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Warren Upham’s 1920 gazetteer, printed in the Minnesota Historical Society’s Collections, gives Ranier a single sentence on page 284. This instalment reads that sentence closely, then reads the entries that sit beside it on the same page, and the list of shoreline features that Upham prints two pages later.
Upham records that Ranier is a village of the Duluth, Winnipeg and Pacific railway, sited at the mouth of Rainy lake, and that the village took its name from officers of the railway rather than from a settler, a surveyor or a postmaster. Upham is a source here rather than an authority: Upham wrote in 1920, using the transcription conventions of that day, and where Upham gives an Ojibwe or a Cree origin, a modern Ojibwe-language source, or the Bois Forte Band, may render it differently.
Upham writes that Ranier “is a village of the Duluth, Winnipeg and Pacific railway at the mouth of Rainy lake, named by officers of this railway” (page 284). No other sentence in the gazetteer returns to Ranier to add anything further.
Upham’s page-284 entry names no individual officer of the railway, attributing the choice only to officers as a group, and it gives no year for when the village was platted or when the name was adopted. The entry settles that a railway, and not a settler or a postmaster, supplied the name, and it settles nothing about who among the railway’s officers chose it or why.
Upham records that the information gathered for the county came from Louis Ogaard, the county surveyor, during a visit in September 1909. Upham adds that a second visit, in August 1916, drew on Slocum, the county auditor. The entry for Ranier, like its neighbours in the county’s list of townships and villages, therefore rests on what those two local officials told Upham, not on a document supplied by the railway itself.
Upham records that Rainy Lake City existed for only a few years as a gold mining station, sited on the east side of the strait where Rainy lake meets Black bay, a body of water Upham also calls Rat Root lake. Upham writes that a stamp mill went up in 1894 to crush ore taken from the southwest end of Dryweed island, under a mile away, and that when the venture failed to cover its costs, the planned city was given up roughly 15 years afterward.
Upham records that the East fork’s sources lie within Rapid River township, and that the fork flows north to join the Rapid and Rainy rivers. Upham’s entry for Rat Root township notes that a winding river of the same name crosses the township, feeding into Rat Root lake, which Upham’s entry for Rainy Lake City identifies as also called Black bay.
Upham follows the county’s villages and townships with a separate list of the islands, bays and points along the part of Rainy lake that lies within the county, giving them in order from east to west. Upham names Dryweed island, Sha Sha point, Black bay, Grindstone island, Grassy island and Grassy narrows, Red Sucker island, Jackfish island and bay, Stop island, Kingston island, Sand bay, and Pither’s point at the mouth of the lake.
Upham’s page-286 list includes Dryweed island, the same island whose ore Upham says supplied the stamp mill at Rainy Lake City. The same list places Pither’s point at the mouth of the lake, the same stretch of water where Upham’s separate entry sites the village of Ranier, though the entry for Ranier does not mention Pither’s point by name.
Upham’s page-284 entry leaves Ranier as it found it: a village at the mouth of Rainy lake, named by officers of a railway whose own reasons for the choice go unrecorded in the gazetteer.
Where the Name Came From is an 18-part series read from a public-domain 1920 gazetteer of Minnesota place names, compiled by Warren Upham and out of copyright since publication. Where the Name Came From — part 3 of 18. Every date, every name, every figure and every quotation in it is checked automatically against the gazetteer pages listed below before it is published, and each quotation is checked word for word against the scanned text and carries the page it came from. The scan carries machine-read text, and where a word in it is damaged this series says so rather than quoting the damage.
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