AI Model: Claude by Anthropic
Sources:
View on Minnesota Geographic Names: Their Origin and Historic Significance →
AI-generated content may contain errors. Community members are encouraged to verify important details independently.
International Falls sits at the edge of a source most residents have never opened: Warren Upham’s Minnesota Geographic Names, written for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Collections. The gazetteer records the county seat in a short entry, and that entry fixes the year the city was incorporated, the falls the city is named from, and the two men who gave Upham the details he printed. This instalment reads that entry as Upham wrote it, on page 283 of the 1920 volume, along with what stands beside it on the surrounding pages of the same gazetteer.
Upham records that International Falls, the county seat, was founded as Koochiching village in the township carrying that name, and that it was incorporated as a city in 1909. Upham records that the city’s name “notes its location on the international boundary at the Koochiching falls of Rainy river” (page 283).
Upham’s 1920 gazetteer gives the county’s own name as a Cree word that the Ojibways applied to Rainy lake and to Rainy river. Upham is a source here rather than an authority: the gazetteer gives its renderings in the transcription conventions of Upham’s own 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 records that the river’s descent here, in broken rapids over irregular ledges of granitoid gneiss, was 23 feet, most of it within about 300 feet of channel. Upham writes that a dam close above the falls, completed in 1908, “increased their head to 26 feet, raising the river to the level of Rainy lake” (page 283), and that the change let the lake steamboats reach the city.
Upham writes that once the dam was in, the river’s power ran the paper mills of International Falls. Upham adds that before the dam, the falls’ frequent rainbow in its mist had, in his telling, explained why Rainy lake and river carry that name.
Upham records that the information for this county came from Louis Ogaard, the county surveyor, during a visit at International Falls in September, 1909. Upham records that a second visit, in August, 1916, brought information from L. H. Slocum. Upham names him as the county auditor. Upham names only these two informants for the county’s chapter of the gazetteer.
Upham records that Fort Frances stands across the water from the city, on the Canadian bank, and that it grew up around a former fur trading post named for Frances Ramsey Simpson, the wife of Sir George Simpson. Upham gives Frances Ramsey Simpson’s death as 1853. Upham gives Sir George Simpson’s dates as 1792 to 1860.
Upham records that Koochiching township, like the county, took its name from the falls of Rainy river.
Upham lists the islands, bays and points of the county’s part of Rainy lake, from east to west, as Dryweed island, then Sha Sha point and Black bay, then Grindstone island, then Grassy island and Grassy narrows, then Red Sucker island, then Jackfish island and bay, then Stop island, then Kingston island, then Sand bay and Pither’s point at the mouth of the lake. Upham gives no description of these islands or bays beyond their names and their order from east to west.
Upham’s entry for International Falls stops at the falls, the dam and the boundary line. It gives no population figure, no description of its streets, and no account of the city beyond why its name was given and when it was incorporated. Upham’s own entry gives no date for when the village was first settled, only for its incorporation as a city in 1909.
Upham records the paper mills, the steamboats and the border crossing only as consequences of the falls and the dam, never as subjects of their own. The entry’s last word is the dam and the lake steamboats it allowed to reach the city, not the city that grew up around them.
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 1 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.
Read from:
Images:
