The stranger-than-fiction tale of how a real Minnesota island became ‘Moosylvania’

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The animated TV cult classic “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” often poked fun at Minnesota.

Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose lived in Frostbite Falls, Minn. — a spoof on International Falls. And the pair often visited the “soggy shores” of an island way up north called Moosylvania, said to be Bullwinkle’s birthplace.

For three years back in the 1960s, a real Minnesota island actually became home to the fictional Moosylvania. Jay Ward, the show’s eccentric and irreverent creator, leased a tiny island in Lake of the Woods, called it Moosylvania and traveled the country petitioning for its statehood.

A reader asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, to find out more about this wacky publicity stunt.

With the help of a Warroad, Minn., historian, we were able to track down the actual location of the erstwhile isle of Moosylvania. Minnesota’s far-flung Northwest Angle had a key role in this super-silly pop culture moment — which culminated in an ill-timed visit to the White House in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis.

“It is just a really funny and really cool piece of Minnesota history,” said Brady Swanson, museum manager at the Warroad Heritage Center.

From the beginning, Minnesota was a running gag in the show, which ran from 1959 to 1964 and was sponsored by General Mills.

Ward, who grew up in California, likely came up with the setting of Frostbite Falls because he was once a fan of the Golden Gophers, according to the book “The Moose That Roared.” In the late 1920s the team’s star quarterback, Bronko Nagurski, was from International Falls.

Later, as the show’s heroes thwarted over-the-top Cold War-era villains Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale in episode after episode, its writers introduced a new Minnesota setting: Moosylvania.

They didn’t exactly make it seem appealing. In one segment, Rocky pipes up over the whine of a mosquito: “Boy, what a terrible place!”

“Situated directly between the United States and Canada, Moosylvania has the distinction of being constantly fought over by both countries. The U.S. insists it’s part of Canada, and Canada insists it’s part of the U.S.,” says the narrator.

“But why do we come here on our vacation?” Rocky asks, setting up Bullwinkle to deliver the punchline:

“Because after two weeks in Moosylvania, anyplace else in the world seems like heaven.”

In 1962, Ward was unhappy with how the network was promoting his show. So he and publicist Howard Brandy came up with the idea for a wild Moosylvania statehood publicity stunt.

Ward approached the show’s editor Skip Craig, who grew up in Minnesota. “You’re gonna buy an island!” Ward told Craig, according to “The Moose That Roared.”

Craig got in touch with an uncle who was a surveyor, and they started going over maps.

“We finally found a dentist who’s got this dinky little island,” Craig said in an interview for “The Moose who Roared.” “And he thought this was hilarious. ‘Gee, that’s funny,’ he said. But he still wouldn’t sell it.”

The island in question is called Collins Island, near what is now Flag Island Resort, said Swanson. At the time, it was owned by Warroad dentist Dr. John Larson.

“They asked to buy it. I said no. They argued. Finally they told me what it was all about,” Larson told the Grand Forks Herald at the time. He ended up leasing it to them for three years. He charged them about $1,500, according to Craig’s account.

Craig and his uncle rode on a single engine sea plane above the little island to get aerial photos for the campaign. “On the way out there, [the pilot] buzzed the shore and said, ‘I’m gonna find you a moose,’” Craig recounted in “The Moose That Roared.”

“And he did. He’s yelling out, ‘There’s a moose. Hey, Bullwinkle!’” he said. “So we fly out there and take pictures. There’s a swampy area and a hilly area, really a pretty little place.”

Ward and Brandy headed out from California on a Moosylvania tour that October, collecting signatures in a bid to make the island the “52nd state” (never mind that there were only 50 to begin with). They drove a van that played music like a circus calliope and stopped in 22 cities across the U.S.

When they arrived in the Twin Cities, Ward told the Minneapolis Star that they were having trouble defining the boundaries of the island “just north of Minnesota and south of Canada.”

“Our surveyors keep getting swallowed up by quicksand,” he said.

Ward, sporting a hat that made him look like Napoleon, took his petition all the way to Washington, D.C.

“Jay had this huge list of names, signatures for statehood for Moosylvania,” said Brandy in the PBS documentary “Of Moose and Men.”

The guard at the White House gate told them to “turn around and get out of here,” Brandy said, adding that Ward found the guy’s attitude “rude.”

“That afternoon, I took the photographs that were taken of us in the car by the White House, and I went to the AP office, and I said to them, look, we tried to get in to the White House, and they wouldn’t let us. I thought Kennedy had a sense of humor.”

Someone at the AP then showed them photos of Russian ships with missiles on the way to Cuba, Brandy said.

“We arrived at the White House on the day of the Cuban missile crisis,” Brandy said. “So nobody paid any attention to us even though we were very funny.”

That part of the tale “is just kind of like the cherry on top of the cake on just how ridiculous this stunt was,” said Swanson, the Warroad historian.

These days, Moosylvania is a “part of the Northwest Angle folklore,” said Swanson.

The Larsons later sold their island but held on to a small trove of Moosylvania memorabilia. Larson’s daughter Barb Larson donated it, including a campaign flyer and a vinyl recording of Moosylvania’s state song, to the Warroad Heritage Center.

“The official state song goes, ‘Where it rains and snows and it hails and blows from the first of June until the 31st of May,’” Swanson said.

The collection also includes letters from Ward and Craig to Dr. Larson.

“Thank you for making Moosylvania possible!” Craig wrote to the dentist.

“P.S. Thanks to you and everybody up there for being such good sports. I was afraid you might get a little miffed at the way we described your area,” he wrote. “It’s really very beautiful, but this had to be funny.”

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