-duta, or Little Crow. Sibley writes that they “hunted together for several weeks,” moving in a southerly direction. “Upon reaching Root River, they found Wakoota [sic] with but three lodges, the rest having taken up the line of march for the Mississippi. Jack remained with his uncle until the opening of the spring.”
The next winter, fifty lodges of a combined party of “the Wabashaw [sic] and Red Wing bands” went further afield to hunt, to the Menominee River along the present-day Wisconsin-Michigan border. Frazer was among them, telling Sibley that the harvest included “160 bear, 100 elk and many deer, beaver, and other game.”
In footnote 11 of Iron Face, Chapter One — titled A Boy Goes on the Warpath — the editors note how “The American elk, or wapiti, were common along the Upper Mississippi in 1680 when Hennepin visited the Minnesota region. The animals were becoming rare by 1834 and eventually disappeared from the state.”
In the 1883 History of Winona County, a recollection from Dr. John Balcombe who traveled with a local guide, one Mr. Hamilton, struck out from Wabasha’s Prairie (now Winona) up the south valley from the river at Minnesota City. This route would wend through present-day Stockton valley. The doctor and his guide would spend a few days in May, 1856, “exploring the country along the branches of the White Water and Root river as far as the western part of this county” — the same region Jack Frazer hunted with Wacouta a few decades prior. Near the present-day township of Saratoga, Balcombe and Hamilton “saw a large herd of elk, the last that have been seen in this vicinity.” The extirpation of elk in southeast Minnesota was complete. A dozen years later, Frazer’s death notice appeared in the St. Paul Daily Pioneer on Feb. 27, 1869.
Even three decades prior, Frazer noted the decline in wild game and near-impossibility of living well by hunting alone. Ethnologist, linguist, and author Ella Cara Deloria (Yankton Dakota, 1889–1971), working with anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University, transcribed to English the words of Frazer recorded in Dakota by Samuel and Gideon Pond in 1839. In times past, Frazer said, “the beasts that walked the earth were very plentiful; in those times beavers in hordes filled all the bodies of water wherever water lay, life was possible; [the people] kept alive. Today, even if someone tried to live in that way, he would fail, he could not live, and he would meet with hardship.”
Lifeways of various Dakota, Menominee, and Ojibwe bands living along the rivers Zumbro, Chippewa, Buffalo, Black, Root, and Upper Iowa are represented in Frazer’s stories. The greater Paleozoic Plateau region was subject to mass Indigenous land-dispossession by the U.S. government and subsequent mass emigration of Norse-German settlers in the 1850s.
“Joseph J. Frazer” died in Faribault, MN, on February 23, 1869. A complex and compelling figure in life and death, Frazer is buried about 20 miles south of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in a French Catholic cemetery in rural Wheatland Township, Rice County, Minnesota. The headstone was purchased by Minnesota’s first governor, Henry Hastings Sibley. Cemetery coordinates: 44°29'09.5"N — 93°29'36.0"W
