Hungry Jack Lake

Hungry Jack Lake History
By Maryanne Norton- 1998
As evidenced by Paleo-Indian stone tools found nearby, there was human activity in the Hungry Jack Lake area as early as 10,000 years ago. These people were nomads who hunted large game with spears tipped with locally quarried stone. As climatic warming began, about 7,000 years ago, cultural changes occurred, and the Archaic Indians began to hunt, fish, gather vegetables and use copper tools. The later Woodland Period, from 200 BC to 1650 AD, produced more cultural changes, including use of birch bark canoes, the bow and arrow, fabric weaving, net making and the addition of wild rice, berries and nuts to the diet. It was during the Woodland Period thattribes were organized.
Present day Cook County had been Chippewa land until the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe opened the area to white settlement. Mineral exploration soon followed. In the search for copper, silver and gold, the Grand Marais to Rove Lake Road, predecessor of the Gunflint Trail, was laid out around the east end of Hungry Jack Lake, on its way to the Canadian border.
A well-known story is that of the naming of Hungry Jack Lake. By the fall and early winter of 1873/74, federal surveyors were working in the area. They camped on the shore of an unnamed lake. When food ran very low, two of the surveyors snowshoed into Grand Marais while guide Andrew Jackson (Jack) Scott remained. Two weeks later as they approached the camp, one surveyor called out, "Are you hungry, Jack?" The lake immediately was named Hungry Jack Lake, inspired by Jack Scott’s two weeks of hunger and thirst.
The Gunflint Trail was extended to the west end of Hungry Jack in 1923, and the first buildings on the lake, two log cabins, were built by Jesse Gapen and Robert Wegg on a site they leased from the U.S. Forest Service for a resort. In 1924 Gateway Lodge opened to the public and was run by the Gapen family until 1958. The present lodge, now called Hungry Jack Lodge, is the third on this site; the first two burned in 1931 and 1972.
The Forest Service surveyed twenty-one lease lots for summer homes along the north side of Hungry Jack, on lakeshore extending east from the lodge to the West Bearskin portage. Benton and Mary Byers on Lot 1, just east of the lodge home built the first summer in 1923. During the 1920s and 30s, all lots were leased and cabins built, for a total of nineteen by the 1940s. The forest Service surveyed five more lots in the 1940s on lakeshore east of the Bearskin portage. Cabins were built on those lots by 1950.
The first building on Hungry Jack’s south shore, which is private land, was Swanson’s Lodge, built in 1935 by Anna and Algot Swanson. Swanson’s closed in 1970 and two of the cabins have been sold to individuals. The lodge and remaining cabins are used as a private retreat.
Sunset Point, now Hungry Jack Canoe Outfitters, was built in the 1960s and originally operated by Harry and Margaret Nolan. Other homes and cabins on the south shore, sixteen in all, were built from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Land on the south shore east of Mount Anna and on the east end of the lake is Forest Service land not open to development.
A small strip that fronts both Hungry Jack and West Bearskin Lakes in the northeast corner of Hungry Jack Lake is private land. Here, in the 1920s, Oscar Hauschild purchased old logging camp buildings for a summer home, accessible at that time only
by boat from Hungry Jack Lake. Later another cabin that became the home of guide Billy
Needham was built on this land. A road now reaches these locations.
At the very eastern end of Hungry Jack Lake a cliff rises almost two hundred feet out of the water. Known as Honeymoon Bluff, it is a popular spot accessed by a hiking trail off Clearwater Road. This too is federal land.
Logging in the Hungry Jack area was difficult because of the hills and rocky terrain, but in the late 1920s the General Logging Company built a logging railroad from Lake County to Rose Lake on the Canadian border. A spur line ran along the south shore of Hungry Jack from the west. When general logging failed during the depression of the 1930s, the spur line was abandoned and the tracks were torn up by 1940. Evidence of the logging road can still be seen along South Hungry Jack Road. The north side of Hungry Jack was not heavily logged and so today old growth white and red pines still stand on the summer home lots and along Hungry Jack Road.