Marguerite Bonga

A Minnesota Matriarch

Last week I featured Ozaawindib, the “first Swede in Minnesota.”

Because it seemed to be an Ojibway name, I had assumed Ozaawindib was an Indian, not a Swede. Apparently, I was not alone. Only recently have historians figured out that Ozaawindib and Jacob Fahlström were one and the same.¹

I had come across the name Ozaawindib when reading accounts of the early fur trade; along with Bonga, a name that did not seem to be Ojibway.

American Fur Company headquarters, Fond du Lac (Duluth) 1827

In 1820, Henry Schoolcraft, a geographer and Indian Agent, referenced Ozaawindib and Bonga in his narrative accounts of his travels. Schoolcraft met the French-speaking fur-trading Bonga family that year in Fond du Lac (Duluth):

While exchanging the usual salutations with them, we noticed the children of an African, who had intermarried with this tribe…They possessed as black skins as the father.²

Marguerite’s paternal grandparents, Jean and Marie-Jeanne Bonga, had been enslaved in southern Africa and spoke French. Little is known of her grandparents’ passage from Africa. Edward Duffield Neill,³ the founder and first president of Macalester College, claimed they’d been captured as prisoners by the British during the Revolutionary War in Illinois Territory.

Jean and Marie-Jeanne Bonga arrived on Mackinac Island in 1782 as slaves of Captain Daniel Robertson, a British officer. During the Revolutionary War, the British had built a fort on the island. In the straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, Mackinac Island became a strategic military asset.

Before he departed in 1787 for Montreal, Captain Robertson emancipated Jean and Marie-Jeanne Bonga. The Bongas went on to open the first hotel and tavern on Mackinac Island, a major hub in the fur-trade.

Their son, Pierre Bonga (1770-1831), became a prominent fur trader. He married Ogibwayquay (1779-1848), an Ojibway woman who had been born on Rabbit Lake, near Brainerd. They had six children.

Marguerite (1797-1880) was their second child. Two of her younger brothers, Stephen and George, became well-known voyageurs, translators, and treaty negotiators. Because the Ojibway referrred to non-natives as white, her brothers used to say they were the first white children born in Minnesota.

Marguerite’s brother George Bonga, undated photo

The same year Schoolcraft met the Bonga family, Jacob Fahlström known as Ozaawindib signed on with the American Fur Company in Fond du Lac (Duluth). His new trade route in 1820 took him along the Rainy River northwest to Lake of the Woods. This is also the year the American Fur Company established a trading post in Kah-bay-kah-nong (Warroad). Given his travels to and from company headquarters in Fond du Lac, it is likely Jacob Fahlström met Marguerite Bonga through her father and brothers in the fur trade.

Margaret Bongo and Jacob Fahlstrom, c. 1823

Jacob Fahlström married Marguerite Bonga in 1823 in Fond du Lac. By 1825, Fahlström was working near Fort Snelling as a blacksmith. Slavery was illegal in Minnesota territory⁴, however, there were slaves at Fort Snelling when Jacob and Marguerite lived there through the 1830s. Dred Scott — who in 1857 the Supreme Court decided had no legal standing to sue for his and his wife’s freedom even though they lived where slavery was not legal — had been enslaved at Fort Snelling in 1836.

Marguerite Bonga gave birth to ten children; two died as infants. The growing Fahlström family lived on a small farm in Coldwater Springs, two miles from Fort Snelling. Jacob continued to make his living as a guide and voyegeur.

Henry Schoolcraft. Beal Brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1832, Henry Schoolcraft hired Fahlström as his “Indian guide” to search for the source of the Mississippi River. Schoolcraft never mentioned Ozaawindib was a Swede. Schoolcraft took credit for finding the headwater of the mighty river and naming the place Itasca, even though he was taken there by a Swede in a canoe who already knew where it was because he learned from the Ojibway who lived there.

Around 1837, Fahlström experienced a religious conversion to Methodism at a mission at the Mdewakanton (Dakota) village of Kaposia (St. Paul), a few miles south of Fort Snelling. In Sweden, he had been baptised and confirmed as a Lutheran. Then he adopted much of the spiritual outlook of the Ojibway with whom he lived. As a Methodist, he put his faith in a God of love.

In 1841, Jacob and Marguerite moved about twenty miles south to Afton, Minnesota, where they established a farm to support their children. Jacob continued to travel to the north woods as a missionary among the Indians while Marguerite managed their household and business accounts.

Jacob Fahlstrom, 1850

Jacob died in 1859. Marguerite lived until 1880. They are buried side by side in the family cemetery in Afton, Minnesota.

In the novel, Kingsblood Royal (1947), Sinclair Lewis refers to the Bonga family. His protagonist, Neil Kingsblood, is a white middle-class man who discovers he is the descendant of a famous American frontiersman who had once been a slave; loosely based on the life of Marguerite’s grandfather. Kingsblood notices his neighbors treat him differently when they learn of his lineage and force him to move out of his all-white neighborhood. The novel invites readers to think about conformity to social norms when it comes to pride in heritage.

The true story of Jacob Fahlström and Marguerite Bonga surprised me in many ways because it challenged assumptions and beliefs I held about race, ethnicity, family, and identity. For example, the assumption I made from his name about the identity of Ozaawindib. Or that I needed to find marriage license records, when what I have discovered is that there may be no records for marriages à la façon du pays [in the custom of the country] and that these common-law marriages between Europeans and Indian women were the basis of fur-trading society and Métis culture. Women like Marguerite Bonga raised children within their own family and cultural traditions and worked to keep trading posts operating for nearly two centuries.

The Swedish, Ojibway, and African heritage in the Fahlström-Bonga family story shows me people have always seen each other as human, and worthy of love and respect.

1. Alicia Puglionesi. In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022). Greg Seitz, “Scandinavian wanderer settled in St. Croix Valley long before most immigrants,” St. Croix 360, Feb. 20, 2024. Barry Babcock, Bonga: A Safe Abode in the Wilderness (2023).

2. Henry Schoolcraft. Narrative journal of travels through the northwestern regions of the United States : extending from Detroit through the great chain of American lakes to the sources of the Mississippi River, performed as a member of the expedition under Governor Cass. In the year 1820.

3. Edward Duffield Neill. Some Facts in the History of Minnesota, Saint Paul: Pioneer Press Company, 1888:5). Neill is a controversial figure in Minnesota history and his perspective may be informed more by ideology than fact.

4. Slavery was not legal in Minnesota according to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.