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This is the first instalment of How the Falls Got Its Dam, a ten-part history of Backus, Oberholtzer and the water that ran International Falls. It draws on a National Park Service historic resource study of water-level regulation in the Rainy Lake watershed and on the transcript of a 1917 hearing before the International Joint Commission at Minneapolis.
According to the study, surface waters drain generally west and north toward Hudson Bay, and the Rainy Lake Watershed drains about 14,500 square miles of territory. The study traces the chain from North Lake, at an elevation of about 1546 feet, down through Saganaga Lake and Lac La Croix to Namakan Lake, and it records that Namakan’s usual high-water mark of about 1118.5 feet sits roughly ten feet above Rainy Lake’s normal high-water mark of about 1108 feet.
The study records that Rainy Lake covers about 345 square miles of surface, and that Namakan and its neighbor Kabetogama each cover about forty square miles. It also explains that the lower lakes, Rainy, Namakan and Kabetogama, have low and swampy banks, so that even a small rise in depth expands their surface area radically.
Below Rainy Lake, the study notes, the water plunges over the dam at International Falls, once known as Koochiching Falls, with a normal drop of 32 feet, before continuing about seventy-five miles to the Lake of the Woods.
The study records that Backus was born in 1860 near Red Wing, Minnesota, and that he attended the University of Minnesota before dropping out, working his way up in a Minneapolis lumber firm of which he was sole owner by 1885.
The study records that in 1898 Backus rode the railroad to its end at Brainerd, Minnesota, and trekked two hundred miles to the border lands, and that on this trip he first saw the possibilities of Koochiching Falls, opposite the Ontario village of Fort Frances. According to the study, Backus took on the ownership and construction of railroads to the falls, planning with his principal partner, William F. Brooks, to generate their own rail traffic through timber and other wood products; the study records that he sold his Minneapolis lumber and sawmill companies around 1905 and completed a hydroelectric dam at the falls in 1909, and it credits his impetus in the area with the change of the village’s name to International Falls; the study also records that his storage dam at Kettle Falls was not finished until 1914.
The study records that Backus built the dam, the sawmill and the paper mills that gave International Falls steady employment. The same study records that his opponents blamed his plans for flooding shoreline that had stood untouched for a hundred years, and that a few riparian owners filed damage suits against him, though they usually lost.
The study records that Backus borrowed as much as thirty million dollars to build three power dams on Ontario’s Seine River, that his seventeen companies fell into receivership on February 28, 1931, and that he died of a heart attack in New York City on October 29, 1934. The study frames the two men’s core disagreement as a question of priorities: Backus put food and shelter, the basic needs of life, first, while Oberholtzer took those needs as already met and looked to what people need beyond bread.
The study records that Oberholtzer was born in 1884 in Davenport, Iowa, and that he received a Harvard degree in 1907 followed by a year of training as a landscape architect.
According to the study, Oberholtzer first visited the north country in 1909, and in 1912 he canoed to Hudson’s Bay with a guide, Billy Magee. The study records that he later acquired island property on Rainy Lake near Ranier, Minnesota, next to a summer home Backus kept there.
The study quotes an interview Oberholtzer gave the Minnesota Historical Society describing Backus as a neighbor whose wife and mother he knew socially, while insisting he was outside Backus’s business plans. The study records that his testimony at the 1925 IJC hearings at International Falls ran six pages of the transcript, but that it drew Sewell T. Tyng and Frank B. Hubachek to recruit him as spokesman for the conservationists opposing Backus’s plans, leading to the founding of the Quetico-Superior Council in 1928.
The study records that Oberholtzer worked from his retreat on Mallard Island, and that he died on June 6, 1977, at the age of ninety-three.
The study traces the legal fight to the Root-Bryce Treaty of 1909, which established the International Joint Commission with three American and three Canadian members, and it records that the commission’s first docket, Docket #1A on the Kettle Falls Dam, ended in 1913 with the commission declaring it had no jurisdiction.
According to the study, the fight returned to the commission in 1925 as the Rainy Lake Reference, Docket #20R, with hearings held at International Falls in September of that year. The study records that Oberholtzer’s allies won passage of the Shipstead-Nolan Act in the United States Congress in 1930 and in the Minnesota legislature in 1933, and that a final report on the Rainy Lake Reference followed in 1934.
The study records that the two governments negotiated a treaty on the watershed, ratified on October 3, 1940, and that the day-to-day Rule Curve governing levels on Rainy and Namakan Lakes was not drafted until 1949.
The transcript records that the commission convened in Minneapolis on January 22, 1917, with Mr. Gardner presiding, to consider an application filed August 28, 1916 by the International Lumber Company for a boom in Rainy River. Later in the hearing, the transcript records that Edward W. Backus, president of the International Lumber Co., was sworn and testified about the disputed piling in the river.
Backus testified that the booming work “was built several years ago and was operated in about the same manner that it is being operated to-day until some two years ago,” when a change let the company hang a boom to serve the Canadian mill. Defending the company’s need for more room, Backus told the commission:
It does seem to me that there is much ado here about a simple thing; that so long as the people of Canada and the United States have ample facilities to navigate the Rainy River, and the only people who are suffering are ourselves who are very short of facilities for operating those big plants, there ought to be no hesitation about giving us all the room that can be spared.
The next instalment turns to the statutes and the earliest dam permits, tracing how federal authority over Koochiching Falls was first granted and how Backus began building on it.
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 1 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.
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