A Trip on the River

As Tom and I boated in and out of the ox bows on the Mississippi River today, I thought about what it might have been like taking a steamer up river to the Indian Reservation a hundred or more years ago in the heat of the summer. I wonder if I can use today's travels and compare them with a trip on the Steamer Alice? Does the following excerpt help you visualize it?

A trip to Red Lake is one of those things that we shall long remember with pleasure. As there are rapids in the river about six miles from the Falls, and a great many boulders in the stream, the Steamer Alice does not start from the village. A ride of eight miles by horse and buggy was necessary to bring us to the steamer. The Alice is not very large, being about 60 feet long by 14 feet wide, clear of state rooms on each side, but she is new and neat, and traveling by steamboat is decidedly different from the railroad car or a balloon. The distance by the Red Lake River to Red Lake is nearly 100 miles. It is a very crooked river and while the general direction up the river is to the east, yet the sinuosity of the river is so great and varied that it was impossible to tell in what direction we were going.

It was about 4 o’clock p.m. when the whistle sounded her departure and she headed up stream with her bow pointing south west, which quickly turned to north east and we continued to twist and turn through out the night. Half of the journey, the banks are high and the country has park-like appearance; deer dotted the water's edge, coming to drink in the evening. The prairie being covered with luxuriant grass--red topped largely dispersed with a great variety of flowers with beautiful glades and groves of trees alternating and relieving the eye from the prairie view and the question naturally arises, why is all this beautiful country kept for a few Indians who will never use it? As one approaches the lake, the banks get lower and the country changes from a prairie to a marshy appearance. The grass is wilder and more luxuriant, the finest meadows in the world, millions of tons of hay could be cut. Why isn't this bountiful crop utilized?

At sunrise we reached the Red Lake and as the fog lifted from the river and marsh and rolled eastward over the lake and banked on the lake like a great field of snow with clouds like icebergs in the back ground, everyone wished for a painters skill to fix the magnificent scene on canvas. The glassy like lake with its fringe of green, was but the setting to the stately gem of fog and cloud in which it rested.

From the outlet of the river to the agency is a distance of about 30 miles. The steamer stopped twice to take in wood, the possession of which was disputed by a hungry hoard of mosquitoes. In fact, these pests are the only drawback to the pleasure of the trip, they are not troublesome on the water.

The Agency was reached about 11 a.m. and we landed at a very dilapidated wharf--a disgrace to any thing under the exclusive charge of “Uncle Sam”. We wondered if we were expected to walk to the land a hundred foot on a log. It was decided the government thought the dock good enough for Indians and strange white men and especially women were not wanted.

Very much different than our travels of today. The fog indeed lay in the low areas and when we passed through it with the truck, it fogged up our mirrors. Although we trolled and cast, it didn't seem like 20 miles. I asked Tom if that was the same heron. There must have been at least a dozen sitting on the edge of the river eating fish. The deer came to the edge and with her fawn, swam across the oxbow to the other side.

We wonder, just what does make the river change its course?



If you asked someone for a river map, they just say, "They change too much". When you look at Google Earth, one wonders how much they have changed in 200 years.

When you compare Google Earth with a map, why is it so different?

Did they have floods too, like in Fargo?

Was it high water?

Ice jams?

Who would know?

How much as the Red Lake River changed since the late 1800's?

So many questions.

e