As soon as upon a time, the Mississippi River hosted one of many gnarliest canoe races anyplace. It was referred to as the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, an annual 450-mile race on the Higher Mississippi within the Nineteen Forties and Fifties. This huge river competitors modified the course of trendy canoeing, and a brand new e book reveals the misplaced historical past of its affect on water sports activities.
In Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Misplaced Historical past, a Close to Loss of life, and Different True Canoeing Tales, award-winning author Frank Bures takes a deep dive into canoe journey. Recounting the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby stays the “coronary heart of the e book,” however the non-fiction anthology provides many different tales as nicely.
You’ll learn concerning the “terror” of two kayakers who barely escaped the 2011 Pagami Creek Fireplace within the Boundary Waters. Then there’s the spooky story of two younger campers who skilled a supernatural scare in Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park within the Seventies. Bures even shares a narrative from his personal life on the river, with a miraculous rescue that exhibits what occurs “once you push the river.”
With the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, Bures delves into the forgotten contributions of the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, who lengthy dominated the race. Within the excerpt under, you’ll additionally be taught concerning the unacknowledged affect of Ojibwe canoe builders Jim and Bernie Smith.
Their design options are actually a part of the trendy canoe-racing panorama, says Bures. At the moment residing in Minneapolis, Bures’ work has appeared in Harper’s, Outdoors, and The Atlantic, in addition to the Greatest American Journey Writing anthologies.
So take a second and journey again 76 years to a canoe race that modified the trajectory of the game.
(The next is excerpted from Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Misplaced Historical past, a Close to Loss of life, and Different True Canoeing Tales, by Frank Bures, Minnesota Historic Society Press, 2025.)
A Race and a Rescue in 1949
Within the early morning hours of Saturday, July 16, 1949, 18-year-old Billy Smith Jr. and his accomplice Bob Bergstrom, a pace skater in his early 30s, settled into their canoe and began paddling throughout Lake Winnibigoshish, a reservoir on the Mississippi River in north-central Minnesota. At 16 miles throughout, it’s one of the crucial harmful stretches on the Higher Mississippi River.
The 2 have been racing within the 450-mile Paul Bunyan Aquatennial Canoe Derby from Bemidji to Minneapolis. Of the 49 groups that left Bemidji the day earlier than, solely 34 would stay by the tip of Saturday.
When Smith and Bergstrom began throughout, the lake was calm. “As soon as we acquired out on the water, the wind picked up and it acquired fairly wavy,” says Smith, at 93, in an interview at his small residence in Shorewood, Minn.
Water washed over their gunnels. The boat started to fill. “Earlier than the race began,” Smith says, “I seen the skilled paddlers had espresso cans of their boats. I assumed they have been for peeing, however I came upon the exhausting method it was for bailing. So we simply slowly sank.”
The 2 have been within the water, hanging on to the swamped canoe, when a small motorboat got here skimming throughout the lake. Piloting it was Jesse Tibbetts, a 56-year-old Ojibwe former canoe racer from Ball Membership, Minn., a small city on the Mississippi that, like Lake Winnibigoshish, sits inside the Leech Lake Reservation.
“He got here bouncing on prime of those waves. Then he came visiting, picked up our canoe, and dumped out the water. We mentioned, ‘Thanks,’ and we took off. He saved the day for us.”
‘These Guys Are My Associates’
It was the second time in 2 days that Smith and Bergstrom had been saved by Ojibwe paddlers. The day earlier than, after the race had began on Lake Bemidji, they acquired stranded within the center. “I used to be so excited,” Smith says, “that I broke two paddles on Lake Bemidji. And I used to be sitting there with my accomplice Bob.”
Then alongside got here two different racers, brothers Jim and Bernie Smith (no relation to Billy Smith), additionally Ojibwe males from Ball Membership, Minnesota. This was their fourth derby, and so they had positioned within the prime 5 in each race to date. They pulled up subsequent to Billy Smith Jr. and threw him a paddle. “Right here,” considered one of them mentioned. “Use this.”
Billy seen straight away that the paddle was completely different. “It was an fascinating design,” he says. “It was shorter with a really thick grip — virtually twice of what you see now. However there was no slippage.”
The three Smiths already knew one another. The truth is, Invoice Smith was truly paddling the canoe Jim and Bernie had used within the earlier yr’s race. Now they’d gone above and past. They’d even gone towards their very own pursuits.
“I by no means fairly understood why they’d do this,” says Smith, “as a result of it value them a spot, which was essential to them financially. However even after we got here in that day, who was ready for me however Jim and Bernie Smith? They shook my hand. I wasn’t even out of the boat but, and so they mentioned I may maintain the paddle. It was a selfmade paddle that they used. And that’s once I determined: These guys are my mates.”
It wouldn’t be a great yr for Jim and Bernie Smith, who dropped out at Aitkin, lower than midway via the race. However Billy Smith and Bob Bergstrom would end fourth total, profitable $750 (practically $10,000 in immediately’s {dollars}), sufficient for Billy to pay for a yr of faculty on the College of Minnesota.
Race Historical past
The 1949 race was the largest and richest Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby but. It was the seventh time the race had been run since beginning in 1940, and it attracted opponents from throughout the US and Canada.
The canoe derby began in 1940, and it was conceived as a grand occasion main as much as the Minneapolis Aquatennial celebration. For greater than per week, groups would paddle a piece of the river, keep in a single day, then begin once more the subsequent morning. Every crew’s time for the lap could be recorded, and the race standings have been then calculated each evening.
Within the morning, the canoes lined up on the shore, and the groups have been launched at 1- or 2-minute intervals in reverse order of their end the evening earlier than. The final canoe went out first. The day before today’s first-place paddlers began final and needed to chase everybody else down.
The race started in Bemidji close to the Paul Bunyan statue. On a few years, the race’s begin came about in the course of the metropolis’s Paul Bunyan celebration, which glided by varied names. The day earlier than the derby, there was at all times a brief dash race, normally 1 mile lengthy, on Lake Bemidji.
After 8 or 9 days (relying on how the phases have been divided), the racers arrived in Minneapolis. The ultimate lap ended simply above St. Anthony Falls. After that, the canoes have been trucked or portaged across the falls to the East River Flats under the College of Minnesota, the place a last dash race to the Franklin Avenue Bridge was launched. The end of the race marked the beginning of the Aquatennial.
After 10 days of breathless race reporting on radio stations and front-page protection in newspapers, monumental crowds, starting from 10,000 to 100,000 spectators, turned out to look at the end. The race introduced an consciousness of the Mississippi, of the cities alongside the way in which, and of canoeing as each journey and a sport to numerous Minnesotans. The derby tapped into and deepened our love affair with the canoe.
Ache, Heroism, and Brilliance
The Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby was the primary and longest race of its variety: solely Quebec’s La Classique Internationale de Canots de la Mauricie (the Mauricie Worldwide Canoe Basic), a 3-day, 120-mile race that started in 1934, is older. It was additionally the richest canoe race in North America, with the entire purse reaching $10,000 in later years — nicely over $100,000 in immediately’s {dollars}.
America. It was there that canoeing legends like Gene Jensen, Irwin “Buzzy” Peterson, Karl Ketter, and Tom Estes all acquired their begin.
But the derby was one thing else too. Within the early days, most of the prime opponents have been from Ojibwe (also called Anishinaabe or Chippewa) communities of northern Minnesota. Their family members had been plying those self same waters for a whole bunch of years, utilizing canoeing traditions that return millennia.
The canoe derby was a uncommon impartial floor the place white and Native outdoorsmen may compete on a good discipline, exchanging information and concepts and the occasional paddle. As they made their method downstream, they developed friendships and rivalries and connections that might final lengthy after they crossed the end line. It was an occasion that blurred among the painful divides in our tradition and historical past, as the lads (and some ladies) raced down the river in pursuit of glory and riches.
The lengthy shadow of the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby is understood to many within the canoeing group. However even there, the historical past of the derby, with its ache, heroism, and brilliance, has practically been misplaced. And few are conscious of the longer historical past from which the derby emerged.
Need to learn extra? Pushing the River is offered on Amazon for $20.
(Excerpted from Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Misplaced Historical past, a Close to Loss of life, and Different True Canoeing Tales, by Frank Bures, Minnesota Historic Society Press, 2025.)
