History

Voyageurs has only been a national park for 41 years, but the area has a deep history.

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History Details

Voyageurs has only been a national park for 41 years, but the area has a deep history. Tens of thousands of years ago, a glacial lake called Lake Agassiz covered Minnesota, North Dakota, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. As the lake receded, exposing land bridges, native people began to flow into the area, where they were able to subsist off of fishing, hunting and harvesting berries and rice. These tribes were the only residents of the area until around 1688, when a French explorer named Jacues de Noyon visited Rainy Lake for a vacation. Fur was in high demand at this time, particularly beaver pelts, and soon European trappers, also called "voyageurs," came to escape the intense competition of the eastern trapping scene. These voyageurs began trading with the Native populations, furs for manufactured goods. The waterway here between the U.S. and Canada became a crucial part of the fur-trading route, as voyageurs traveled up and down the channel. By the late 1700s most of the Native tribes had left the region. By the late 1800s gold was discovered in Rainy Lake. Several mines popped up, and Rainy Lake City was constructed to house the families of the workers. By 1898 the gold boom went bust, and Rainy Lake City was abandoned into the ghost town is still is today. When Voyageurs became a national park in 1975, much of the area was already privately owned and developed. There were several commercial lodges and cabins and hundreds of day-use areas in place. Many of those landowners sold their land to the government, but maintained use rights for the remainder of their life. As the government collects on these properties, it plans to take down many of these preexisting structures in order to return the land to what it once was.

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