A southern Minnesota sky with side oats grama, one of the 200 to 400 plants of the tallgrass prairie. —Photo: Jim Brandenburg

To get to Jim Brandenburg’s place, you drive 17 miles north of Ely, a town already just about as far north as you can go in Minnesota before you run into the vast canoe country that sprawls across both sides of the Canadian–U.S. border. There are only two major east-west roads,Brandenburg notes, between his home and the Arctic Circle.

The persistent dream of Jim Brandenburg’s prairie childhood was a log cabin in a northern woods, welcoming smoke curling up from the chimney. Later, he added wolves to the picture and the wilderness they need to live in. He pulled that dream off at Ravenwood—a cluster of small, elegant buildings that tumble along the bank of Judd Creek as it flows toward a 20-foot drop into a still, black pool. Made of stone and timber, the buildings are surrounded by 1,500 acres of wolves, ravens, bears, chickadees, wood orchids, clouds, and water that are one enormous studio for Brandenburg. He lives and works here with his wife, Judy.

Unassuming and kind, Jim Brandenburg is a high-profile personality in a country where few photographers reach star status. His pictures have appeared in virtually every national magazine, and in 1991, he received the World Achievement Award from the United Nations for “using nature photography to raise public awareness for the environment.”

In his photos, Brandenburg is after the big mystery —the eternal, untouched wild. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to recapture what they took away. To catch an image of the land before we chewed it

Atop a chunk of rock on this rescued prairie sits the jawbone of a long dead bison, part of the 60 to 70 million strong herd that once covered the American plains. —Photo: Jim Brandenburg

up,” says Brandenburg. The despoiled modern world paces just outside his photographs; he never allows it to intrude into images of a dead deer’s staring eye, a simple flap of birch bark wind-torn from the trunk, a wolf caught in midleap from one ice flow to the next. Now in his 50s, he is bringing that quest for the ancient purity of the world down to earth by saving and restoring the land that gave him his history and his start.

As a photographer, Brandenburg is associated mostly with the north country, specifically the wolves of Canada’s Ellesmere Island and northern Minnesota, but it is the windswept land of his childhood that holds him so tightly. He grew up on the prairie turned pastureland of Rock County that is the far southwestern corner of Minnesota. This land promised agricultural riches to Brandenburg’s German and Norwegian grandparents who were among the first settlers in this county. At that time, this prairie supported an estimated 200 to 400 species of plants per acre, but like most virgin prairie, it was plowed and grazed into oblivion. “You know, I’ll never forgive them,” says Brandenburg. “Why couldn’t they have kept some land aside? Just a small parcel here and there that would be untouched?… I’m pretty resentful,” he says, laughing at himself. Then a couple of years ago, Brandenburg got the rare chance to take what his ancestors did wrong and make it right.

Jim and Judy Brandenburg grew up in Luverne, Minnesota, a town of about 4,000 people supported mostly by farming corn and beans (soybeans). It’s a beautiful little town that’s still alive, no megadiscount stores yet to suck the local businesses dry and no multiplex to close down the Palace Theater that has been showing movies since the days of silent films.

But the town needs more than farming to bring in revenue, and so a couple of Brandenburg’s childhood friends asked him to open a gallery to pull people off Interstate 90 and into their town. Brandenburg turned them down, thinking it was naïve to expect people to leave the freeway and come to Luverne to see his pictures. But hi

The captivating wildflower, prairie smoke. —Photo: Jim Brandenburg

s friends persisted, and finally Brandenburg agreed, with the stipulation that it be a prairie gallery devoted to prairie education and preservation. His vision widened into taking that education to the school, restoring prairie around the school, buying more prairie, and putting up a learning center. “My friends kind of gulped at first… and a week later we were on our way,” says Brandenburg. In what is lightening speed for this kind of project, the city of Luverne built a nonprofit gallery. One hundred percent of the money from the sales of Brandenburg’s photos in that gallery now goes to educate people about the prairie and support restoration projects.

As a storefront was being renovated for the gallery, Jim and Judy Brandenburg established the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation run by a board of directors with a mission to “Educate, Promote, Preserve, and Expand Native Prairie in Southwest Minnesota.” Soon it got the chance to buy a piece of prairie in need of restoration.

From the farm where Jim Brandenburg grew up, you can look to the northwest at a long low island rising above the sea of corn and beans. The land is scattered with clusters of Sioux quartzite, a swirled pink and lavender stone covered with patches of pale green lichen. It’s a hard stone—on a scale of 1 to 10 with a diamond being 10, Sioux quartzite is a 7. This rock saved the 360-acre piece of prairie because no farmer would risk his plow trying to till the soil. Today the land is used for grazing Herefords, white-faced Angus, and Charlais.

When Brandenburg was a boy, he would come here. First as a hunter with a rifle and traps, then as a picture taker. This piece of prairie and the land that is now Blue Mound State Park taught him to love the earth, and his gratitude runs deep.

Ron Cole of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says he’s never had a community call him and ask for a wildlife refuge in its backyard, but two years ago that’s what the town of Luverne did. The service pu

Jim Brandenburg and his dog survey the prairie he roamed in his childhood and is now helping to restore. In the left foreground, a patch of diamond-hard Sioux quartzite rubbed smooth over the centuries by rough bison hides. —Photo: Jim Brandenburg

rchased the 360-acre prairie parcel with the help of the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation and the WM Foundation, established by Wallace and Mary Lee Dayton and their four daughters to make grants supporting environmental issues. Both the Brandenburg foundation and the service will work closely in the restoration and rebirth of this prairie. On August 10 this year, a bunch of folks rode on a tractor trailer out into the middle of this cow pasture to dedicate this piece of land and catch Brandenburg’s dream of a prairie grown high again with purple coneflower and side oats grama, big bluestem and blazing star. Burrowing owls would return, and maybe if we were lucky, prairie chickens would come back. It will take 15 years for this chewed-over piece of ground to resemble a real prairie again, but it has time, protected forever as part of the Northern Tallgrass Prairie National Wildlife Refuge.

Later that evening, after a bison dinner served in the new Luverne elementary school, several speakers talked about the prairie and what it means for us as a people to have lost more than 99.9 percent of America’s largest ecosystem. In Minnesota and Iowa alone, tallgrass prairie once covered 25 million acres. Don Hultman of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spoke eloquently of why the tallgrass prairie draws us to it “like a moth to light.” It is its rarity and its landscape, its flora and fauna, but perhaps most of all, Hultman said, “What really draws us to the tallgrass prairie is us… We are forever part of those who came before. Prairie helps keep that link alive… [saving the prairie] is a shining example of our love for ourselves and for those who follow.”

After the speeches, Brandenburg gave a slide show in the high school auditorium. Here were his finest images of the land where he grew up, including his very first wildlife photo taken with a plastic Argus camera of a curious fox kit approaching him through the tall grass. When Brandenburg talks of the land of his grandparents, his wife, his childhood, he is moved by memory and hope. He has traveled the world many times over, but here in this place, he feels “like a salmon coming home to the stream where he was born.”

This little patch of protected prairie—which now belongs to the public—is only a start. A Luverne civic group called Spirit of the Prairie, the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dream of an archipelago of prairie land, stretching from Split Rock Creek State Park south to this promising new parcel in Luverne. Tied together by biking and walking trails, these small but significant remnants of tallgrass prairie will give us a vision of what people looked out upon for thousands of years before the plow came.

On one of the larger outcrops of Sioux quartzite is a section of stone rubbed perfectly smooth and shiny by endless herds of bison. Jim Brandenburg likes to run his hand over it. With the awe of a young boy and the commitment of a grown man, he is recapturing a part of what his grandparents did not know enough to save and offering its wonder to the world.

by Martha Coventry

for more info on the Northern Tallgrass Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, call 320-273-2191 or visit http://midwest.fws.gov/NorthernTallgrassPrairie

for more info about the Brandenburg Prairie Foundation, contact Dave Smith at the Luverne Chamber of Commerce, 507-283-4061.

for more info on Luverne, Minnesota, go to: www.luvernemn.com.

THE UNIVERSITY AND JIM BRANDENBURG

Brandenburg donated a photo of the small yellow lady’s slipper to the University for this year’s Even Mother Nature Loves Maroon and Gold poster series. —Photo: Jim Brandenburg

As a junior college student, Jim Brandenburg was working as a photographer for the Worthington Daily Globe, a southern Minnesota paper that nurtured some of the state’s best talents, like Brandenburg, and the writers Tim O’Brien and Paul Gruchow. One day, University of Minnesota photojournalism professor Smitty Schuneman stopped by, and Brandenburg knew immediately that this man could teach him something important. But when Brandenburg came to the U to enroll, he felt overwhelmed, and he couldn’t get into Schuneman’s class.

So Brandenburg went to the University campus in Duluth and changed his focus from photojournalism to art. “Smitty Schuneman was horrified, and so was I, that I just took off. Just couldn’t deal with [the big campus]. Farm boy, you know.” One quarter short of graduating, Brandenburg got the opportunity to travel with Duluth pathologist Art Aufderheide to the Northwest Territories. Here he filmed the last group of Inuit to live the way they’ve lived for thousands of years before their move to government housing. Brandenburg went on to a highly successful career with National Geographic and as a freelance photographer. He’d love to go back to school someday.

In 1996, Brandenburg gave the commencement address at UMD. And this year, he donated one of his photographs—a picture of the small yellow lady’s slipper (Cypripedium calceolus var. parviflorum) in an old-growth cedar bog at Ravenwood—for the University's Even Mother Nature Loves Maroon and Gold poster series.

Free copies of Brandenburg's poster will be available at the Bell Museum on the Twin Cities campus on Friday, October 19, between 1 and 5 p.m. The newly issued paperback edition of his bestselling book, Chased by the Light, will be on also be on sale at the museum that day.

Notecards with this photo and posters can be purchased at cost from Office of University Relations, 6 Morrill Hall, 100 Church St., S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455. For more information, call Kim Hoffmann at 612-624-6868.