Free Fordlandia by Greg Grandin

Tolksdorf were comical Kurtzes, they were pursued by their own Michiganian Marlow, John R. Rogge. An “old time lumberjack” and a “natural born mill man” from the Upper Peninsula, Rogge had been at Fordlandia since the first tree was felled in early 1928, having been sent by Henry Ford to join Blakeley’s advance team. Since he had survived with his reputation relatively intact both the opportunism of Blakeley and Villares and the ineptitude of Oxholm, Cowling, before he left the plantation, named Rogge assistant manager and told him to keep an eye on Oxholm.

    Rogge was in a staff meeting when Francisco, the marooned cook, showed up at the office with a tale straight out of a “dime novel.” It was night when Johansen and Tolksdorf put Francisco on shore, and he didn’t realize until morning that he was on an uninhabited island. To stay meant to starve, so he lashed some driftwood together and floated a full day downriver until he came upon the hut of a rubber gatherer, who gave him some food and shelter. He then bargained for a canoe, taking twenty-four days to reach the Ford plantation, “through dangerous rapids, tropical rains, and all of the hazards of travel on the Upper Tapajós.” After a short discussion among the staff, Rogge decided that the procurement of usable seeds was a top priority and that he would head an upriver expedition to search for the two wayward Ford agents. 5

    Rogge was happy to go. Born on a Wisconsin farm in Langlade County, he was one of nine boys, three of whom moved to northern Michigan to look for work in the timber industry. He felt at ease in the Tapajós valley, which, like Michigan’s vast forests, was sparsely populated. If the Amazon was hot and humid, the eastern Great Lake plains of the Upper Peninsula were similarly swampy and moist and made miserable by horseflies and other insects during a good part of the summer. Rogge was also used to organizing life and work around the change of seasons: most of Upper Peninsular logging was done in the winter, when the cold hardened the roads and froze the swamps, allowing easier access into the forest. And he was no stranger to water transport: Like the Amazon, the remote Upper Peninsula was cut through with rivers, which before the arrival of the railroad served as the main arteries for loggers, who built camps on their shores. 6

    John Rogge with young rubber tree .

    Rogge thought his “sleuthing of a Scotchman” and “a German” would allow him to escape the familiar routine of the work camp and leave behind the relatively unimpressive lower Tapajós for the real Amazon. Northern Wisconsin, where he grew up, is steeped in Native American culture and history. Yet by time the “American lumberjack,” as Rogge described himself, came of age in the early twentieth century, Great Lakes Indians like the Potawatomi, Menominee, and Ojibwa found themselves struggling to survive, victims of population decline, forced removal policies, and coerced assimilation. Rogge, therefore, hoped that his trip would provide an opportunity to encounter true Indians, of the kind that lived in the “real, untouched jungle.” He gathered a team together, including a few Brazilians who knew something about seeds, and outfitted a small steamboat—open to the weather except for a small thatched sleeping cabin—with a two months’ supply of food and equipment. As they set off from Fordlandia, Rogge and his men made the most of what anthropologist Hugh Raffles has called “hospitality trails,” routes long used by European and American explorers, scientists, and businessmen as they traveled around the Amazon. On these routes, native labor did the hauling, cooking, cleaning, and poling (when rapids prohibited the boat’s passage), and planters, merchants, town officials, and priests provided shelter and sustenance. 7
    Rogge was impressed with the skill of his barefoot and naked-to-the-waist boatmen, who occasionally had to jump overboard to