Power and the Paddle: Exploring History in the Wilderness
A forgotten hydro scheme in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and the scars it left behind. Note: A version of this story was originally published on Paddle and Portage. Visit their site to read more stories from and about the Boundary Waters region.
From near the eastern outlet of Brule Lake, a man yelled, “Fire in the hole.” A sharp crack and loud rumble rushed across what had been calm water. It shattered the silence of moments before.
The mallards in the easternmost bay took to the air in a fury of slapping wings and overlapping quacks. Ripples spread across the surface as a rush of wind escaped the woods. The ground shuddered. Then, dozens of rocks thudded to the ground, followed by silence.
Just minutes earlier, the lake had looked as calm as a mirror. Only the reflections of trees, the sky above, and the occasional ripple of a rising fish broke its peacefulness. In the otherwise clear sky, light fair-weather cumulus clouds floated lazily to the north. A mother merganser had been leading her brood along the shoreline, and a few muffled voices had emerged from the woods near the outlet of the lake.
There, the beginning of the South Brule River flows out of Brule Lake and eventually joins the North Brule, tumbling from the Superior Highlands over waterfalls and rapids to Lake Superior.
After the explosion, men in the woods cheered as water rushed down the 112-foot channel that they had spent days digging and blasting out of the rock.[i] It was one of three locations that they planned to modify to increase the flow of water into the Brule River system.
On the other side of the lake, a second crew toiled away to build a rock dam preventing the flow of water from Brule Lake into South Temperance Lake. It would reduce the flow of the Temperance River and increase the flow into the South Brule River.[ii]
Meanwhile, a third crew worked on Winchell Lake[iii], which is north of and 100 feet higher in elevation than Brule. They gathered on the northern shore of the lake at the outlet where the lake flowed north into the North Brule River running through several lakes on the way. The first of which was a small lake 100 feet away and a full 20 feet lower. A modified outlet at this point could lower Winchell ten or more feet. There they found that the outlet was protected by granite which would need to be blasted to allow the lake to drain.
The First Investigation
I had stumbled across a brief mention of this story, which I have dramatized, while looking over back issues from 1925 and 1926 of Fins, Feathers, and Fur, which was the official bulletin of Minnesota’s Game and Fish Department. I wanted to see these locations for myself, and because I had taken many trips into all the locations without knowing this quirky bit of history it would offer a new way to look at the landscape. Plus, it was a mystery that needed solving. If I could uncover anything physical at the sites, it might make doing historical research more interesting. I had to figure out who did it and why.
In late October of 2022 my wife, son, and I launched from the Brule Lake entry point in what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) to go find the locations of these events. Our plan was to paddle west across Brule to South Temperance, make camp for two nights, examine where the dam was, and then head towards the eastern side of Brule to look for the blasted channel. I’d have to visit Winchell on another trip.
Standing at the entry point in down jackets, long underwear and warm fleeces under a clear blue sky felt strange for October. Normally, October weather is miserable, but the forecast was for calm, warm weather in the 40°Fs. After we loaded our jet-black carbon fiber Northstar Polaris canoe, we pushed off onto Brule, one of my favorite lakes.
Brule Lake, at 4,326 acres, is one of the larger lakes in the BWCAW. It measures about 8 miles long and approximately 2 miles wide. It runs east/west like many of the other big lakes in Cook County, and it branches into many bays. The lake itself holds many large islands – the largest is nearly 9/10th of the mile long. Altogether including the islands, it has a staggering shoreline distance of 63 miles. Its crystal-clear waters reach a maximum depth of 78 feet, and it has a mean depth of 35 feet. By any measure of size, Brule Lake is large.[iv] Lowering the lake by one foot would send approximately 1.4 billion gallons of water down the South Brule River. With 121 billion gallons of fresh, clean water in its basin, it had lots to spare, or that’s what the person behind the scheme must have thought.
As we paddled out onto the Brule, I took my bearings from familiar islands, and we turned the canoe to the west. Once past Jock Mock Point and out of the protection of the islands, we could see the far northern shore and the western edge of the lake. While sunny and calm, the chill of the October air made me want to paddle harder.
