2
“I wonder why my folks ever left that place!”
—C.A.L. (flying over Sweden, 1933)
IN THE LATE SUMMER, THE SKY OVER SWEDEN SOMETIMES casts a striking color, an extremely pale but radiant blue. By fall the currents of the surrounding winds and waters shift, producing a quilt of clouds that can go unturned most of the winter.
In 1859, even with the arrival of spring, dark clouds persisted in hanging over one Swede in particular, a prominent figure in Skåne, the country’s southernmost province.
Ola Månsson had been born fifty-one years earlier in the village of Gårdlösa in the parish of Smedstorp. Educated in the local grammar school and raised a Lutheran, he had bought a farm in the village of his birth. The Baltic Sea lay but twelve miles from his two hundred acres of flat prairie land, which boasted numerous lakes and a trickling river. At twenty-five he had married a girl from the neighboring parish of Onslunda, Ingar Jönsdotter, eight years his junior. Over the next twenty-two years, they produced eight children.
Because of the middling quality of the soil, Månsson’s “River Farm” subsisted off its dairy products and a few basic crops. But Månsson, a strong, stocky man with an imposing nose and piercing eyes, held the respect of his neighbors. Possessed of a dramatic oratorical style and a firm sense of his own rectitude, in 1847 he persuaded his district to elect him to the Farmer Estate in the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.
Månsson arrived in the multi-islanded capital, six hundred miles away, at a trying moment in Swedish politics. Social reform was sweeping across the nation, and Månsson often led the charge, advocating a basic liberalism which he felt was in the best interests of his farm-labor constituency. Even as a freshman “Riksdagsman,” he argued for tax relief and a loosening of the Lutheran Church’s hold over Swedish society. He later advocated laws protecting children, the elderly, women, and Jews. He urged the abolition of the whipping post. He was soon appointed to the powerful appropriations committee, chosen from the entire Riksdag; and he was the odds-on favorite to become the next speaker for the Farmer Estate. But greater visibility brought greater vulnerability.
The liberal press suggested that Ola Månsson was in the pocket of Crown Prince Carl—who was soon to become King Carl XV. Known as “The Farmer King”—largely for his rural tastes, which included a penchant for carousing with farmers and sleeping with their daughters—Carl was said to have bought Månsson’s support on several key votes.
In the last weeks of 1858, Ola Månsson fell from political grace even faster than he had risen. Through his position in the Riksdag, he had been appointed as an officer of the State Bank of Sweden in Malmö. Using information furnished by one of Månsson’s enemies, the public prosecutor charged Månsson with embezzlement. The accusation stemmed from his having violated bank regulations—acting as an agent for people applying for loans, a conflict of interest compounded by the further accusation that he had exacted one percent commissions in helping secure loans. At first Månsson denied any wrongdoing; but as a paper trail was produced, he admitted that he had accepted some compensation. The courts ordered Månsson’s dismissal from his position as an officer of the bank and that he be stripped of his civil rights.
The case went to Sweden’s Supreme Court, which Månsson treated with utter contempt. He insisted that his having served as an agent was his personal business. When he was presented on the stand with an extremely compromising document, he ripped it up, only to wipe his buttocks with one of the pieces of paper. On June 4, 1859, the Supreme Court of Sweden unanimously upheld the lower courts’ decision, depriving Månsson of his civil rights.
The defendant was not present for the verdict. In the few weeks between his court apppearance and the final ruling, Ola Månsson disappeared. It would be months before Månsson’s even more troubling personal travails were revealed, which further explained his sudden flight. Some of the details would not come to light for another century.
During the long parliamentary sessions, Månsson’s wife, Ingar, remained on the farm raising their children while Ola enjoyed the many pleasures of Stockholm, including its women. There the forty-nine-year-old man from Skåne fell in love with Lovisa Callén, a waitress at Lennström’s restaurant. She was a simple country girl, born in 1837 not far from Stockholm. Having lost her father, Lovisa went to the city at fifteen as a “piga,” a maidservant. She became a skilled seamstress before taking her restaurant job, by which time she had bloomed into a dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty, with a trim figure. In April 1857, the nineteen-year-old discovered she was pregnant.
Her son with Månsson was born on January 20, 1858, five blocks from Lovisa’s Stockholm residence, at the home of her midwife. Månsson was in Gårdlösa at the time. The “piga” there was making his bed when she discovered a letter addressed to him, which she turned over to Ingar; it was from Lovisa, announcing the birth of their baby and asking what to call him. The birth was recorded in the capital city’s “oakta dopbok,” which registered the births of bastards, stating that the child’s parents were “unknown.” Two days later, the boy was christened Karl August.
For more than a year, Månsson juggled his two families and his thriving career. Had his illegal banking activities not come to light, he might very well have kept his life and child with Lovisa in the shadows. But once he saw the handwriting on the courthouse wall, he began taking English lessons; and in May 1859, while his case was still pending, he had obtained a passport.
By that time, fewer than twenty thousand Swedes had emigrated to the United States, though, over the next sixty years, stories of America would lure more than one million of their countrymen. Månsson was not as financially desperate as most Swedish refugees; but, more than most, he was by necessity intrigued by this place where he could erase his past—where, in his fifties, he and the young mother of their eighteen-month-old son could start a new life.
Månsson returned to Gårdlösa and announced his intention to flee, offering his wife the opportunity to accompany him. When she and the rest of the family refused, he transferred ownership of the River Farm and all his other property to one of his sons, so that they would all be cared for. A robust forty-three at the time of Ola’s departure, Ingar would be dead within five years.
Carrying as few possessions as possible—including a gold medal he had once received from his constituents, and Lovisa’s only heirloom, a gold watch—Månsson and his new family embarked on a three-day voyage across the North Sea to Hull, on the eastern coast of England. There they boarded a train across the Midlands for Liverpool—120 miles, some seven hours away. A few weeks later, a steamer took them to Quebec, a crossing that lasted a month. Upon arriving in the New World, Ola Månsson decided to give himself and his second family new names. At a time when Swedes were breaking tradition and assuming permanent patronymics—instead of last names that proclaimed whose son or daughter they were—he adopted the surname his two older sons had acquired at the University in Lund, and he adapted their own Christian names.
And so the newly named August Lindbergh, his wife, Louisa Carline Lindbergh, and their baby, Charles August Lindbergh, boarded a train in Quebec and went all the way to Windsor, Ontario, on the Grank Trunk Railway of Canada. Unable to afford the extravagance of a first-class sleeping car, the Lindberghs spent most of a week sitting on wooden benches as the wood-burning locomotive chugged across southern Quebec and Ontario, occasionally attaining a speed of twenty-five miles per hour.
In Windsor the Lindberghs crossed the Detroit River and entered the United States. They spent the better part of another week riding trains to Chicago, then across Illinois until they reached Dubuque on the Mississippi River. There they boarded a boat that carried them three hundred miles north into the year-old state of Minnesota. They disembarked at the Falls of Saint Anthony, a town of three thousand, which would merge in another thirteen years with the flour-milling town of Minneapolis. From there it was seventy-five miles west—by ox-cart and prairie schooner—through wilderness to the village of Litchfield, where the Lindberghs had friends from Sweden. With its open prairie land dotted by hundreds of surrounding lakes, Litchfield looked remarkably like Gårdlösa; but August Lindbergh chose not to settle there. He opted instead to squat on even more virgin timberland fifty miles north, about a mile and one-half outside a place called Melrose in Stearns County. On August 4, 1859, after ten weeks of arduous travel, the journey officially came to an end, when August Lindbergh appeared at the Minnesota District Court to declare his intention to become a Citizen of the United States.
The immigrants settled into the rigors of pioneer life on the edge of the American wilderness, one of only three families in Melrose. They built a sod hut. Even though the Minnesota summer was hotter than those in Sweden, the winters were known to be colder; so Lindbergh at once got to replacing the crude one-room hovel with a log house, cut from trees on the free land he had staked out. Barely had it been finished when Louisa gave birth to the second of six children she would deliver in America over the next thirteen years—Lovisa, Linda, Victor, Juno, Frank, and Lillian. Lindbergh traded his gold medal for a plow, so that after clearing the land he could break the ground.
As the Lindbergh family expanded, so did their house. It became one of the biggest in the county, with a frame addition to the cabin, upstairs bedrooms, and wood siding. On August 2, 1861, while milling wood for the house—nine miles away in Sauk Center—Lindbergh got too close to the exposed saw. The machinery caught his clothes and tugged him into the spinning blade. Men at the mill ran for help, summoning the local missionary. The Reverend C. S. Harrison later reported his findings, that the saw “had taken a slab off his [left] arm and then struck him in the back and hurled him half way across the mill,” gashing him so deep as to expose his beating heart and part of a lung. He dispatched a man to fetch the nearest surgeon, sixty miles away. Meantime, locals wrapped Lindbergh in a quilt, piled him into a lumber wagon and carted him home. Reverend Harrison noticed a spring of cold water nearby and prescribed constant bathing of the mangled arm; he also dressed the wound in the back as best he could, picking out cloth and sawdust before binding the ripped flesh together. The doctor arrived on the third day after the accident, by which time there was little to do but amputate the arm at the shoulder.
When Lindbergh was able to get out of bed, he called for the dead limb so that he could bury it in his garden. “Bring him to me,” Lindbergh cried. Then, taking the fingers of the lifeless left hand, he said, “Gootbye, mine dear hand. You have been a goot frent to me for fifty years. You haf always been goot and true to me, but you can’t be viv me anymore.”
Combatting adversity with stoicism, August Lindbergh established the work ethic his descendants would emulate. By the next harvest, he had rigged up a belt with a metal ring, into which he could insert one of the handles of his scythe, thus allowing him to continue to work. But feeling he could not do the job of a whole man, he summoned his son Per from the farm in Sweden; another son, Måns, would follow. Lindbergh grew a long, shaggy beard, making his now permanent scowl even more intimidating. It also proved practical in washing and drying his remaining hand.
Thousands of Indians lived in the surrounding areas, mostly Sioux and the friendlier Chippewa, whose birch-bark teepees reminded the immigrants from old European communities just how new America was. The settlers viewed the Native Americans as a nuisance more than a threat, for they generally kept to themselves, only occasionally giving the settlers cause for alarm. In August 1862, Little Crow rebelled against the government’s treatment of his tribe and led the Sioux on the warpath. August Lindbergh unpenned his animals and herded his then-pregnant wife and two children into a cart, then headed to the stockade fort at St. Cloud, fifty miles east. There they waited out what came to be known as the Sioux Uprising, while tales of massacres, tomahawking, and children being shoved into ovens made their way into the fort. When the Lindberghs returned to their homestead many weeks later, newborn in arms, they discovered their farm intact and most of the animals rounded up. Many of the white men in the MinnesotaValley were not so lucky; three hundred fifty settlers were killed. The Indians won the battle but lost the war. The Sioux were banished from Minnesota by an act of Congress; and each month brought caravans of prairie schooners carrying new settlers.
In October 1867, August Lindbergh officially acquired 160 acres of land in Stearns County at no cost through the Homestead Act; and the following spring he purchased forty adjacent acres for fifty dollars. Life on the new land was hard. The Lindberghs raised all their own food and made most of their necessities—clothes, soap, even bullets. The elements constantly conspired against them. Over three successive summers in the 1870s, grasshoppers ravaged the farm. One year the insects devoured everything but the garden peas, leaving the family to live off pea soup for months. Whooping cough took the lives of three Lindbergh children. When Louisa’s housedresses wore through, she took to wearing the few silk frocks she had carried from Sweden—even for such chores as milking the cow. When the cow died, she sold her gold watch to buy another. Louisa often suffered from crying jags. Through it all, August Lindbergh was thrilled to be in America and proud when he became a citizen on December 23, 1870. Both he and his wife learned English as quickly as possible, insisting that it be spoken at home. They both read their Bible, and August studied history for the rest of his life.
Opinionated as ever, August Lindbergh found himself drawn into political discussions. He wrote letters to the editors of the local newspapers; and after organizing the local school district, he sat on its board and served as town clerk, justice of the peace, and postmaster.
His son Charles August grew into the best-looking young man for miles around—almost six feet tall, lithe, smooth-skinned, with a dimpled chin; but he was moody, often brooding. To him, anything easy was hardly worth doing. From the moment he had been old enough to carry a gun, C.A.’s primary obligation was to provide meat for his family. He had a muzzle-loading double-barreled shotgun, and he became a crack shot. He knew he had to account for each kill against the number of homemade bullets he had been given, so if he ever missed, he would sometimes wait for hours until he could line up two birds that he might shoot with the next. Fishing was often done with spears by birch-bark torchlight. For coming home with a deer, all else was forgiven.
No school for C.A. even existed before he was twelve years old. “I had become so imbued with the grandeur of God’s Creation that, when a school was started,” he remembered years later, “I could not divert my attention from Nature to books.” He considered himself the poorest student in the two-room schoolhouse, which he attended until he was eighteen. But C.A. felt he learned something that could never be taught in a classroom—independence, “not only in thinking,” he later wrote, “but in action as well. I love independence, and I like to see others independent. But most of all I like to work and cooperate with independent people.”
The circumstances of C.A.’s birth and his father’s reasons for coming to America were barely discussed and certainly never publicly disclosed; but with the arrival of his Swedish half-brothers, he pieced together the details. His illegitimacy seemed to fuel his ambition, as though compelling him to make the Lindbergh name honorable, to succeed in the public eye. Like his father, he was driven—stubborn, earnest, and even a little angry.
C.A. pursued his studies at the Grove Lake Academy, where, for six dollars a week, Father Daniel J. Cogan, a Catholic priest, and a few other professors taught six dozen young men—mostly enlightened farmers’ sons whose fathers recognized the importance of a formal education enough to release them from farmlife in the winter. As much as possible, the teaching was tutorial, rigorously training each young man to think and speak for himself.
