Minnesota River Valley

Across 12,000 years of human history, native peoples and Euro-American settlers made their home in the Minnesota River Valley. For the native people who first inhabited the valley, hunting and gathering provided subsistence, and for many generations the river was the primary travel route along its 335-mile length. At the end of the last ice age, approximately 12,000 years ago, Lake Agassiz burst through its banks near present-day Brown's Valley, creating the glacial River Warren, which carved out the valley of the Minnesota and upper Mississippi Rivers. Today's Minnesota River is a small remnant of that glacial river. In the nineteenth century, native dugout canoes, settler keelboats, and more than 100 steamboats traveled the river, while today recreational boats and barges hauling grain from elevators in Savage move down the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Wildlife in the valley has also changed over time: wooly mammoth, musk ox, elk, wolf, and bison once roamed here, while today wild turkey, geese, ducks, deer, raccoon, muskrat, beaver, coyote, and fox may be seen. More than 90 species of fish live in the Minnesota River, though many have suffered from poor water quality, and wild rice once grew abundantly in the river and shallow flood plain lakes of the valley, especially in areas such as Long Meadow Lake.

Bloomington, Minnesota · United States