It was a hot and smoky afternoon when a small group gathered in Shafer, Minnesota for a trip down the St. Croix River in mid-July. We were there to experience the river and talk about its geographic history—its place in the world, its connections to the surrounding region, its intersections of land, water, and wildlife, the ways people have navigated it over time, the maps they’ve made. The occasion was a guided paddle I was leading with St. Croix Falls canoe and kayak outfitter Paddlefish Adventures.
The smoke from wildfires in forests far to the north lay heavily on the water, stifling any breeze, leaving the surface glassy enough to reflect the orange light of a sinking sun filtered through the haze. Hot and humid air contributed to the thick, soupy atmosphere.
Many have traveled this river before us. The St. Croix is a natural highway and part of a wide road network. It connects Lake Superior in the north to the Mississippi in the south, Lake Mille Lacs in the west to Lac Courte Oreilles on the east. It connects prairies and savanna to forest and bog. It connects people to places.
Stream of life
The first priority after getting on the river was to find a place to get in the river. The summer, which had not only been hot but dry, had caused low flow and water temperatures well into the 80s. We wanted to really cool off, so we headed for a spot where spring water came tumbling down a steep bank and splashed into the river, cooling it slightly.
The cold water only extended a few inches from shore. The warm river quickly absorbed it. I walked into the water up to my shoulders, let the current push against my body, talked with my companions.
The first time the St. Croix showed up on a map was 1688 by French cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin. Its inclusion was probably based on reports from Daniel Greysolon, the first white person to travel the river in 1679. He passed this place with voyageurs and Native American guides on their journey south. In 1683, he built a trading post at the head of the St. Croix River, called Fort St. Croix, which appeared on Franquelin’s map five years later.
The St. Croix’s human history and its geography are intertwined. Since the first people ventured into this region in the wake of receding glaciers more than ten thousand years ago, the river and its tributaries have been the circulatory system of civilization.
St. Croix connections
As we descended the river, it was easy to imagine the many generations who had gone before us. But rarely were those journeys confined to the St. Croix alone, like our evening adventure. The St. Croix was the thoroughfare that intersected many other major travel routes.
The St. Croix’s link to Lake Superior is perhaps most famous, particularly via the Brule-St. Croix Portage, the famed two-mile trail between the headwaters of the two rivers. It has carried noted explorers, anonymous traders, and countless generations of Indigenous people. Today, it’s part of the North Country National Scenic Trail, and it has stones along its course bearing the names of early European explorers who crossed the portage.
Local historians will tell you that this portage was actually less popular than its alternative. An 80-mile trail the French called “The Grand Footpath” was possibly more traveled, going from the St. Croix to Chequamegon Bay on Lake Superior and providing easy access to Madeline Island, the region’s major settlement during several different eras.
Franquelin, Jean Baptiste Louis. Carte de l’Amerique Septentrionnale: depuis le 25, jusqu’au 65⁰ deg. de latt. & environ 140, & 235 deg. de longitude / par Iean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, hydrographe du roy, à Québec en Canada. [or 1910, 1688] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002622264/.
The Snake River is the westernmost river in the St. Croix watershed and provided an important route to Lake Mille Lacs, a metropolitan center for millennia. Mille Lacs drains through the Rum River south to the Mississippi, but a St. Croix tributary gets within five miles of the huge lake. The Knife River is the stream that gets closest to Mille Lacs, joining the Snake near Mora, and it too has a long human history.
In 1659, the first white men known to set foot in what would become Minnesota were two French traders named Raddison and Groselliers. They were also the first Europeans to make direct contact with the Dakota people, and it is believed that the auspicious meeting occurred at Knife Lake, along the Knife River. It makes sense that such an event would occur along such a major travel route.
Finally, on the east side of the watershed, the St. Croix is connected to its neighboring river systems by other portages. The best known route was from the Namekagon River overland to Lac Courte Oreilles, a large lake at the headwaters of the Chippewa River. The portage is located about five miles south of the city of Hayward, Wisconsin. This portage first showed up in European reports in 1767, when traveler Jonathan Carver ascended the Chippewa and crossed the portage. In 1784, fur trader Michel Cadot established a trading post on the Namekagon end of the trail.
