Steamboats on the Rainy River / Welcome to Minnesota

As part of the "Voyageurs’ Highway" of rivers and lakes, Rainy Lake and the Rainy River carried fur trade canoes for nearly two centuries before the first steamer, the Louise Thompson, entered service in 1875 to help build a canal and locks at Koochiching Falls linking the lake and river and encouraging Canadian homesteaders around Fort Frances, Ontario. The canal project was soon abandoned when the Canadian Pacific Railroad bypassed Fort Frances and opened frontier areas farther west, but steamer traffic on the 90-mile river route from Fort Frances to Rat Portage, later Kenora, on Lake of the Woods boomed with settlement in the 1890s. In 1894, 27 steamers and 29 barges carried 2,100 tons of freight and 20,086 passengers on the lake and river system, and in 1897 the new steel steamer Keenora made its maiden voyage, praised as a "floating palace" with electric lights and room for 200 passengers. Local hopes that such service would create summer resorts on both sides of the Rainy River faded as steamer traffic declined in the 1900s with the coming of rail service, and by the time the resorts became real, the excursion steamers were gone. Minnesota, the thirty-second state, grew as a collection of small farm communities, many settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany, yet its forests, open pit iron ore mines, and Lake Superior shipping lanes also drew other settlers and helped make it notably diverse. Known as the North Star State and the Gopher State, it is associated with Paul Bunyan, the Jolly Green Giant, Sinclair Lewis’s Gopher Prairie, and Garrison Kellor’s Lake Wobegon. Best known for its 15,000 lakes, with many town names tied to lakes, falls, rivers, rapids, isles, bays, and beaches, Minnesota also takes its own name from a Dakota phrase meaning "sky colored water." Lake Itasca is the source of the Mississippi River, and Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis inspired "The Song of Hiawatha," though Longfellow never visited the falls. Minnesotans take pride in the state’s natural beauty and have led in conserving resources and promoting quality of life.

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