Two years at Father Cogan’s academy prepared Lindbergh to pursue the study of law. He matriculated at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the closest law school of any merit, which then awarded a degree after but two six-month terms. That left Lindbergh enough of each year to return home and earn money to pay his tuition, which he did by hunting and trapping for muskrats and minks along the river. At school, he kept his nose in his books—avoiding distractions as much as possible, especially girls. He even moved out of a house in which he lodged because he found himself taking too great an interest in a girl rooming there. He graduated in the class of 1883.
Although rural living would always appeal to him, Lindbergh viewed his sheepskin as insurance against his ever having to rely on a farm for his livelihood. He was admitted to the Minnesota bar that summer; and after two years exploring professional possibilities in St. Cloud and a few towns in South Dakota, he settled in fast-growing Morrison county, in a town called Little Falls, fifty miles northwest of where he had grown up.
Over the next ten years, the population of Little Falls would increase tenfold, to 5,000. This bustling community was no longer concerned with clearing the land so much as what to put on it. New farms, new homes, and new businesses—to say nothing of such booming industries as the Weyerhaeusers’ lumber mill—all needed lawyers. So did East Coast investors who were loaning considerable sums on Western farmland.
From the neighboring county, August Lindbergh watched his son’s practice flourish—enough to suggest there might be a political career in his future. To prevent his own past indiscretion from ever affecting his son’s career, on the afternoon of September 15, 1885, August Lindbergh took his common-law wife to Stearns County Courthouse to be formally married. The judge later said he understood that “August Lindbergh was a very conscientious man and believed in being one hundred percent American and that was probably a reason for an American marriage.” Lindberghs unknowingly subscribed to that story for generations. And when August Lindbergh died eight years later at the age of eighty-five, the obituaries described a model American. The papers gilded his reputation as a Swedish legislator, then spoke of his coming to America for religious freedom.
The old Swede had lived to see, in less than a generation, his son become one of the leading citizens of Little Falls, the most dynamic attorney in town. Over the next twenty years, C.A. Lindbergh alternately practiced with a partner or two (including his younger brother Frank) or on his own. He soon counted such companies as Little Falls Lumber, McCormick Harvester Machine, and Singer Manufacturing among his clients. No longer content closing deals for others, owning real estate became his passion, a means by which he could trade up.
He took advantage of the boom years by turning property around and by building in Little Falls. Four second-floor rooms in one of his buildings in town served as his office. Throughout these early years of land transactions, something more than C.A.’s success attracted other clients. “What first drew my attention to the man,” said his friend Thomas Pederson, “was the very evident respect with which his name was mentioned and the confidence and trust everyone seemed to have in him.”
Morrison County thought so as well, electing him county attorney in 1890. He chose not to run for reelection but did not lose his taste for public service. Even in private practice, which included a great deal of corporation work, “a poor man was never turned down because he had no money,” noted his brother Frank. “His sympathies were for the ‘under dog.’” Lindbergh lived modestly at first—in the boondocks, in the only Little Falls house on the west side of the Mississippi. Then he moved into the boardinghouse of Harriet and Moses LaFond, original town settlers, and met their daughter.
Mary LaFond was sweet and pretty, uncommonly refined for having been raised on the frontier; and he, with his career underway, paid serious attention to a woman for the first time. They married in April 1887 and moved into a substantial brick house he had built in town, where they settled into a kind of civilized domesticity most people thought impossible in still untamed territory. Mary was often talked about for the “fine home” she kept; and over the next five years she brought three daughters into the world—Lillian, Evangeline, and Edith, the last dying in infancy.
“He was a great home lover,” Mary’s sister later remarked; but C.A. was equally enamored of his twin careers of real estate and law. Indeed, Frank Lindbergh noted, he “worked hard always beginning early in the morning and he seldom failed to work after supper and into the night.” He began buying farms, which he rented out, offering the tenants the privilege of buying them on easy terms; he erected the first creamery in Little Falls; he bought the mortgages of settlers and sold them to Easterners who had money to invest in the community. He was an original shareholder of the First National Bank, and after but five years in town was asked to sit on its board of directors. The town’s other large financial institution, the German-American National Bank, offered him a large block of stock for the privilege of using his name as one of their directors. The transaction fascinated Lindbergh, leading him to question who had actually paid for his shares and to study banking practices.
In April 1898, C.A.’s prosperous life all but completely crashed. His wife began suffering from stomach pains, and a doctor in Minneapolis diagnosed an abdominal tumor. Not until Mrs. Lindbergh was under chloroform did the doctor realize that his patient was also several months pregnant. He said the only way to save the mother was to sacrifice the child; but two hours later, Mary LaFond Lindbergh—only thirty—died as well.
At first, C.A. found comfort in his family. His mother moved into the big brick house; and he hired a kindergarten teacher to tend to his children—ten-year-old Lillian and six-year-old Eva. But after eighteen months of grieving, he craved solitude. With the start of the school term, in September 1900, he sent his children to a boarding school in Minneapolis and threw himself into his work. He moved out of his house and into a room on the second floor of the large Antlers Hotel.
He had hardly unpacked when he noticed another recent arrival at the Antlers. She was the new science teacher at Little Falls High School—twenty-four years old and beautiful. It was not just her enormous blue eyes, fair skin, and shapely figure that made her so striking; it was the confidence she exuded, a worldly air hardly known in those parts. College-educated, she had also been born and raised in what many people considered the most sophisticated city west of the Atlantic seaboard. She was, in fact, the daughter of two of its best-known families—the Lodges and the Lands of Detroit, Michigan.
WITH ITS ADVANTAGEOUS SITUATION for boats and trains, and an abundance of natural resources, Detroit’s flowering had been inevitable. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some of its roads, notably Woodward Avenue, could be counted among the most beautiful residential streets in the country. In the rise of post-Civil War industrialism, the city came of age.
One of its renowned citizens was Edwin Albert Lodge, born in London in 1822. Traumatized by an alcoholic father, he left home in his teens for America. After several years of wandering, he found himself in St. Thomas, Ontario—halfway between Buffalo and Detroit—where he married a spirited beauty named Emma Kissane. By then Lodge had developed an interest in medicine, particularly the unconventional practice of homeopathy. Over the next ten years the Lodges traveled through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where he became a graduate of (as he later advertised) “one Allopathic, two Eclectic and four Homeopathic Colleges.” In 1859 they moved with their six children to Detroit, which had become a center of homeopathic medicine. There, according to one history of homeopathy, he established “one of the [city’s] largest and most lucrative practices ever enjoyed by any physician.” A formidable figure—tall, dark, and spare, with a scraggly beard—it was said “half the babies in Detroit were named after him.”
Lodge also found religion there. A member of the Church of the Disciples, Dr. Lodge became a fanatic, opposing most earthly pleasures. He forbade anyone in his family from dancing or playing cards; and on the Sabbath he further restricted reading newspapers or eating warm meals, because the cooking of them “prevents those preparing them from going to church.” Although he was not an ordained minister, he was frequently asked to preach. In preparing his sermons he would underscore the words of Christ in the New Testament in red ink, those of the Disciples in blue; he practiced writing the Lord’s Prayer in a space the size of a dime. Never far from controversy, he incurred the scorn of the orthodox medical community.
In time Edwin A. Lodge, M.D., became a cottage industry—as the subtitle on his stationery indicated: “Homoeopathic Chemist, Importer and Publisher.” His practice and Homeopathic Dispensary moved every few years. From one location, on Wayne Street, he published the American Homoeopathic Observer, which offered as many as twenty different pamphlets on homeopathic subjects in its advertisements. Thus, he administered doses of homilies and Scripture alongside such remedies as “Lodge’s Indian Tonix Elixir” and “Lodge’s Chinese Dye-Powder for the Hair.” He also delivered public addresses on nutrition, marriage, and midwifery to the good people of Detroit. These speeches pestled some common sense about healthy bodies with some slightly loony “scientific theories,” with a pinch of fire and brimstone thrown in. His “Private Lecture to Young Men,” for example, prepared “men at eighteen” for puberty—which he claimed was largely induced by “the hot-bed rearing of city life”—
by its unnatural excitements, by reading love romances, and the foul trash which is weekly retailed in sensual papers, by waltzes and other dances, by witnessing theatrical representations of love-plays, by operatic entertainments, by love-songs and lascivious poetry from the pens of Byron and other sensual poets….
A devout anti-abortionist, he urged young men to search for “true wealth” in a partner—“intelligence, affection, and health”—before replenishing the earth.
Had Dr. Lodge spent more time examining the health of his own wife, Emma, he would have observed that she was mentally ill—subject to extreme mood swings that culminated in rages. Within a few years of their marriage, he filed a bill of divorcement, which he withdrew when she promised to put an end to her “bad treatment, violent acts, threats and imprudences.” She proved unable to “reform,” however, stricken with what the next century would probably recognize as a chemical imbalance. Even after she died a few years later, Lodge wrote his mother, “No mention is ever made of that Xantippe who worried me of old,” and that “dead or alive I am not willing to have her spoken of by any member of my family in my house or out of it.”
Dr. Lodge lost no time in taking a second wife, one Christiana Hanson, a Norwegian widow of a sea captain. She entered the marriage with a son, who assumed the name Lodge; and they had four more children of their own. Three of the Lodge boys became doctors, and one of the sons from his second marriage, John Christian Lodge, became mayor of Detroit and one of its longest-serving councilmen. But for most of his life, Dr. Lodge criticized his children far more than he ever praised them, engaging in constant arguments, sometimes verbally violent behavior. He seemed to find peace only after he retired from the practice of medicine to run a farm on Pine Lake, about five miles from Pontiac, where he could soak up the beauty of God’s country.
