Trees fell and dams were built to provide a constant water supply for the sawmills taking down the dense pine forest. Nearly 200 people had once lived in this wet-weather place but years later, tourists would continue to visit the silent, once bustling ghost town. When the short-lived mining boom ended, resident miners, prospectors, saloonkeepers and shopkeepers, and other gold rushers abandoned Rainy Lake City only years after the city had been established in the northwoods. ( This little-known Native American society was once as powerful as the Aztecs.)Īround the same time, loggers and gold miners succeeded the long-gone voyageurs. In Minnesota, the Ojibwe now live on seven reservations: Red Lake, Bois Forte, Grand Portage, White Earth, Leech Lake, Fond du Lac, and Mille Lacs. But by 1900, the Ojibwe were forced onto reservations around the Great Lakes region in the U.S. The voyageurs relied on the Ojibwe as guides and canoe makers, as well as providers of herbal medicine and spiritual advice.
Veritable iron men, the voyageurs often paddled up to 55 strokes a minute, dipping their paddles in unison as they sang about lost love, the weather, or animals. Avants (“front men”) stood in the bow navigating, while gouvernails (“rudders”) stood 30 feet back in the stern with paddles as long as six feet. Traveling in brigades of four to eight canoes, they pushed west in their quest for pelts.
These hearty mountain men-famous for their wilderness chorales-paddled oversize birchbark canoes, trading and freighting furs from the far reaches of North America back to Montreal. The park is named for the French Canadian traders, called voyageurs, who traveled through the interconnected border lakes more than a century before the nation’s founding. The Ojibwe harvested rice around the Boundary Waters and trapped fur animals, trading their pelts to French Canadian explorers, who arrived in 1688, for ammunition, flintlock rifles, blankets, and axes. The Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa and Anishinaabe) have lived in the area since at least the 1600s, after migrating from the East Coast in search of food. Together, these protected acres of aqua-wilderness are known as “the Boundary Waters.” Voyageurs National Park flanks the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park, and other state and national forests. To this day, traditional folklore holds that Wataway are the spirits of ancestors dancing in the sky to celebrate life and remind onlookers below that we are all part of the celestial wonder of creation. The park is one of the many reasons that northern Minnesota is one of Nat Geo’s Best of the World destinations. At Voyageurs-designated an International Dark Sky Park in 2020-this spectacle happens as often as 200 nights a year. Sometimes, they morph into heavenly versions of a delicate cedar frond or stream water diverting off rocks. Shimmering green, pink, or blue, the ribbon- and curtain-shaped lights strobe into searchlight beams or flare up into what appears to be an interstellar explosion. Properly positioned in the darkest places below, Earthlings can bear witness to the bombardment called the northern lights, or aurora borealis. The Earth’s magnetic field deflects these detrimental rays and particles. Located above the ionosphere, as high as 400 miles above the Earth, the magnetosphere is being bombarded by debris and radiation streaming from the sun. The light displays can be seen when the sun produces the ideal radiation during clear nights from the higher latitudes of the planet, where the magnetosphere weakens. But travelers who venture to Minnesota’s only national park-one of the country’s least visited-are rewarded in the coldest months with some of the best northern lights viewing in the contiguous United States.
A wintertime trip to Voyageurs National Park is not for the faint-hearted.
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