As we reached the western end of the lake and the outlet into South Temperance Lake, a cow moose crashed out of the water and disappeared into the spruce and fir along the shore. After the sighting, we pulled our canoe up onto rocks at the outlet of Brule.
I walked into the shaded south shore and into frost. Twenty feet east along the shore was a submerged crib. I doubted it had anything to do with the dam created, but the opening between Brule and South Temperance was covered with rocks.
The rocks looked like a combination of natural rocks and those that had been piled. Knowing that the opening had been dammed made it appear like I was looking at a dam, but the descriptions in Fins, Feathers, and Fur, were vague about the type of dam built there. If it were rocks piled upon each other, then the dam hadn’t been fully disassembled. If it included cement, then there was nothing remaining.
We did the short portage and set up camp in the north central campsite for two nights, which gave us good views of sunrise and sunsets, and explored South Temperance and hung out in camp.
After two nights on South Temperance, we decided to explore Brule Lake more. After completing the portage, I looked at the potential dam again and convinced myself that what I was looking at was at least partially man made. Things about it looked too uniform for it to be natural. We left the dam, and after making a side trip to Cam Lake, we found a campsite on one of Brule’s islands.
At camp, I sat high above the lake at a western overlook on the island and watched the sunset while thinking about what might have happened back in 1925.
In 1925 Thirty Men To Build a Hydroelectric Dam
During the week of June 4th, 1925, a group of thirty men were employed at a clearing at the mouth of the Brule River. The men labored to build a camp to prepare for a big project. They were to build a 12-foot-high and 75-foot-long hydroelectric dam near the mouth. The dam would generate a claimed 250 horsepower and was to power a new town or resort to be built near the mouth of the river. Additionally, the Cook County New Herald reported that more power projects would be built on the Brule River. [v]
At the same time, wealthy businessmen from Duluth were banding together to buy land around the Brule River to build an exclusive resort that would serve famous people, like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Ring Lardner. They officially announced the plans in 1927, but they were seeking investors and buying land before then. The resort would open as the Naniboujou in 1929, but no dam was built to power it.
1925 was square in the middle of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and Prohibition. Things were bustling in Cook County and in northern Minnesota at the time. Tourism was up. Canadian whiskey smuggling on Lake Superior was drawing the attention of the feds, and the Cook County News Herald reported that the cops destroyed a 100-to-150-gallon moonshine still in the county. The Grand Marais to Little Marais phone lines were completed with phone service offered at houses in Grand Marais. The town of Grand Marais contracted with a private company for electricity to all the houses, and demand for power was up.
On the other side of the Boundary Waters in 1905, timber baron Edward Wellington Backus built a hydroelectric dam in International Falls to power paper mills. The mills flourished. He wanted to expand his empire dam by dam by damming a series of border lakes. In 1925 the International Joint Commission at International Falls was considering the proposal. Opposition to the proposal was led by Ernest Oberholtzer, an explorer, a conservationist, and an Iowan who spent his life in Minnesota. The opposition succeeded in preserving the border lakes through national legislation passed in 1930 as the Shipstead-Newton-Nolan Act.[vi]
In Cook County, the Cook County Historical Society has a contemporaneous map from the Pigeon River Lumber Company that purports to show a series of proposed hydroelectric dams on the Pigeon River running from South Fowl Lake to High Falls. The Pigeon River is famous among paddlers for being the river that connects the inland lakes of the Boundary Waters with Lake Superior. Paddlers bypass the roughest parts of the river via the Grand Portage, an eight-mile portage around rapids, waterfalls and drops in the final miles of the Pigeon River. The features that made the river hazardous to paddlers would make for good hydroelectric dams. The map shows the project as hand drawn dams and several hand-colored parcels. A few colored parcels are shown on the Brule River near where the biggest constrictions with tallest bluffs lie on the river.[vii]
While I paddled in the wilderness nearly 100 years later, I found it hard to decern who might be responsible for the blasting on Brule and Winchell. Fins, Feathers, and Fur reported that the Game and Fish Department received information that it was a development company, and the Commissioner telegraphed them, that their unauthorized work needed to be filled, and the dam removed. Of course, it wasn’t done to an acceptable level.[viii]
Brule and Winchell Are a Busy Summer Destination in 1925
If it was the men camped out at the mouth of the Brule River that had blasted the channels and built the dams, it wouldn’t have been easy to get to Brule and Winchell Lake from there. When we left on our October trip, we left our house near Grand Marais and drove to it in about 30 minutes.