The most compliant of the eleven Lodge children was Evangeline, from his first marriage. She learned to deal with her father’s tempestuous personality by quietly submitting. She worked long hours in the offices and the pharmacy and never engaged in the family quarrels. At twenty-five she married a man who was in many ways like her father.
Controversial and contumacious, Dr. Charles Henry Land was the most progressive dentist in town, often to the consternation of his colleagues. Like the Lodges, the Lands came to the United States from Great Britain by way of Canada. Some of the family had fought as Loyalist soldiers during the American Revolution, and one member had married into the family of General Winfield Scott, the hero of three wars and Supreme Commander of the Union Army. Abandoned as a teenager by his father, Dr. Land had sold newspapers on the streets of New York and worked as a meat packer in Des Moines before he found himself at age twenty-one in Chicago, apprenticing to a dentist. With all the zeal of an autodidact, Charles Land immersed himself in the science of oral medicine. Just when he had built his own successful practice, the great Chicago fire stormed through the city, taking Land’s office and home with it. He fled with little more than the clothes on his back, spending that night in October 1871 under a viaduct, where he covered himself in sand for protection. The next day, he persuaded the captain of a lake boat to take him up Lake Michigan and down Lake Huron to the eastern shore of Michigan—on credit.
Land arrived in Detroit practically penniless. As soon as possible, the twenty-four-year-old dentist hung out his shingle, which he literally painted himself. He met with immediate success; and over the next twenty years he revolutionized his profession. Inventing the porcelain jacket crown, as well as two dozen other patented devices and procedures, earned him his appellation, the “Father of Porcelain Dentistry.” In 1875, Charles Henry Land married Dr. Lodge’s daughter Evangeline. They moved into a brick house just below Grand Circus Park on Woodward Avenue; and over the next four years they produced a daughter and a son, whom they named after themselves.
Dr. Land proved to be as much of a firebrand in Detroit as Dr. Lodge was. The “gold work” dentists vociferously opposed Land’s experiments with porcelain and called him a “quack.” And when Land began to advertise his practice, publicly announcing his new techniques, he hit a nerve. The Michigan Dental Association expelled Land from their organization over the issue. “That suits me,” he told The Evening News. “I want to be removed from any institution which can be so intolerant and nearsighted as this one is proving.”
To make matters worse, he formed a company to sell the Land System of Dental Practice, complete with the rights to practice his methods and a guarantee against patent infringers. Many in the profession objected to such patents and raised money to fight Land in court. At one point, he offered to grant his patents to the dental profession, if it would adopt his methods of dentistry; but he was refused. One against many, he spent most of his resources on lawsuits and went bankrupt.
Young Evangeline and young Charles had to grow up with other embarrassments. Mildly eccentric, Dr. Land busied himself with peculiar activities. An amateur lepidopterist, entomologist, ornithologist, taxidermist, and fungiphile, he surrounded himself with his collections, growing the wild mushrooms in his cellar. In his spare time he made porcelain flowers and pottery, which he threw on a wheel he had fashioned from an old dental foot-engine.
It was difficult for the Land children to keep friends, because they moved almost every other year, the size of their house reflecting the state of their finances. Isolated, the Land children grew up appreciating solitude. Evangeline attended Miss Liggett’s private school and practiced piano as much as four hours a day. Furthermore, in an age when most fathers discouraged their daughters from becoming too educated, Dr. Land urged his daughter to pursue an additional year of high school at Detroit Central High School and—even more unusual—to continue her studies at the University of Michigan. She graduated in 1899 with a Bachelor of Science degree, having majored in Chemistry. She was by her own admission “a practical & matter of fact young woman.”
Evangeline was also engaging, lively, and utterly unpredictable. Long after her first cousin Emory Scott Land—a midshipman at the Naval Academy who would rise to the rank of Admiral—had invited Evangeline to be his prom date in Annapolis, he referred to her as “the most beautiful girl at Ann Arbor.” One of her Lodge cousins thought he was paying an even higher compliment when he recollected years later that Evangeline was, in fact, “a perfect picture of her grandmother, Emma Kissane.” The similarity was more than skin-deep: Evangeline Lodge Land was beginning to exhibit symptoms of her grandmother’s mental instability as well.
Because of financial pressures, Evangeline’s mother suggested she might teach, thinking her daughter would apply for a position in Detroit. But young Evangeline had other ideas. “How wonderful it would be to go to some mining-town and teach chemistry to the children of miners,” she mused. “And if I had to live on the outskirts of town, to have a great St. Bernard dog to carry my lunch.” A teachers’ agency informed her of an opening in Little Falls, Minnesota.
