Road Trip Through History: The Things We Missed on the Great River Road, Part 2
For those of you who are coming in late, My Own True Love and I recently took a week-long road trip along the northern leg of the Great River Road along the Mississippi River. We drove north to the river’s headwaters in Lake Itasca and then worked our way south to the Minnesota-Iowa border, stopping at anything that caught our attention.*
We saw a lot of fascinating things, but there were also plenty of things we missed, including:
- The Friday night country swing dance at Huckleberry Finn’s restaurant in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin—which occurred right across the street from the hotel we stayed in. We’re already plotting to make that dance our first night out when we drive the next stretch of the road. A dance is a terrible thing to waste.
- A number of small historical sites related to the days when Minnesota had active iron mines, most notably the Croft Mine Historical Park. It’s built on the site of the the Croft Mine, which was an active underground ore mine from 1916 to 1934 and includes a simulated tour of an underground mine. This is the sort of thing my nerdy heart delights in.
- The Forest History Center near Grand Rapids, run by the Minnesota Historical Society. I must admit, this is the one I most regret because, as I realized over the course of the week, I know next to nothing about logging. Exhibits include a living history replica of a nineteenth century logging camp and a fire tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
- The Charles Lindbergh House and History Center at Little Falls and the Sinclair Lewis Historic Site in Sauk Center.
- The Twin Cities: because realistically, we could have spent the entire week in Minneapolis and St. Paul. We’ll be back.
For the most part, the things we failed to see were the result of a fundamental scheduling problem. Many of Minnesota’s historical sites and tourist draws close or reduce their hours to weekends-only immediately after Labor Day. Because of the constraints of our own schedules, we were there a month too late. On the other hand, if you wait for the perfect time to make a trip, you may never go anywhere.
As the week went on, however, we became aware of one thing we weren’t seeing because it didn’t seem to be there: information on the history and culture of the Native American peoples of the region, specifically the Ojibwe and Dakota. At best the various historical sites and museums that we visited gave us hints of events, half-told stories, and broad generalities. I wanted the same level of detail that was devoted to say, the mining industry. If you know of museums or historical sites that would help us fill the gap, let me know. In the meantime, I'm making a reading list.
We’re not done with the Great River Road: the stretch from Iowa to Arkansas remains as yet unexplored. Next up, Indian mounds in northern Iowa!
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Travel Tips:
We made several fabulous stops that were not exactly historical, but that I strongly recommend:
- The National Eagle Center at Wabasha, Minnesota—Excellent exhibits and a close up view of rescued eagles.
- The Red Wing Shoe Museum—Unexpectedly fascinating. The history of an iconic American company, an introduction to how boots are made, different ways to evaluate a pair of boots, and profiles of Red Wing boot wearers. Be warned: you’re apt to fall in love with an expensive pair of boots in the store downstairs from the museum. I’m saving my pennies.
- Red Wing Pottery—A tour of a working pottery. (Soup bowls are cheaper than boots.)
* If I haven’t said it before, kudos to Minnesota for making it easy to stay on the Great River Road. Great signage, people. We almost didn't need a map.
Road Trip Through History: Local History Museums, Logging Trivia, and the Lumberjack Sister
My Own True Love and I make a point of stopping in local history museums when we’re on the road. On our recent road trip along the northern leg of the Great River Road, we visited three local and/or county historical museums.(1) There were several others that we failed to visit because they were closed for the season,(2) closed on the day we were in their town, or their hours didn’t accommodate our schedule in some way. (Or perhaps our schedule didn’t accommodate their hours.)
The museums that we visited were different in fundamental ways, but they shared one common thread: the changing role of natural resources in the development of their communities. We saw discussions of the interaction between waterways, prairies and wetlands and how the arrival of European-American settlers changed the balance between them. (I, for one, had never heard of the oak savanna, a transition area between prairie and hardwood forest.) We saw exhibits on the fur trade, agriculture, logging, and granite quarries, and the support industries that grew up around them. (Wheat farms, for instance, led to the establishment of flour mills, horse markets and wagon makers in country towns. So obvious once you think about it.) And exhibits that demonstrated the impact of the rise and fall those industries on specific towns.
Several bits of historical detail from the logging industry particularly caught my imagination:
• In the early days of logging in the north woods, the loggers used oxen to pull logs to the rivers and lakes. Once the logs reached the water, they were transported to timber mills in the form of rough rafts by river drivers, known as “river pigs.”(3)
• In the winter, loggers made ices roads to allow them to pull loads of logs on sleighs. They cleared and leveled the road in the fall. Once the weather was cold enough, they used a water tank wagon to flood the road bed with enough water to create about a foot of solid ice. Then a “rut cutter” made ruts for the sleigh runners. Throughout the hauling season, night crews worked to maintain the quality of the ice roads.
