by Lynne Diebel
That summer day at Traverse des Sioux, Nicollet’s map spoke to us not of war, but of river travel and adventure. Bob and I have canoed together on nearly sixty of Minnesota’s rivers: long challenging trips, but always downstream. Now here was a map that reminded us of a reality that we had often discussed as we paddled, that rivers are two-way roads for canoes, highways for getting places by water if you don’t mind paddling upstream. We had long talked of doing a river journey from place to place, using the river as a travel route, paddling upstream as needed, traveling to get somewhere, not just to float downstream.
Nicollet’s graphically beautiful and compelling map, titled Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River, includes the rivers of what are today the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Nebraska, and Missouri: a vast web of spidery interconnected river lines, filled in by short, closely spaced hachure lines that portray the land’s rounded rises, the degree and direction of the slopes. There are no roads on this map. And the network of river lines called to us.
With his fingertip, Bob traced the river route to our home in Wisconsin.
“Upstream on the Wisconsin?” I said.
“Sure, we can do it,” he replied. “The Indians and traders paddled upstream all the time. So can we.”
“What about getting from Black Earth Creek to Lake Mendota?”
“Portage wheels. On the back roads.”
The idea obsessed us for several years, an obsession that included the desire to have a copy of that map. Like many things possessed by government, the 1843 plates used to print the map were archived and forgotten, for over 120 years; in more recent times, governments have misplaced moon rocks given to states by the Apollo program. In 1964, Alan Wool-worth of the Minnesota Historical Society tracked down the original engraved copper plates for Nicollet’s map at the Army Corps of Engineers Lakes Survey in Detroit, Michigan, and in 1965, the Historical Society press reprinted the map from those original plates. We bought our copy for fifteen dollars, had it framed—for a lot more than that—and hung it on a wall at home, where it still resides. Bob’s handwritten “You are here” sticky note is still on the glass at the eastern edge of the map, right over our Wisconsin home.
Nicollet’s map, cropped to show the area traveled
We had our map, and long talks followed about logistics and water level fluctuation patterns, about which canoe was best suited to the wide range of river conditions we would face. Still, three years passed before we decided the time was right. And when we finally launched, it was not from Traverse des Sioux, but from the city of Faribault, Minnesota. I spent all my childhood summers on a lake just outside Faribault, in a farmhouse my great-grandparents bought in 1883, and Bob and I have spent time there with our children every summer.
We loved the idea of traveling from this beloved summer home in Minnesota to our home in Wisconsin. As we first planned it, the journey was about 376 river miles, about 100 of those miles upstream. But low water led us to shorten the route to 359 river miles, and when we encountered impassable debris dams near the end of the trip we portaged 24 of those upstream miles. Cedar Lake is drained by Devils Creek, a little stream that flows into the Cannon River, and the Cannon flows through Faribault and on to the Mississippi, 70 more miles downstream, north of the old river town of Red Wing. Down the Mississippi 164 miles, at Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park, we would head up the Wisconsin for 78 miles to its confluence with Blue Mounds Creek. We would follow Blue Mounds and then its tributary, narrow Black Earth Creek, upstream for about 24 miles to Cross Plains. Crossing into the Yahara watershed would mean a long portage, towing our canoe strapped onto portage wheels along about 10 miles of county roads to Pheasant Branch, a wetland creek that flows into Lake Mendota in Middleton. From the lake, it is an easy and familiar route, about 23 miles downstream on the Yahara to our home in Stoughton.
But as it is with some journeys, this one wasn’t easy. And it didn’t always go as we planned.
The river route we chose traverses the hilly Driftless region from its northwestern corner in Minnesota to its southeastern corner in Wisconsin. I’ve spent my life crossing this land. When I was a child, we drove on U.S. Highway 14 across the heart of the Driftless, headed for my Kentucky grandmother’s house. I would be so excited when the hills of the Driftless appeared, thinking, in my childish way, without any sense of how little time had passed, that we had already reached the hills of eastern Kentucky. In the late 1960s, going off to college in Illinois, I drove on newly minted Interstate 90, which roughly parallels what we called Old 14 but skims along the northeastern boundary of the Driftless instead of crossing its heart. Often I made that journey by train, riding the Milwaukee Road passenger line from Winona, Minnesota, to Chicago, crossing the Driftless by yet another route.