In 1925, there wasn’t a direct road or trail to the lake. From Grand Marais there were two ways. The first was to head up the Gunflint Trail until it intersected with the South Brule River and then paddle up the South Brule to Lower Trout Lake (now Bower Trout Lake). From there, the route followed the same canoe route paddled today from Bower Trout to Brule.
The other way was following what is now County Road 7 to Bally Creek Road, which eventually degraded to a tote road, or rough logging supply road. From there the route took an old, abandoned railroad line and followed a spur to Brule Lake. The modern road called The Grade closely follows and sometimes uses this old railroad grade. The current Brule Lake Road follows the old railroad spur.[ix] Imagine hauling tools and dynamite all the way from near the mouth of the Brule River, which is 15 miles east of Grand Marais on Lake Superior, to Brule Lake without the roads that we have now. The pay must have been good.
They wouldn’t have been the only people heading to that area that summer. During mid-July, a five-person party including the Commissioner of Forestry, Grover M. Conzet and District Ranger Patrick “Paddy” Bayle canoed into Winchell and came back reporting on having an enjoyable outing. They didn’t report in the forest news about noticing a dam, a new channel, or blasting on Winchell. Unless they didn’t report that to the public, the work had to happen after mid-July.[x]
By the time August rolled around the Arrowhead Light and Power Company was in court in front of Judge Magney trying to acquire land on the Brule.[xi]
Investigating the Eastern Outlet of Brule Lake
After sunset on Brule Lake, I took one last look at the lake below me and walked the path back to the tent in the early evening darkness of October.
We woke up to another calm day as an orange sun disk rose over the lake and refused to warm up our camp. It was a quick breakfast and in the canoe on the way to the eastern side of Brule Lake. We didn’t dally this time and paddled as quickly as we could to get there.
Finding the channel wasn’t difficult. While it was partially filled by rocks and covered with dead fall, it was dead straight and looked man made. I stepped off the trail to get closer to the channel. The outlet looked visibly widen and then filled, but much of the channel looked like it remained.
In March of 1926, the Game and Fish Department commissioner, an engineer and others used the annual snowshoe trip as a vehicle to inspect the temporary repairs that had been completed. While I was there to see what they had done, they wanted to figure out how to complete more permanent repairs.[xii] If they completed more than attempting to plug the channel with debris and rocks, I couldn’t recognize it as I stood there. As far as I could tell, any formal repairs were either hidden under the dead fall or driftwood where the lake meets the river or washed away with time.
After we inspected the channel, we paddled back to the entry point. It was fun to experience something new in an area that I had visited often in the past, and I had found evidence of these events. It was a successful outing.
Investigating the Hole Blasted in Winchell Lake
As life does, time got away from me, and I wasn’t able to return to these lakes until October of 2024. I loaded my portage pack into my Northstar Magic and pushed off onto Brule in a crisp but light wind.
I was headed to Winchell Lake to see if I could find the work that was done in 1925. A series of portages and small lakes takes you from Brule to Winchell. With my late start, I arrived with just enough time to climb to the top of the Winchell cliffs, which are part of the Misquah Hills, the highest mountain range in Minnesota and the highest points in 500 miles in any direction. Below, the view of the blue lake surrounded by the final remains of the fall color felt stunning. I imagined that the view in 1925 would have held fewer trees due to logging in the area but would have been as stunning.
The next morning a tailwind carried me swiftly down the lake and to its outlet. I landed and pulled my canoe up onto a flat piece of exposed bedrock. Where the outlet had been blasted open was immediately apparent. It was at least 15-foot wide, briefly interrupted by a high point of stone topped with cedar trees, and then there was another smaller opening on the east side.
