In This Tender Land (2019), William Kent Kreuger’s loose update of Huck Finn, the O’Banion brothers and their compatriots Emmy and Mose end up in St. Paul, Minnesota, after escaping from the Lincoln Indian Training School—and its despicable, abusive, headmaster Mrs. Brinkman—and sailing down the Minnesota River in a canoe. After passing Fort Snelling, under whose shadow Mose signs to the others, “that’s where the soldiers who killed my people come from,” the four pull ashore at the West Side Flats. While you can still visit Fort Snelling today, the old West Side Flats is now an expanse of office buildings and warehouses. Between the 1870s and 1950s, it was a densely packed neighborhood settled by whatever immigrant community had most recently arrived; first it was the French, then the Germans and Irish, then Jews from Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, with Mexicans and Mexican Americans putting down roots in the 1930s. In 1932, when our protagonist Odie O’Banion lands in the Flats, it was heavily Jewish. Indeed, these adolescents on the lam have been advised to seek out a woman named Gertie Hellman.
Kreuger’s portrayal of the Depression-era Flats is based on historical and archival research he conducted for the novel, but it’s a fictional landscape that he conjures, one that suits his picaresque story. However, the spaces and characters of This Tender Land’s St. Paul offer a different vision of the Twin Cities’ past than the one of Scandinavian settlement that I learned as a child from reading On the Banks of Plum Creek and the American Girl books about Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant to Minnesota. (When I asked other historians about their primary associations with Minnesota history, they mined entertainment from the more recent past, citing Mary Tyler Moore, Prince, The Replacements, and Husker Du most frequently. If these are the other dominant narratives, This Tender Land most certainly helps widen the lens.)
The St. Paul that Odie, his brother Albert, Mose, and Emmy encounter is dominated by water—they leave their canoe in a “boat hotel,” cross an “arched, stone bridge” to downtown, socialize on towboats, and walk past homes marked with black waterlines “two feet up the outside walls” from the Mississippi’s spring floods. Water defines this northern state, as historian Katrina Phillips writes in the introduction to her forthcoming post in this series, the Dakota word for water, mni, became part of its name.