Indigenous maps
Mention the first European map and the question immediately arises about geography before 1688.
Ojibwe, Dakota, Sauk, Fox, and other people who have called this place home for thousands of years have known the region intimately. Often nomadic before the American government confined them to reservations, they needed ways to document and share who went where and when. The journals of Edmund Ely, a Presbyterian minister who was based on Lake Pokegama along the Snake River in the 1830s and traveled across the region by foot and birchbark canoe, usually with Ojibwe guides and companions, offer some insight.
Describing a winter journey from Fond du Lac to Lake Pokegama in January 1837, Ely mentioned Native American “guide boards,” a technique for conveying geographic information.
“Thursday 26 Started this morning as soon as light enough to see the road travelled as fast as our strength would permit. At one time we turned off on another track, & debated sometime [which way to go]. Found a large piece of bark hanging on a pole, pointing onward. This is an Indian guide board—on it was written as follows, ˄˄ || ˄˄˄˄ ˄˄. [Indicates encampments or rest stops.]
“Friday 27 About 10 oclk [sic], came to a branch in our road leading off to the left hand. We of course were at a stand. Here were also two tracks, & the new road was very plainly marked on the trees, & bushes broken. A couple of saplings were thrown across the old path, & a stick similar to that of yesterday, set, pointing into the new road. We could not find the bark which had been put into the stick. We were also about 6 encampments from where the bark hung yesterday, as that bark had said.”
Frances Densmore’s book “Chippewa Customs,” first published in 1929, offers more about the people’s methods of geographic communication.
“The Chippewa had a system of conveying information publicly by means of characters which were familiar to all the tribe. This was chiefly used in the messages that were outlined on birch bark or cedar and left by travelers for the information of those who might follow them. Such a message, outlined with charcoal, was placed in the cleft of a stick that was stuck in the ground pointing in the direction taken by the travelers. A thin, flat chip of cedar was frequently used as a tablet for these messages, as it was stiff and easy to write upon, but the eyer-ready birch bark was also used for this purpose. The outlines of these messages comprised a fairly accurate representation of familiar objects together with a simple system of abbreviation and combination.
“Travelers wishing to indicate the direction of their journey put up a stick in the ground, slanted in the direction they had gone. This stick usually had a bunch of hay tied to it, in order to attract attention.”
According to an Ojibwe woman named Nawajibigokwe who shared information with Densmore, Nawajibigokwe’s people had methods of mapping.
“Nawajibigokwe stated that maps were sometimes drawn on birch bark for the convenience of persons traveling through a strange country. Such a map was drawn by her, showing the territory traversed by her father and his family in going from Sandy Lake to Crow Wing Agency for their annuities. The downward trip occupied two or three days and the return trip took about six days. This map contained much detail and indicated a general knowledge of the geography of the country. The map conformed to the shape of the piece of paper on which it was drawn, so that relative distances and points of the compass were not. strictly maintained. The principal interests to a man traveling in a canoe would naturally be the intersection of streams and the presence of lakes, through some of which a stream passed, the lake being a widening of the river.”
Cedar Bend
Somewhat cooled by our submersion in the river, we proceeded downstream. I often come to the river in unfavorable conditions: rainy, cold, and so on. I do this in search of solitude, a natural condition of the St. Croix that is not always available on busy weekends. Wildfire smoke also seemed to keep most others away, and despite the unpleasant air, we did enjoy being alone on this big, beautiful stream.
A little farther down, after weaving through a few islands,we came to a big turn in the river, where the St. Croix’s southwestern course hits a high bluff and turns due south. This is Cedar Bend, perhaps the most important point of pre-European geography along the river.
In 1825, the American government gathered people from the Ojibwe and Dakota tribes at Prairie du Chien, the Army fort and trading center along the Mississippi River some 200 miles south of here. The Americans’ goal was to stop fighting between the tribes so that more furs and other resources could be extracted by traders. The government convinced numerous Indigenous leaders to sign a treaty that established a boundary line between the two tribes. It described the line as connecting various points across what’s now Minnesota and Wisconsin. On the St. Croix, it was at Cedar Bend.