Evangeline had never heard of the town; but she was able to locate it on a map, little more than one hundred miles downstream from the Mississippi’s headwaters. And in Captain Willard Glazier’s Down the Great River, she found a thrilling account of his travels along the Mississippi. The description of his momentous visit to Little Falls, where he was greeted by a brass band, clinched Evangeline’s decision.
She traveled by boat to Duluth, Minnesota, where she caught the only train to Little Falls. It arrived at four o’clock one early-September morning, 1900, offering Miss Land a reception far less festive than Captain Glazier’s. From the depot, she went directly to the nearby Antlers Hotel and moved into a room with a bay window in the third-floor tower overlooking a lumber mill. Later that day, the school superintendent, Joseph Seal, introduced her to C.A. Lindbergh, and they soon began to walk together to their respective workplaces.
Within weeks of their meeting, Evangeline was writing home to mother about her new friend, “the brightest lawyer in Minnesota.” Before their relationship could get too serious, Mrs. Land wanted details about his reputation and the state of his health; she wondered if so successful an attorney might also be unused to physical labor and effete. “He is about four or five inches taller than I,” Evangeline replied. “He has light hair and blue eyes. He has broad shoulders and a chest that would make you laugh at your own question.” And though he was forty-two to her twenty-four, “He can swim across the Detroit River all day long back and forth as long as you will be willing to watch him when you ask him. He is strong and awkward and well. He hasn’t one unsound tooth. So there.” Furthermore: “He has not one single stain on his reputation. He does not drink, chew or smoke. His greatest fault is that he works too hard.” Beyond that, Evangeline reported that C.A. had two young daughters who were attending private school in Minneapolis and that her presence was suddenly “causing great commotion because I have interested this man whom everybody caters to …”
Love had not completely blinded Evangeline to the rest of Little Falls, which, after Detroit, seemed pretty hick. Evangeline was homesick; and her job—which paid $55 a month—only exacerbated her feelings. She felt underappreciated and overburdened, carrying a teaching load of Botany, Chemistry, Physical Geography, Physiology, and Physics. She and her principal came to loggerheads that December, when she broke school rules by moving equipment from the unheated attic-laboratory to her classroom. “I shall tell you one thing,” she wrote her mother, “surely that no matter what becomes of me & my friend the lawyer, Little Falls Minnesota shall not see so very much more of this chicken.”
Dr. Land advised his daughter to resign at the end of the year, thinking she might come home. Mr. Lindbergh advised the same, hoping she might stay. He tried to change her mind about Little Falls by showing her the best of its social scene. He courted her in a two-horse carriage he had hired, and he sometimes kept Evangeline out as late as nine o’clock, so they could ride home in the moonlight. Soon she was writing home that “this town is not such a wild and woolly place as I first thought it.”
A guilty conscience as much as a hasty heart was driving the stoical lawyer from Little Falls. That autumn he received disturbing reports from the school in Minneapolis to which he had farmed out his children. Miss Olive Adele Evers, headmistress of Stanley Hall, cared for the school’s only boarders, the two young Lindberghs, in a red-brick house next door; and she wrote their father that they were both extremely anxious little girls, potential discipline problems who provoked fights with the other children. More disturbing was that Eva was biting her fingernails down to the quick and Lillian was literally tearing at the skin of her fingers until they bled. “Two more forlorn children never existed,” Eva recalled sixty years after her stay at Stanley Hall. “We suffered extreme homesickness, made father’s visits miserable, and did not really adjust to the abrupt change.” They yearned for a home.
Evangeline Land was, in fact, only twelve years older than Lillian, closer in age to C.A. Lindbergh’s children than to him; and when he asked her to marry, he never defined how he expected her to play her role of stepmother. Nonetheless, she quit her job and returned to Detroit for Christmas vacation to mull over his proposal. In January their engagement was announced.
Charles August Lindbergh and Evangeline Lodge Land married in Detroit on March 27, 1901, at her parents’ home. The small parlor there limited the number of guests to closest relatives and a few friends. Because emotional displays made both the bride and groom uncomfortable, they wanted to steal away without being showered with rice. So when Grandmother Lodge had to leave early, Evangeline and C.A. each took her arm to aid her down the steps and into her carriage. Nobody paid any attention when they got in the carriage as well, driving off to her house, where they had already brought their suitcases earlier in the day.
They journeyed west for a “wedding tour” of ten weeks. They stopped at Pike’s Peak and the Garden of Gods in Colorado before pushing on to California, where they traveled the entire length of the state—from Tijuana in Baja to the Oregon border. By Sacramento, Evangeline was giving in to feeling that marriage could be sheer bliss … until one night, while taking a long walk, she and C.A. found a deserted garden filled with roses. She picked a bouquet of them and carried them back to their hotel room. Only then did C.A. rebuke her for committing “an offence against the law,” insisting that they would have to leave town as soon as possible. Not until the sting of the lecture had worn off did she realize that he had been joking. It was an early glimpse of her new husband’s perverse sense of humor.
The “happiest part of our trip,” Evangeline Lindbergh would later recall, was spent in The Dalles on the Columbia River in northern Oregon, where they rafted and hiked and camped out, several weeks alone together, at peace with nature. They returned to Minnesota on the Northern Pacific Railroad.
On the way to California, C.A. had asked Evangeline whether she would prefer to live in the town of Little Falls or on the outskirts, in the country. Whichever, he wanted to give her the house of her choice. When she did not hesitate to choose the latter, he told her about a farm two and one-half miles south of Little Falls, on the western bank of the Mississippi. Upon their return, Evangeline saw a most winning aspect of her husband: He had written ahead to a business associate named Carl Bolander, an architect and builder, who had constructed a temporary camp for the newlyweds—a tar-roofed, two-bedroom shack of pine, with a kitchen and screened-in porch that could double as a dining room, right on the banks of the river at the foot of their new land.
Most of the Lindberghs’ one hundred twenty acres sat on the bluff, one hundred feet above the riverbank encampment. Pikes Creek and a road running parallel to the river cut through this magnificent woodland, thick with white pines, oak, elm, poplar and linden. They agreed to build Evangeline’s dream house at the edge of the cliff, where the land dropped precipitously into the so-called “valley-by-the-river”—affording a spectacular vista of the Mississippi.
The three-story house of pine and cedar had double linings of tar paper for extra warmth. Each of the public rooms on the ground floor was finished in fine wood—the den in California redwood, the dining room in quarter-sawed oak, and the living room in birch. All the floors were varnished maple. The second floor had four bedrooms, with a fireplace in the master bedroom. The third floor had servant’s quarters and a billiard room. The house also featured two bathrooms, with water pumped by a gas engine from a well dug seventy feet deep. An oversized furnace that burned either wood or coal heated the hot-water radiators.
Evangeline L. L. Lindbergh, as she now signed her documents, was not the only one to realize her dream that summer. Lillian and Eva were released from Stanley Hall. They returned to Little Falls with open arms, embracing their new mother.
“It was a very happy summer,” Evangeline remembered of 1901, when the new family shantied along the river. Lillian and Eva slept in a tent; and a maid cooked and cleaned. One day Evangeline, in a freshly ironed gingham dress and feeling good about her country life, slipped on the grass and fell all the way down into the cold river up to her armpits. C.A. stood on the bank and laughed, which infuriated her. But with each day’s progress on the house, Evangeline found ways to overlook her husband’s flintiness and his dry humor.
She was even warming to Little Falls, delighting in its reputation “for having two saloons for every church and a church for every creed.” C.A.’s office was over one of the saloons. His practice was thriving, and he seemed to derive even more pleasure from his home. That autumn the outside of their house was painted light gray with white trim; and by January the inside was furnished—featuring an upholstered davenport and mahogany bookcase, a piano, Oriental rugs, mahogany-colored drapes, oil lamps, water-color paintings, and a beautiful white and gold china service. “It was wonderfully peaceful and beautiful there,” Evangeline recalled, “—not a building in sight across the river—nor thru the trees in any direction. Evenings we had only the sound of the rushing water, and birds’ songs.”
And soon to come … a baby’s cry, for Evangeline Lindbergh was entering her ninth month of pregnancy. At the end of January, she went to Detroit, so that her uncle Dr. Edwin Lodge could deliver the baby in her parents’ home. C.A. visited the last week of the month and saw Evangeline comfortably settled into the large front bedroom of the house on West Forest, then left to attend business back home. He planned to return in a few weeks as the due-date approached.
On the bitter cold night of February third, Evangeline went into labor. Dr. Land sent a telegram to Little Falls, urging C.A. back to Detroit. Uncle Edwin arrived at seven o’clock and went to bed, to rest until the attending nurse summoned him around midnight. He administered no anesthesia. At 1:30 the next morning, the nine-and-one-half-pound child was born.
For months C.A. had crowed that he knew the “new babe would be a son”; and eager to please, Evangline immediately asked in his absence, “Is it a boy?”
“It is,” her uncle replied.
“Are you sure?” she inquired.
“Dead sure,” he said. “Just look at the size of those feet. He is fine. You ought to have seventeen like him.”
But he would be her only child—named for his father, with the addition of a syllable to the middle name: Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Soon after the birth, he was bundled up and laid on a chair near an open window, where he breathed in the winter air.
“Life’s values originate in circumstances over which the individual has no control,” Charles Lindbergh would write seventy years later, after an odyssey that took him to places nobody had ever journeyed before. Then, with a peculiar sense of detachment bordering on the divine, he described the beginning of his strange, singular destiny by adding: “I was born a child of man, in the city of Detroit, on February 4, 1902, of Swedish, English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry.”