• In 1887, the sisters of Saint Benedict built a hospital in Duluth and then created a primitive form of health insurance for loggers. They sold logging companies and individual loggers “hospital tickets”. At an annual cost that ranged from one to nine dollars, a hospital ticket entitled its holder to care at one of the Benedictine hospitals in the region, assuming the lumberjack’s injury was not due to drinking or fighting. One member of the order, Sister Amata Mackett, became known as the Lumberjack Sister. Possibly because she was almost six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds. For thirty years she went from camp to camp, traveling by train when possible and by foot or snowshoe if necessary. Men eagerly awaited her annual visits. She not only sold lumbermen hospital tickets, she also darned socks, baked pies, listened to lonesome lumberjacks, and provided onsite medical care.
Who knew?
(1) Four if we count the Crow Wing County Museum, which we arrived at fifteen minutes before it closed: just long enough to use the washrooms, whip through a single gallery, have a meaningful conversation with a museum staff member, and curse the fact that we didn’t have more time.
(2) Unlike places further south, where October 12th has become the official end of the tourist season, Minnesota takes a conservative view and begins to shut down tourist draws at the end of September.
(3)This pinged memories for me of a book I read as child in which a young girl escaping from something bad floated down the river on a timber raft (probably disguised as a boy). She also cut and stacked cords of wood for sale. Anyone?
Road Trip Through History: Crow Wing State Park and the Red River Ox Cart Trail (with a brief aside on ghost towns)
My Own True Love and I almost didn’t stop at Crow Wing State Park. It was late on a dreary afternoon. We’d had a long history nerd day already. And it wasn’t entirely clear that there would be anything to see.
But all the (very vague) descriptions of the park said it was the site of an important pre-Civil war frontier town and a major stop on the Red River Ox Cart Trail. We had been tantalized by bits and pieces about the Red River Trail on historical markers ever since we crossed into Minnesota several days before. We decided we couldn’t pass up the chance to learn more.
It was a good choice.
It is true that Crow Wing State Park doesn’t have much to see as far as history-nerdery goes: a gentle trail with a series of interpretive signs (1) and an antebellum Greek Revival house in the throes of restoration. If you want a living history program to interpret the past for you, this is not the site for you. If you can make due with an interesting story and standing in the place where history happened, you will be just fine.
The park is located at the confluence of the Crow Wing and Mississippi rivers. It is also located at the confluence of two frontier stories: the rise and decline of the trading town of Crow Wing and the history of the Red River Ox Cart Trail. (2)
The American Fur Company (3) established a trading post in the region in 1823. When the fur trade declined in the 1840s, the town of Crow Wing became an outfitting center for the logging trade and an important stop on the Red River Ox Cart Trail.
The Red River Trail was a set of three overland trade routes that ran between Winnipeg in Canada and St Paul in Minnesota from the late 1830s through the early 1870s. Thousands of heavy two-wheeled wooden carts, made with spoked wheels that were designed to pass over rocky river beds and through soggy marches, carried Canadian furs south and supplies north. They traveled in caravans that often numbered more than a hundred vehicles. Each cart was pulled by a single ox. By tying each animal to the cart in front of it, a driver was able to handle as many as ten carts. By the 1850s, caravans of 500 carts arrived in St. Paul on a regular basis. It was smuggling on an large scale: an attempt to evade English laws that imposed heavy tariffs on imported goods from the United States and gave the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company a monopoly on trading in Canadian furs.
Crow Wing prospered alongside the illegal fur trade. It was a rowdy frontier town that served not only as a center of the fur trade but as the political headquarters for the powerful Ojibwe leader Hole-in-the-Day. Crow Wing reached its peak in the 1860s, with a population of about 800 and some thirty buildings. Two events led to the town’s demise. In 1868, the Ojibwe nation, members of which made up a substantial portion of the community, was relocated to the White Earth Reservation. In 1871, the Northern Pacific railroad bypassed Crow Wing in favor of nearby Brainerd.(4) By the end of the decade, Crow Wing was a ghost town.
And speaking of ghost towns:
To my surprise, ghost towns were a recurring theme of our trip. More than once we saw small exhibits dedicated to towns that had grown up to support the fur trade, the logging industry, or mining and withered away because industries closed, transportation routes changes, or county seats shifted. A chilling reminder of the impermanence of the things we build.
(1) Most of them in bad condition. A park employee told us with great excitement that new signs are on the way. I am pleased to report that the few new signs that were already in place are highly informative. Give it six months or a year.
(2) Apparently, the area was also the site of a significant battle in 1768 between the Sioux and the Chippewa, part of an ongoing war in which the Sioux struggled (unsuccessfully) to defend what is now Minnesota against the invading Chippewa/Ojibwe. Unfortunately, this is the sum total of what the park historical markers told me—and more than I knew going in. One of the other things I learned over the course of our adventure is the depths of my ignorance about Native American history. I plan to do something about that.
(3) Founded by John Jacob Astor in 1808 to challenge the dominance of the Canada-based Hudson’s Bay Company—a name you’ll see again in another paragraph or so.
(4) The arrival of the railroad led to the demise of the Red River Trail as well