“It is agreed between the Sioux and the Chippewas, that the line dividing their respective countries shall commence at the Chippewa River, half a day’s march below the falls; and from thence it shall run to Red Cedar River, immediately below the falls; from thence to the St. Croix River, which it strikes at a place called the standing cedar, about a day’s paddle in a canoe, above the Lake at the mouth of that river.”
What is notable is not so much the treaty as the language: “a place called the standing cedar.” The treaty is referring to a point on the river known to both the Dakota and Ojibwe, as well as the American officials (who included William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition). Long before 1825, this place had a name.
The cedars still stand. This is one of the only places along this part of the St. Croix where there are white cedars growing next to the river. These beautiful evergreens do particularly well in wet soils, like the banks of a river. They also grow very slowly and can live for centuries. A white cedar’s lifespan can easily reach 400 years, and some trees make it past 1,000. There are several big, beautiful cedars stretching over the water from limestone banks seeping groundwater. It’s possible to paddle right under some of them. There’s a good chance some of these standing cedars were the same ones referred to 200 years ago in the Prairie du Chien treaty.
Border water
At the bottom of Cedar Bend is a railroad bridge built in 1887 for the Soo Line, connecting Minneapolis to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. One span of the bridge once pivoted on a massive cog on a sandstone block pillar in the middle of the channel, opening to allow paddlewheelers through, closing to let trains cross. It was like a stoplight or roundabout for this intersection of river and rail routes.
Just below the bridge, our group came to a fork in the river. One small channel disappears east behind a sandbar, and a larger channel curves to the west. Today, most boat traffic follows the big channel down the Minnesota side. But that was not the case until a century or so ago; when the boundary was determined between Minnesota and Wisconsin, following the “main channel” of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers, it was the eastern channel that was primary.
James Taylor Dunn, who wrote the first major history of the St. Croix River in 1964, blamed “indiscriminate farming, poor highway planning at Taylors Falls, and badly located gravel pits” for altering the hydrology. These combined forces caused the river to abandon its eastern channel and instead opened up a backwater called “McLeod’s Slough,” inundating a swampy area and redirecting the ceaseless flow of the St. Croix.
“Over the years this dross has washed past the bridge where the river, narrowing into a trough, is confined and turbulent, and a short distance below it has piled up to form an immense bar which effectually dams the main channel and sends the river rushing through narrow McLeod’s Slough. The St. Croix, therefore, instead of favoring the Wisconsin side, now hugs the spring saturated Minnesota shoreline. This fast-flowing, deep channel has somewhat widened McLeod’s, an area with boulder-lined banks that are pleasantly reminiscent of portions of the wilder, more remote upper valley.”
The old main channel is now narrow and shallow and rarely traveled, and the eastern channel is wider, deeper, and carries many boats. But the state line still follows the eastern channel. If the boundary had been drawn later, it surely would have followed the western channel. The end result is that Minnesota is about 600 acres larger than it ought to be, at Wisconsin’s expense. Much of this floodplain area is part of Minnesota’s Calvin Rustrum Wildlife Management Area, and is rich habitat for waterfowl and other creatures.
A trail through time
For old time’s sake, our group of paddlers took the Wisconsin route, at one point passing old wooden pilings where paddle wheelers once tied up. The water was several inches deep at most.
The two channels rejoined after a mile-and-a-half, the waters gently mingling at the confluence. The smoke had slowly lifted as the evening wore on, and while it was still hazy, there was some color in the sky as the sun set.
The current carried our canoes and kayaks steadily south, just as it has transported so many others over a great span of time, and as it hopefully will continue for eternity. The water has found its own course to the sea, and humans have a calling to follow it.
Greg Seitz is a co-founder of Agate and the publication’s webmaster. He also operates St. Croix 360, a website and newsletter dedicated to the St. Croix River watershed. Greg is currently working on a book about the region for the University of Minnesota Press.
