AI Model: Claude by Anthropic
Sources:
AI-generated content may contain errors. Community members are encouraged to verify important details independently.
This instalment reads from a 1986 National Park Service historic resource study of water-level regulation at International Falls and Kettle Falls, part two of ten in the series How the Falls Got Its Dam. The study records that in the eight years after Edward Wellington Backus first set his mind on a dam at Koochiching Falls, he needed permission from the United States Congress four separate times, from the Province of Ontario twice, and from the Dominion of Canada as well.
The study records that Backus made up his mind to dam Koochiching Falls soon after a snowshoe trek to Rainy River early in 1898, and that he organized the Koochiching Company for the purpose. It records that he and his partners had neither adequate capital nor transportation to the site.
The study cites two earlier appropriation acts, of September 19, 1890 and July 13, 1892, giving the Secretary of War authority over dam construction. It records that a further appropriation act of March 3, 1899 added the Corps of Engineers to that oversight, and that under its Section 9, the location and plans of such works had to be approved by both the Chief of Engineers and the Secretary of War before construction began.
The study records that Backus won passage of the first authorizing law, 30 Stat. 398, on May 4, 1898, permitting the Koochiching Company to build a dam, canal, and works across the Rainy Lake River in Section 27, Township 71 North, Range 24 West, in Minnesota. It records that the law let the government take over the dam at cost at any time, required a fishway and log sluice, put changes to the dam under the Secretary of War’s approval, and gave the company one year to begin and three years to finish, a deadline the study says Backus could not meet.
The study records that Congress granted a second extension, 31 Stat. 167, on May 4, 1900, moving completion to May 4, 1903. The study records that when that deadline also passed, Congress granted a third extension, 32 Stat. 485, on June 28, 1902, and the study dates the new completion deadline to May 4, 1907. The study also notes that this act capped the dam at Rainy Lake’s high-water mark and required gates or waste ways to carry the river at flood stage without raising the water above its natural level, and it reads that text as a new awareness in Congress that environmentalist concerns were coming alive.
The study describes what Backus did with the time, and it is the study’s own portrait of the builder: it records that he put together a network of partnerships, sold his mills in Minneapolis to concentrate his resources along the Minnesota-Ontario boundary, and put a syndicate together to build a railway, the Minnesota and International, from Brainerd to the town that had just taken the name International Falls in place of Koochiching, a line the study says was finished only in 1907.
The study records a fourth extension, 33 Stat. 814, on February 25, 1905, granted a month after the Ontario contract problem was settled. The same act, it records, saw Backus transfer the Koochiching Company’s rights to a new entity, the Rainy River Improvement Company.
The study records that a 1904 contract between Backus and the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Province of Ontario set a payment of $5,000 for a grant in fee of the land and power on the Canadian side, and that the contract was renegotiated on January 9, 1905. It records that the 1904 version reserved to Ontario the right to keep Rainy Lake at no higher than high-water mark and to control the lake’s level as necessary to secure safety, while the 1905 version kept that control but tied it to plans the lieutenant governor in council had since approved, extending it to the use of flashboards.
The study records that the 1905 contract gave Backus a one-year extension, to January 1, 1907, but required him in exchange to build all of the powerhouses and buildings in Fort Frances rather than half, to develop the full horsepower available for Canadian use by that date, and to reserve at least four thousand horsepower absolutely for the Canadian side, with Canadians given first preference on power beyond that amount. It records that both versions, at paragraph 17, freed the government from liability for flood damage while giving Backus no permission to overflow land outside Crown control.
The study records that the revised contract was approved by an Order in Council on January 13, 1905, and that on the same day Royal Letters Patent incorporated Backus and his associates as a company, the Ontario and Minnesota Power Company, Limited, capitalised at three million dollars. It records, citing testimony given at the 1912 hearings, that the case made to Ontario for the rewrite was that there was “no market whatever” for power on the Canadian side near the dam at the time.
The study records that the government of the Dominion of Canada raised its own concerns in January 1905, when the Privy Council and Governor-General instructed the Minister of Public Works to warn Backus that Dominion disapproval would require him to remove his temporary coffer dams at his own expense and pay any damages they caused, though construction was allowed to continue. It records that in May 1905 an assistant to the Governor-General doubted Dominion permission would be given at all, citing navigation, fishing, and the unfinished Dawson Route canal and lock at Fort Frances.
The study records that Backus secured passage of 4-5 Edward VII, Ch. 139, assented to July 20, 1905, an act of the Dominion Parliament respecting the Ontario and Minnesota Power Company, Limited, that mirrored his Ontario contract and placed pricing disputes and power apportionment under the Board of Railway Commissioners of Canada, though not the power to regulate water levels. It records that the Privy Council attached seven conditions when it approved the act on September 19, 1905, including that the company not raise water above its natural depth below the dam and that the Minister of Marine and Fisheries could veto the design of the fishway.
The study records that the Ontario Legislature then passed its own act, Chapter 132, on May 14, 1906, abrogating parts of the Dominion act on the grounds that it had not accounted for the Town of Fort Frances’s conveyance of the land to the Ontario Crown. It records that the Ontario act returned the power to fix prices and allocate electricity from the Board of Railway Commissioners to the Lieutenant-Governor in Council, and extended the completion deadline to January 1, 1908.
The study records that Congress, responding to the frequency of similar dam projects, passed a General Dam Act, 34 Stat. 386, on June 21, 1906, putting the Secretary of War and Chief of Engineers in charge of dam plans generally, reserving the government’s right to require navigation locks and to control pool levels for navigation, and imposing the same one-year-to-begin, three-year-to-finish limits that had already tripped Backus once.
The study records that Backus’s indenture with Ontario’s Commissioner of Crown Lands, dated November 20, 1906, put in writing a pledge he had given in January 1905: to build a flouring and grist mill, an oatmeal mill, a pulp mill, or some other manufacturing industry in Fort Frances within two years of the dam’s completion, with a flour or oatmeal mill sized to a thousand barrels a day, and that he paid $25,000 for the privilege. The study describes that pledge as a promise that, in consequence of building the dam, Backus would provide the Canadians with several mills giving gainful employment to residents in the town of Fort Frances.
The study’s next section records that this permission problem was not finished. In 1908, it records, President Theodore Roosevelt vetoed a bill extending Backus’s construction deadline. The study also sets down the objections Backus’s dam met that year: it records that Roosevelt’s veto message voiced fears of monopoly of water power resources, and it notes that the high water Roosevelt sought for navigation would in time become a curse to riparian owners. That fight over a signature Backus thought was already settled is where the series turns next.
How the Falls Got Its Dam is a 10-part series read from federal records that are in the public domain — a National Park Service historic resource study of water-level regulation in the Rainy Lake watershed, and the Government Printing Office transcripts of International Joint Commission hearings. How the Falls Got Its Dam — part 2 of 10. Every statute citation, every date and every named order in it is checked automatically against the pages listed below before it is published, and every quotation is checked word for word against the scanned text. The scans carry machine-read text, and where the scan is rough this series says so rather than tidying it.
Read from:
Images:
