49 Fun Facts About Voyageurs National Park

Voyageurs National Park is in which U.S. state?

Minnesota's only national park is nearly 40 percent water, because Ice Age glaciers gouged hollows in the bedrock here and their meltwater filled them.

Which aviator publicly backed the 1960s campaign to create Voyageurs National Park?

Charles Lindbergh spent his last years as a conservationist. He endorsed the park proposal in 1969, helping to bring it national attention, and also campaigned to save whales.

Voyageurs National Park lies on the border with which Canadian province?

Ontario: the border here follows the route the fur traders paddled, so it runs down the middle of three of the park's four big lakes rather than along a straight line.

Which president signed the 1971 law authorising Voyageurs National Park?

Richard Nixon signed it in January 1971, but the park could not be formally established until 1975, after state and local governments had donated the land they held inside its boundary.

Which animal 'island hops' around Voyageurs National Park, swimming out to campsites in search of food?

Black bear: its sense of smell is keener than a dog's and open water is no barrier to it, which is why the park's campsites come with metal food lockers.

Which roadless peninsula makes up most of the land area of Voyageurs National Park?

Kabetogama: its trails start at landings on the shore and cross it past small interior lakes, where the park keeps canoes for hikers to rent.

Which gateway city to Voyageurs calls itself the 'Icebox of the Nation'?

International Falls has traded on its bitter winters for decades, and has had to defend its claim to the slogan against the mountain town of Fraser, Colorado.

Which is the largest lake in Voyageurs National Park?

Rainy Lake is so big that the park holds only its southeastern corner. Even so, its level is not natural: it has been regulated at the outlet, for the mills downstream, since the early 1900s.

Water leaving the lakes of Voyageurs National Park ends up where?

Hudson Bay: the park lies north of the Laurentian Divide, so its water flows west down the Rainy River and on toward the Arctic, while rain falling a little way south and east runs to Lake Superior.

In a voyageur canoe crew, what did the man called the gouvernail do?

Steered from the stern: with the avant guiding from the bow he took the canoe through the rapids, and the pair earned about twice the pay of the paddlers in the middle.

Which famous American canoe wilderness lies just east of Voyageurs National Park?

Boundary Waters: motorboats have been tightly restricted there since 1978, leaving most of it to paddlers, whereas on the big lakes of Voyageurs next door motors are welcome.

Which historic hotel is the only lodging inside Voyageurs National Park?

Kettle Falls: its first guests were the stonemasons building the dams beside it, followed by lumberjacks and fishermen. The Park Service bought it in 1976 and later restored it.

In 1918 the only hotel in today's Voyageurs park sold for $1,000 and what else?

Four barrels of whiskey were part of the price, and fittingly so: the buyer, Robert Williams, was later charged with selling illegal liquor there.

Voyageurs National Park has one of the few spots in the lower 48 where a visitor does what?

Looks south into Canada: at one portage between two of the big lakes the border twists so sharply that the Canadian shore lies on the south side of the channel.

Which animal's pelt was the great prize of the fur trade that the voyageurs served?

Beaver: as trappers stripped the eastern forests of them, the trade had to reach ever farther into the northwest, which is what sent the canoe brigades through these border lakes.

What did prospectors find on a small island in what is now Voyageurs National Park in 1893?

Gold: the Little American Mine is thought to be the only gold mine in the state that ever turned a profit, but the other diggings yielded so little that the rush was over within five years.

Which boom town of the 1890s, in what is now Voyageurs National Park, was deserted by 1901?

Rainy Lake City sprang up in 1894 with a bank, a school, a newspaper and several saloons. When the mines failed, the school and the paper closed and the town emptied; one saloon still stands.

What were the voyageurs' big freight canoes mainly built from?

Birch bark, stretched over a cedar frame and sealed with spruce resin. A 25-foot north canoe weighed only about 300 pounds, so two men could carry it across a portage.

Which product drew big commercial fishing companies to the waters of Voyageurs in the 1890s?

Sturgeon caviar: seven or eight companies were after the eggs of lake sturgeon by 1900, but the markets were far away and there was no refrigerated transport, so the big operators did not last.

Which animal is the dominant predator in Voyageurs National Park, preying mainly on white-tailed deer?

Wolf: some 30 to 50 live in and around the park, and researchers track them by collar. When wolves vanished from the rest of the lower 48, this state's north woods were their last refuge.

Which bird, the official bird of the park's home state, is a common sight on the lakes of Voyageurs?

Loon: unlike most birds it has solid bones, extra weight that helps it dive after fish. The park's home state has more of them than any other outside Alaska.

Voyageurs National Park holds international certification for the quality of what?

Its dark night skies: to keep the status it won in 2020 the park must go on protecting them from stray light and run stargazing programmes. On a clear night they show the Milky Way and sometimes the northern lights.

What do many visitors rent from companies just outside Voyageurs National Park to live on the lakes for days?

A houseboat: the park sets aside marked shoreline sites for them, each with a fire ring and mooring posts, and lets two boats tie up overnight at each one.

Voyageurs is one of the few national parks in the lower 48 where visitors might meet which giant of the north woods?

Moose: about 40 to 50 live in the park, mostly on its big peninsula. While the state's herd has roughly halved since 2009, the park's has held steady.

Which people were the main residents of the border lakes around Voyageurs by 1780, supplying the fur traders?

Ojibwe families kept the trade moving: they built the canoes the voyageurs paddled and sold them the smoked fish and other food they needed for the journey.

Which band lived in the Voyageurs area from the 1760s until the Nett Lake reservation was created?

Bois Forte families stayed long after an 1866 treaty signed away two million acres of their homeland: they went on living here and harvesting its resources into the twentieth century.

Which vast glacial lake's retreat opened the Voyageurs area to its first people some 10,000 years ago?

Lake Agassiz was once bigger than all the Great Lakes put together. When it drained away it left Lake Winnipeg and Lake of the Woods behind as remnants.

Voyageurs National Park sits on the southern edge of which ancient mass of bedrock?

Canadian Shield: rock some 2.8 billion years old, more than half the age of the Earth, lies bare at the surface here because Ice Age glaciers scraped away everything younger.

Which trees were the loggers of the early 1900s chiefly after in what is now Voyageurs National Park?

White and red pine: the lumber companies cut so thoroughly that by 1929 the big stands were gone, and trees that once dominated the forest are still only a minor part of it.

Hoist Bay in Voyageurs is named for what?

Machinery that lifted logs from the water: a hoist on a railway trestle swung floating logs onto train cars bound for the sawmill. The camp closed in 1929 once the big timber was gone, and the trestle pilings still stand.

Jack Ellsworth, a Chicago carpenter, spent some twenty years building what on a lakeside outcrop in Voyageurs?

A terraced rock garden: he cut the outcrop into flower beds full of lilies and set abstract stone sculptures among them. Abandoned for years and then restored by the park, it is now its most visited stop.

Voyageurs measured distances on the water in which unit, named for their hourly rest stops?

Pipes: the crews stopped for a few minutes every hour to smoke, and the breaks mattered so much that a lake was reckoned as so many pipes across rather than so many miles.

Which trail food, made in bulk on the prairies, fuelled the voyageurs' long hauls to the far northwest?

Pemmican: making it on the prairies saved the fur companies the cost of hauling food all the way from the St. Lawrence, and a man could chew a piece at midday without putting down his paddle.

How did voyageur crews keep their paddle strokes in time through a working day of fourteen hours or more?

By singing: paddling songs such as 'Alouette' set the pace, and a man's stock of songs was a point of pride. One old voyageur boasted that he could sing fifty.

From which city did the voyageurs' canoe brigades set out each spring with trade goods for the west?

Montreal: its merchants controlled the trade, and each spring their hired crews paddled west with goods, met the wintering traders coming east with furs, and raced home before the rivers froze.

What lets visitors drive cars across the big lakes of Voyageurs National Park for part of each year?

An ice road: once the ice is thick enough the Park Service plows and marks a route from a visitor centre's boat launch. Cars and light trucks may use it at up to 30 mph, but snowmobiles are kept off.

The voyageurs' canoe route through Voyageurs ran from Lake Superior to which far northern lake?

Lake Athabasca was the far end of the route, and its thick northern furs were among the most prized. Crews set out as soon as the lakes thawed, because the ice-free season up there lasted only a few months.

About how much weight was a voyageur expected to carry across each portage?

About 180 pounds: the standard load was two 90-pound packs at once, and some men took more. Hernias, broken limbs and twisted spines were the price.

Voyageurs who only worked the summer run from Montreal to Lake Superior were mockingly called what?

Mangeurs de lard hauled up to four tonnes of goods per canoe with crews of up to ten.

Which fur post, now a national monument on Lake Superior, was the scene of the voyageurs' great summer rendezvous?

Grand Portage: each summer the canoes from the east met the winterers coming down with furs, and both had to shoulder their loads over the long carrying trail around the Pigeon River falls that gives the place its name.

Which fur-trading company, a force in the trade from the 1780s to 1821, relied on voyageurs as its main workforce?

North West Company: its bosses were mostly Highland Scots but its muscle was French-Canadian, and after years of feuding with its older, London-run rival the two companies merged.

Which raptor's breeding pairs in Voyageurs have grown from six to more than forty since the park was founded?

Bald eagle: DDT had thinned its eggshells until almost no chicks hatched, and in 1975 the park's six pairs raised a single fledgling. After the pesticide was banned the birds recovered, leaving the endangered list in 2007.

As sport fishing boomed, what ended commercial walleye netting on the lakes of Voyageurs National Park?

A state licence buyout: to leave the walleye for the growing ranks of anglers, the state paid the last commercial netters to give up their licences. One of their camps, Harry Oveson's, is kept in the park as a visitor stop.

Which wild grain, gathered here for over a thousand years, is Voyageurs National Park restoring in its wetlands?

Wild rice once grew in broad beds on all four big lakes. Regulating the lakes' levels for industry cut most of it back, which is why the park is now clearing invasive cattails and replanting.

Who first asked for a national park at Voyageurs, in 1891?

The state legislature asked the president in April 1891 to set aside the border lakes. Congress never acted on the request, and the law that finally authorised the park was not signed until 1971, almost eighty years later.

Which forest type covers about 70 percent of the land in Voyageurs National Park?

Boreal forest: the park sits at the very southern edge of the great northern forest of spruce, fir and aspen, so even a slight warming could change which plants and animals can live here.

Which of Voyageurs' four big lakes lies entirely inside the United States?

Kabetogama Lake is the only one the border never touches. The other three are shared with Canada, so their fish stocks have to be managed jointly by the two countries.

In the 1920s conservationists led by Ernest Oberholtzer defeated a lumber baron's plan to do what to the border lakes?

Dam them for power: Edward Backus wanted a chain of dams to feed his mills. Oberholtzer's coalition beat him, and a 1930 law barred new dams in the neighbouring national forest, sparing the wild shorelines Voyageurs now protects.

Which 1783 treaty turned the voyageurs' canoe route west of Lake Superior into an international border?

The Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution and ran the new border along the fur traders' customary canoe route, which is why the boundary here winds from lake to lake instead of following a line of latitude.