I walked below the outlet and could see how carefully placed boulders formed a dam. The repair of this opening was obvious and instantly recognizable as manmade. The blasting went deep. Standing below the opening and repairs, it was over my head. I estimated that it would have lowered Winchell by at least five feet. While not as big as Brule, Winchell has an area of 876 acres and at 160 feet deep it holds a lot of water.[xiii] Each foot of water would be 286 million gallons of water.
Making a bunch of back of the napkin assumptions about the size of the openings on Brule and Winchell, flow rates, gravity, the effective head of the water, and other mathematic wizardry one can arrive at an estimated flow rate achieved by blasting holes into the two lakes. It could have raised the flow rate by 300cfs to 400cfs without accounting for friction and downstream obstructions.
An average flow rate in summer months on the Brule River ranges from 210cfs in July to 89cfs in August. In September, it increases to 97cfs on average. It peaks in May during spring runoff at 818cfs.[xiv]
With an additional 300cfs to 400cfs of flow, it could see average June levels, which are 388cfs. The dam that the 30 men at the mouth of the Brule River were supposed to build was claimed to be able to generate 250 horsepower, but when accounting for the dam size and average summer flow rate, it would be about half that. To hit 250 horsepower, they’d need a generator running at 80% efficiency and a flow rate of about 230cfs, which is more than double the average summer flow.
Complicating the situation, the spring and summer of 1925 were drier than normal with precipitation reaching only 55% of normal.[xv] During dry summers, it isn’t unusual to see flows drop to 25cfs, a trickle.
Imagine what it would look like to potential investors in a hydroelectric dam or an exclusive resort village standing at the mouth of the Brule River, where the Naniboujou currently sits, and running about five miles north following the river, an area that is now Judge C.R. Magney State Park, that the principals claimed would be powered by hydroelectric, to see a river running at a trickle. If you were an unscrupulous businessman willing to bilk investors, blasting holes in Winchell and Brule might look attractive enough.
Unfortunately for the developers, blasting the outlets of Brule and Winchell would only give the river a temporary boost in the flow. Timed right, it could be enough flow to show that the hydroelectric generator could output 250 or more horsepower.
The increased flow would quickly drop the levels of both lakes until the lake dropped to the height of the opening. On Winchell based on my estimates, it would drop a foot about every 24 hours. Based on what I saw, Brule Lake would drop slower, but it also would have only provided a fraction of the flow of Winchell. It would have taken weeks to drop a foot.
Back on Winchell, I marveled at the size of the openings that they blasted. At the eastern opening, I cleared away debris from the top of the granite bedrock to see the edge where they had blasted. The surrounding rock was worn smooth with the passage of time, of glaciers, and of water. But where it looked like they had blasted, it was rough like an uneven saw blade of granite. On the other side, the granite was the same.
Touching that sharp-edged rock transported me back in time to the sharp crack and loud rumble, to mallards taking flight, to ripples and a shuttering ground, and to the sound of dozens of rocks hitting the ground and coming to a rest, and silence.
No Suffered Consequences
Nobody was held to account for these actions. The DNR ended up completing the repairs, and in the case of Winchell, the repairs appeared to be holding. I’m not so sure about the repairs on Brule Lake, but even if the repairs didn’t hold the elevation of Brule is the same now as it was recorded on a 1919 Army Corp of Engineers map of the area. It sits at 1,851 feet.
I wonder why nobody was brought to justice over this. The laws of the times could be blamed. The attitude about wilderness could be blamed. Law enforcement could be blamed. Maybe bribery was in play. The county had a whiskey smuggling operation, a speakeasy, and after 1925, it entertained Al Capone and other gangsters. The law ignored those operations. It isn’t hard to imagine that this was the case. A telegraph was sent to the developers, and that seems to have been the only action taken against them–a slap on the wrist. It feels to me that the robber barons, timber barons, power barons, and wealthy investors of the time could do what they wished with public land and walk away with a slap on the wrist.
It’s hard for me now one hundred years later, looking at the state of the proposed sulfide-copper mines in the Boundary Waters watershed, and recent actions by the current federal administration in Washington to invoke wartime powers to allow the mines, to think that instead of a telegraph being sent telling the wealthy perpetrators to repair their illegal work, this time it would be a telegraph inviting the robber barons to do more.
