PBS counts on Gen Z to keep Minnesota history quirky

Minnesota history is more than land grabs, lumber barons, milling and mining. It's also a fake Finnish saint, a smelt parade and a mongoose facing a federal death sentence, per "Minnesota Historia."

Now in its second season, the quirky docuseries from PBS North explores the nooks and crannies of Minnesota's oddball past through a playful, youthful lens.

"What the hey, let's throw our mukluks into the ring," is how 26-year-old "Historia" host Hailey Eidenschink describes Duluth's failed bid to host the 1932 Winter Olympics.

Ken Burns this is not. The humor-packed, 10-minute episodes, produced by Gen X-er Mike Scholtz, a longtime Duluth-area documentary filmmaker, have the fast pace and chatty style of a TikTok video. The show, available on YouTube, is deeply researched, down to the photo of Julia Roberts visiting the BWCA's Root Beer Lady on a youth group trip. But it's also fun — as in an 11-year-old wearing a bear costume who makes repeat cameos.

Eidenschink never imagined she'd parlay the "super-duper small theater stuff" she did at tiny K-12 Climax-Shelly Public School (there were just 11 students in her graduating class) into becoming the young, winking guide to Minnesota's weirdo past.

But the onetime Glensheen Mansion tour guide has been a fan of tall tales, myths, social histories, and folk stories — "things that are not necessarily history with a hard 'h' " as she puts it — since writing a report on Bigfoot in fifth grade. Hosting "Historia" sits squarely in Eidenschink's wheelhouse of making the past more exciting and accessible.

"Pulling apart these weird, off-kilter tidbits shows that humans have always been kind of weirdos, and we've always been doing really questionable stuff," she said. "That's what makes humans humans."

1. The first musher in the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon is a ghost. At the Lower 48's premier dogsledding race, the staggered release of mushers begins by sending John Beargrease's spirit through the gate, to honor Minnesota's "fastest, coolest, most dog-sleddingist" mail carrier, who delivered along Lake Superior's North Shore. Also, every Beargrease racer is legally sworn in as an official USPS mail carrier and ferries letters to the end of the route.

2. "Phantom kangaroos" have been spotted in Minnesota. As a cryptozoology enthusiast, Eidenschink has an insatiable curiosity about animals whose existence is unsubstantiated or disputed. This includes "phantom kangaroos," marsupials supposedly sighted in places they don't naturally appear — including Anoka and Cloquet.

3. Shipwreck hunters roam the Great Lakes in search of 6,000-plus sunken ships. Jerry Eliason of Cloquet is a wreck-hunting legend who made his first deepwater discovery in Lake Superior, of the SS Onoko, in 1988,using a $149 fish finder. He's part of a small crew of especially successful searchers whose credits include Lake Superior's SS Benjamin Noble — a "Loch Ness Monster" wreck, as ships of special significance are known.

4. Duluth's winter sports infrastructure once included the world's largest curling facility — as well as a hockey amphitheater whose walls are now part of a grocery store. "This used to be my grocery store, and I had never noticed that the exterior walls don't all match," Eidenschink noted. That amphitheater once hosted hockey powerhouse University of Minnesota-Duluth's first team, nicknamed the "Pedagogues," or teachers.