When Bob and I made our home near Madison, Wisconsin, a new era of I-90 road trips began, with four energetic children who begged to stop at Castle Rock to climb its Cambrian sandstone tower— geologically alluring, though not in the Driftless—and at the Mississippi River overlook on the Minnesota side to watch a river barge tow lock through the dam at Dresbach.
On each iteration of each route I too am drawn to the same familiar landforms—the Baraboo Hills, the Wisconsin River sandbars, the view west to the Mississippi valley from the upland rise by Limekiln Hill, a certain bluff along the Mississippi where spring water seeping from the limestone face becomes an aqua-tinted icefall in winter, the bend in the river road on the Minnesota side where the highway curves west as it swoops up out of the wooded Mississippi valley to the open fields of the plateau high above. It’s a landscape that I’m deeply connected to, in the way that terrain can imprint on our subconscious and become part of our souls. The physical course of the road is in memory after so many trips, almost to the point of recalling it mile by mile. But what of the other older route: miles of river road burnt into the memories of travelers hundreds of years ago? The landscape begs for deeper exploration, this time by river.
Rivers reveal only their narrow slice of the land’s breadth, but that slice is telling. Where the river has incised deeply, the land’s geologic bones are laid bare. The diversity of riverine ecosystems is often greater than that of the surrounding landscape. Rare plants sometimes survive on the steep slopes of river valleys because the farmer cannot plow there. Alas, invasive species often spread along rivers. The blue heron stalks the river but not the farmer’s field. The eagle watches both fish and paddler from his perch but rarely ventures into town. Secretive animals like the coyote, the fox, and the raccoon go to the river to drink. Others, the otter and the muskrat, burrow in its banks. The beaver builds his organic dam to create the deep pool he needs. Wooded river corridors provide textural relief from the monocultures that are modern agriculture and the hardness that is manmade landscape. Only when we strip the bold highway lines from our twenty-first-century maps do we truly see the thin blue lines of rivers, the original highways that served for centuries as the best way to get from one point to another. The river is a more primitive layer underlying the debris of modern life.
Down the Cannon
June the twenty-fourth. Stoughton, Wisconsin. Getting ready for a long canoe trip is a familiar ritual. Bob checks the canoe from bow to stern, inspects our paddles and life jackets, collects the camping gear from the jumbled storage bins in the basement, and makes a trip to the hardware store for the fuel that our little camp stove burns. I plan meals for two weeks, gather provisions, mix muesli and trail mix, sort the food into meals, each sealed in a ziplock bag. Packing clothes is easy: we wear the same thing every day and occasionally wash it out. We pile everything but the canoe on the dining room table and floor. One of us asks, “Where are the maps?,” remembering the time years before when we were almost an hour up the interstate for a three-week paddling trip in northern Minnesota before we realized that our river maps were still at home. Several times a day, I go to the website that tracks river water levels, fruitlessly hoping that rain
has fallen on southern Minnesota, bringing the water level up so we can start our trip at Cedar Lake. We load the truck, strap the canoe to the roof rack, and head northwest on Interstate 90.
June the twenty-sixth. Cedar Lake, near Faribault, Minnesota. The day dawns hot and dry, like all days for weeks now. Yesterday, on our scouting trip, we were dismayed but not surprised to find that the little creek that normally drains Cedar Lake into the Cannon River is not much more than a damp grassy ditch, victim of a primitive board dam at the lake’s outlet and several years of drought. Downstream of the two big dams in Faribault, the Cannon itself is low. A period of high winds is forecast on the Mississippi River’s Lake Pepin, which we will reach in less than two days, and paddling our open canoe in the high waves on that long, wide expanse of water will be dangerous.
But we’re packed and eager to go. As we stand in the kitchen talking, my grandniece Hannah assesses my paddling clothes—loose khaki pants, loose long-sleeved white sun shirt, shapeless hat—with the critical eye of a teenaged girl.
“You look like a beekeeper, Aunt Lynne.”
“Thank you, sweetie.”
