The Rum River, one of Minnesota's wild, scenic, and recreational rivers, begins at Lake Mille Lacs and winds south for 145 miles to the Mississippi River at Anoka. Its name is thought to have resulted from white settlers mistranslating the Dakota word for "Spirit" as "Rum." The Dakota, the original residents of the Lake Mille Lacs and Rum River area, called Lake Mille Lacs "Spirit Lake" and knew the river as the "River of Good Spirits." In the mid-1800's, as Minnesota's fur trade declined and logging became the state's fastest-growing industry, the Rum River lay at the center of the great pine lands that began 40 miles north of Minneapolis. Along with the St. Croix, Snake, and Kettle Rivers, it served as a river highway for logs from forests of white and red pine. From the early 1850's to the early 1870's, thousands of logs floated downstream on the Rum River into the Mississippi and then to St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, where they were sawed into lumber. Today canoes and inner tubes float the river instead of logs, and old remnants of the logging era remain in some deeper pools. This stretch of the river is well known for smallmouth bass fishing; Minnesota Department of Natural Resources fisheries surveys found that about one-half of the total fish population in this segment is smallmouth bass, though walleyes and northern pike are also common, and success depends greatly on water levels.