Ginseng, The Divine Root by David A. Taylor

Author:David A. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 2006-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Everybody in St. Peter who could not otherwise make three dollars a day was out in the woods digging sang. The Red Wing Sentinel ran a banner headline: GINSENG FEVER. In Chatfield, some residents made roughly a hundred dollars in a week of digging. Minnesota was catapulted to the front of ginseng-producing states.

People around the Big Woods saw ginseng as a godsend. The Minnesota Statesman published poems about the root. The town of Mankato threw a ball in its honor. An announcement for that celebration said the dance would distract diggers from the “musquito bite or toil of delving for the bulbous root, whilst ‘tripping the light fantastic toe.’” You can imagine the scene in the town’s Union Hall, a clapboard structure on the main street near the river: the summer twilight lasting longest then, and the dance numbers following a familiar sequence, up to the newly composed Ginseng Polka.

The music faded quickly. By late June the boomlet had stalled. Roots had flooded into exporters’ warehouses back east faster than the market could absorb them. The price slumped. Still, the fling had helped many people make their mortgage payments and buy groceries, and for three years the state shipped more than half of the total U.S. ginseng harvest. Sometimes twenty-five tons left St. Paul in a single week. Although it never struck again with quite the same intensity, Minnesota’s ginseng fever simmered into the early 1860s. By 1861, the main diggers were the Sioux and Winnebago along the Minnesota River at the western frontier, along with smaller-scale diggers like farm boys and housewives who sold it for spending money.

In 1865 the Minnesota legislature passed “An Act to preserve and protect the growth of Ginseng.” It was probably the first regulation that restricted American ginseng hunting to a season, which the law set as May 1 to August 1. Digging at other times became a misdemeanor subject to a fine of up to a hundred dollars. The law aimed to reassure the moneymen back east that they could depend on a regular supply of quality Minnesota roots in the future. Yet within thirty years the root was just about dug out of Minnesota. By the 1890s, old-timers of the ’59 rush had grown nostalgic. Articles in the Faribault Republican and the Wright County Republican recalled the old days when ginseng saved Minnesota.

“What made the 1859 episode unique,” Lass told me, “was that it came when the Minnesota economy had crashed. So you found many people out in the woods collecting it who otherwise wouldn’t have been there.” In the article Lass wrote about the Minnesota Ginseng Rush for the state’s history journal, he had called it a “legendary” interlude that helped pioneers through perilous times.

“Are you aware,” he added slowly, “that the United States government at one point encouraged the production of ginseng?”

Near the end of our conversation, Dr. Lass mentioned that just a week before, he had spoken with someone who knew someone who reportedly had “gone out and gathered the wild root,” he said, the last word rhyming with soot.

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