Her mother Julie drives us the five miles to Faribault and a river access point just downstream of the Woolen Mill Dam. Two weeks earlier, after 144 years of weaving woolen blankets, the owners of the Faribault Woolen Mill Company had given up their financial struggle and shut down the looms, they thought for good. At the mill’s shuttered outlet store, we cross an empty parking lot, already sprouting weeds, to reach the river. I think sad thoughts of the soft woolen blankets they will no longer weave, blankets that have been an enduring theme in my domestic life, not knowing that the mill will reopen two years from now under new owners Chuck and Paul Mooty, to thrive, brilliantly in fact, perhaps auguring a similar future for the rivers of this beautiful corner of the world. Just upstream is the dam, a relic of the era when river power drove mills. It’s been over a century since it last generated power, but the impoundment behind it became the centerpiece of a city park years ago and dams like that are tenacious.
Others aren’t. During settlement times, everyone and his brother built a dam on the Cannon, a lively river with plenty of flow to power gristmills, and local fields provided a steady supply of hard spring wheat to grind in those mills: the mighty power of commerce reshaping the natural world. Local historians say at least seventeen gristmills operated on the Cannon and Straight in the nineteenth century, and Alexander Faribault, the part French, part Dakota founder of the city, owned one of them, the Straight River Mill. When wheat crops began to fail in the 1870s, the mills began to close and most dams were eventually removed. A few mill dams remain, and a hydropower dam was built at Cannon Falls in 1910. But the river is considerably less shackled than a century ago.
While dams are hard on fish, limiting their freedom to migrate up and down the river in order to spawn and thrive, an epidemic of dams can be cured. The more insidious problem of pollution developed more gradually and seems more difficult to reverse. In the 1930s, widespread fish kills began happening on the Cannon, and the river’s formerly excellent smallmouth bass fishery faded away. In 1958, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (Minnesota DNR) deemed the Cannon uninhabitable for fish, because towns along the river were dumping raw sewage and industrial pollution into the Cannon. Some of the most egregious incidents involved sulfuric acid, dye, fermented corn silage, pumpkin waste, and turkey blood and parts. By the 1960s, most of these same communities had built proper wastewater treatment facilities, though sewage still found its way into the river throughout the 1980s: the small town of Hope, upstream of Owatonna, illegally discharged raw sewage into the Straight River until 2008. It took time, political will, and taxpayer money for these unsavory practices to end, but they did. And the bass are coming back. Walleye, northern, bluegill too, and many other species now swim in the Cannon again, and trout still hide in cold spring-fed tributaries.
Mussels, often called clams, are staging a less certain comeback. The river mussel is an unremarkable-looking creature, at least on the exterior. Most species have a dark oval shell, ranging from one to seven inches long, with narrow concentric growth ridges and sometimes-knobby protuberances, and this rock-like exterior helps the mussel blend into the gravel-covered river bottom that is its preferred habitat. The mussel’s secret is that its drab shell is lined with shimmering pearlescent nacre, coveted for years by button makers. Residents of the Cannon Falls area remember the river being “paved with clams” in the 1920s, according to accounts given to the Cannon River Watershed Partnership (CRWP), enough mussels to support businesses that shipped the shells to button manufacturers. But after over a century of overharvesting, habitat destruction, and dams that blocked the movements of the fish they depend on as migratory larval hosts, mussel populations dropped so low that in the 1940s it was hard to find a live mussel in the Cannon. In 1987, a mussel census by Mike Davis of the Minnesota DNR turned up fifteen species in the watershed, an encouraging sign. During a subsequent census in 2012, Davis found sixteen species and said that eight of those species appear to be rebounding. To river scientists, the mussel is the canary in the coalmine, a key indicator of the river’s health. Whether you are a mussel or a human being who wants cleaner rivers, Davis’s results are good news. Davis calls this the Clean Water Act at work: when we improve wastewater treatment, we get cleaner water. Mussels depend on clean water and free-flowing rivers to survive, and these sensitive yet hardworking little bottom feeders return the favor by further filtering and cleaning the water themselves.