Somehow it seems that little has changed in 100 years. The barons want to exploit the area for its wealth, and those that love the area for recreation have to continually fight for its existence and the experiences that it freely gives us.
A Gift From the Boundary Waters
On the morning, I visited Winchell’s outlet, I watched the sunrise. I sat near the shore with my canoe and watched a sun beam form through small ice crystals suspended in the sky. A 22° halo circled the sun, and two sundogs flanked its sides. An upper tangent arc rested on the top of the halo and spread its wings like it wanted to lift the sun into the sky.
While these types of atmospheric optical phenomena aren’t rare, I seldom see them. This time it felt like a gift from the Boundary Waters. I had enjoyed two mid-October trips into my favorite parts of the Boundary Waters with perfect weather on an adventure to uncover history, and on the final day was given a stunning visual display in the sky and enough hints about the past to stir my imagination on even the coldest winter nights.
As I sat near the shore with my canoe, watching the sunrise framed by a 22° halo, I realized I may not have conclusively solved the mystery of those who blasted the holes in Brule and Winchell. Maybe someone with better historical research skills will. But, I’m not sure it matters, because I know who did it. We all do. It’s the same men doing it today. A hundred years later, they wear different names and faces, but they’re the same. They always are.
Luckily, the land is still whole, still offering its gifts, still worth defending. But it doesn’t protect itself. It needs people, like Ernest Oberholtzer, like us, to stand up and say enough, to stop those men from doing what they always do. To keep them from taking away the places where we can dip a paddle, propel a canoe, and glide across a mirror-calm lake reflecting the blue sky above.
[i] “Northern Lakes Present Varied Problems”. p. 43. Fins, Feathers, and Fur, Official Bulletin of the Minnesota Game and Fish Department. No 43, September 1925.
[ii] “Northern Lakes Present Varied Problems”. p. 43. Fins, Feathers, and Fur, Official Bulletin of the Minnesota Game and Fish Department. No 43, September 1925.
[iii] “Northern Lakes Present Varied Problems”. p. 43. Fins, Feathers, and Fur, Official Bulletin of the Minnesota Game and Fish Department. No 43, September 1925.
[iv] Brule (16034800): Lakefinder. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. (2025, January 29). https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/lakefind/showreport.html?downum=16034800.
[v] Cook County News Herald, Grand Marais, MN, June 4, 1925.
[vi] “History of the Quetico Superior.” Quetico Superior Wilderness News, September 6, 2024. https://queticosuperior.org/history-of-quetico-superior-ecoregion/.
[vii] Map showing dam project of the Pigeon River Lumber Company, Cook County, Minnesota. 1924 – 1934. Cook County Historical Society, collection.mndigital.org/catalog/p15160coll14:188 Accessed 20 Mar. 2025.
[viii] “Northern Lakes Present Varied Problems”. p. 43. Fins, Feathers, and Fur, Official Bulletin of the Minnesota Game and Fish Department. No 43, September 1925.
[ix] Benson, Victor H. Map of Lake and Cook Counties, the sportsmen’s territory in the Minnesota Arrowhead country. 1926. University of Minnesota Libraries, John R. Borchert Map Library., umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll230:1082 Accessed 20 Mar 2025.
[x] “Forest News of North Shore,” Cook County News Herald, Grand Marais, MN, July 23, 1925.
[xi] Cook County News Herald, Grand Marais, MN, August 13, 1925.
[xii] “Brule Lake Trek Appeals to Many”. p. 67-68. Fins, Feathers, and Fur, Official Bulletin of the Minnesota Game and Fish Department. No 44, March 1926.
[xiii] “Winchell (16035400): Lakefinder.” Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, January 29, 2025. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/lakefind/lake.html?id=16035400.
[xiv] “Brule River (MN) near Hovland.” Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, March 13, 2025. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/waters/csg/site.html?id=01022001.
[xv] “XMACIS2.” ACIS NOAA Regional Climate Centers. Accessed March 21, 2025. https://xmacis.rcc-acis.org/.
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