Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor Page B

chapel that Christmas vacation would be spent at the College in academic pursuits. Six boys left on foot in the afternoon, leaving baggage behind and a student body of four souls: Borden, Smith, Godfrey, and Weiss. The four “are in a desperate state, afraid to disobey, afraid to remain,” wrote Mr. Reithman in his journal. “They enrolled here expecting much and are reluctant to abandon ship, though I have argued with them. I believe they trust me too much and think that matters will improve so long as I remain. God help me. I must go and take them with me. Our President is crazed.”
    He told Dr. Watt that the College must be closed. Dr. Watt replied that he would sooner kill himself. “It is no time to be giving in to fear,” he cried. “This institution is the only one! It stands alone, friendless,far from any sympathetic soul! If we retreat now, sir, we permit ignorance to stand unchallenged for years to come!”
    On the afternoon of the 18th, shots were heard from the woods and shouts—a Mr. Slocum from town ran out from the trees and yelled to the lookout, “I have killed him!” They followed him back the way he had come and found the bear humped in a pile as if he had tried to gather himself for one last leap. His blood lay steaming on the snow, bright red, a great burst of it.
    Mr. Slocum took the skin for himself and four big steaks. He hacked off the head and said he would come back for it. Four boys and Mr. Reithman put the rest of the meat on a sled and hauled it to Main, and that night they ate a good part of it themselves—Dr. Watt said he had no stomach for bear—roasting it over an open fire, a feast that got livelier as it lasted on into the night. They ate with their fingers half-cooked bear meat and sang song after song, and piled more wood on the fire, until the flames nearly reached the treetops. They piled every stick of wood they could find on the fire and went off for more, and evidently that was when the second bear attacked.
    Two boys, Emmett Borden and Alton Smith, had found a fallen birch and were carrying it back toward the bonfire when they heard crashing behind them and dropped their load and ran. The bear pursued and caught them just short of the fire, where a third boy, Miles Godfrey, watched in horror. Emmett was bit in the throat and perished on the spot. Alton, a brilliant student who later embarked on a distinguished career in public life, suffered gashes on the chest and shoulders from the animal’s trying to drag him away, and bore scars to the day of his death in 1908. Miles Godfrey was thrown to the ground and his foot nearly chewed to the bone, but recovered, and eventually made his fortune in the grain trade in Minneapolis and Chicago. Mr. Reithman hurled chunks of ice at the beast and drove it away. Mr. Weiss was not present, having gone to bed. Mr. Reithman obtained a new position at Carleton College in Northfield and taught there for fifteen more years until his untimely death in a boating accident. Mr. Weiss remained at Albion College until the spring, his mind unhinged, and had to be removed to the state asylum at St. Peter, where he lived until his decease, the date of which is not known.

    The winter of the bears ushered in the Panic of 1857, when Minnesota Life Insurance & Trust Company gravely and gracefully crashed and banks in St. Paul stopped dealing in legal tender; when the investors of the New Albion Land Company opened the treasurer’s strongbox and found dried grass, some gravel, and a few feathers; and when every piece of paper held by New Albion speculators became a piece of paper. Deflation was followed by a plague of dysentery. The grasshoppers came in August, from the west, a black funnel cloud of them on the 7th, the sky turning black with bugs on the 12th. Those who had scorned speculation in favor of honest labor now found their crops destroyed by the infestation.
    That August, the poet Putnam wrote:
    Were I a bird, a wingèd bird,
    And sped the