Beth Kallestad, executive director of CRWP, told me that in one sense the Cannon is cleaner now than in the early nineteenth century, because we no long discharge raw sewage and industrial pollution. But because the river now carries pharmaceuticals, household chemicals, water softener salt from wastewater, and road salt from storm water— inputs that are not monitored and whose potential impacts are not known—it is hard to say whether the water is cleaner. And it is increasingly clear that difficult-to-reverse changes in watershed hydrology— channel straightening, wetland ditching and tiling, the wholesale destruction of the flood plain—continue to degrade the river with sediment lost from agricultural fields along the river’s tributaries, the branches of the riverine tree that shapes the Cannon watershed.
Watershed is a term worth further description. The watershed of the Cannon is the land on which all surface water—rainfall and smaller streams—flows downhill into the Cannon. Watersheds are divided by ridges or high points in the landscape; thus to move from the river of one watershed into another often requires a portage over these land boundaries. However, the Cannon and the Zumbro and other river watersheds nest into the larger Upper Mississippi River watershed, making it possible to move from one of these watersheds to the other by following the Mississippi from one confluence to the next. It’s all about networking.
We stand with Julie on the heavily shaded riverbank, at the confluence with the Straight River, the big tributary that flows into the Cannon from the south, quietly muscling its way into this locus of river union directly across from our launch point. Flowing in from our right is the Cannon itself. The dam upstream aerates its waters and thin strands of bubbles on its dark surface trace the line of flow as it moves past the muddy bank where we stand talking. I like confluences. At these points where rivers join, I feel the physical reality of a riverine system: its connectedness, its overarching goal of gathering waters for the downstream journey that ultimately ends at the sea.
At many confluences, the smaller river is called the tributary and the larger, the main stem. This is the hierarchy of a dendritic river system, so named because its pattern is like that of a tree, with a main stem or trunk, and branches or tributaries. But here in Faribault the classification seems confusing. At their confluence, the Straight is larger than the Cannon, yet once they join, the main stem is called the Cannon: an apparently arbitrary decision made back when people started charting the river highways.
And as it is with some human labels for the natural world, river names can be fluid over time. The name Straight is alleged to be from the Dakota word owatonna, loosely translated as “honest trader,” but some say the river was named for the fact that it runs straight north. The Dakota called the Cannon River In-Yan Bo-Sda-Ta Wa-Kpa in reference to a striking sandstone spire; Nicollet noted this landmark on his map as “Inyan bosndata” (natural obelisk). It is said that the modern name Cannon is an Anglicized pronunciation of the name given by early French traders, La Rivière aux Canots—River of Canoes. Yet in 1838, Nicollet instead named the river the Lahonton, in tribute to a travel account written by another Frenchman, Baron Louis Lahonton, on a river he presumed was the Cannon. Somewhat as an afterthought, it seems, Nicollet added (The Cannon) to his map as well. A scientist with a poetic sensibility, Nicollet also named southeastern Minnesota the Undine Region, German for water spirit. In the late nineteenth century, the main stem was called the Great Cannon to distinguish it from another tributary, the Little Cannon. Weapons of war played no part in the naming.
On the water. There is a moment just after we push our canoe away from the bank when the boat goes with the pull of the current and we take our first paddle strokes. There’s so much promise in that moment, even on a familiar river. We settle into our paddling rhythm and head down the Cannon toward our home in Wisconsin, now 359 river miles, seven Mississippi River locks, and six portages away.
I love canoeing the Cannon. This reach follows the ice margin of the most recent glacier. A string of lakes—Tetonka, Sakatah, and Cannon— that are wide places in the Cannon upstream of Faribault are thought by glacial geologist Carrie Jennings to lie in a broad trench, the remains of a tunnel valley that formed briefly under the melting glacial ice when the glacier was pushed up against the massive bedrock escarpment, or cliff, that is here where our journey begins, the escarpment that defines the channel of the Straight as it flows into Faribault from the south. Melt-water streamed out of the tunnel valley at high velocity, spraying forcefully against the escarpment and over its top, its powerful torrent like a fountain, eroding a number of channels in the high land to the northeast, one of which became Prairie Creek, which flows from Nerstrand Woods into the Cannon, and another became Crystal Lake. An ice-marginal stream channeling meltwater along the edge of the retreating glacier formed the Cannon valley downstream of the escarpment.