The Voyageur's Highway: Minnesota's Border Lake Land [Paperback]

Grace Lee Nute (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1941

A popular guide to the state's canoe country from Rainy Lake east to Lake Superior tells of famous explorers, the great fur traders, voyageurs, Indians, and loggers who passed that way. Photographs and maps support the fascinating, authoritative text.

Product Details

• Paperback: 113 pages
• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press (October 1941)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873510062
• ISBN-13: 978-0873510066
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #721,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Colorful History of the US-Canadian border, June 25, 2010

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MAM (Portland OR USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Voyageur's Highway: Minnesota's Border Lake Land (Paperback)

American history buffs are often not familiar with how Canada and the USA's borderline was established amid three centuries of fur-trading, (17th, 18th and 19th) that took place around Hudson's Bay, the Great Lakes region and northern Minnesota. Historian author, Grace Lee Nute, is a graceful, accessible writer who spent a lifetime doing the research and writing several books. The famous Canadian Voyageurs are what make her stories so fascinating - those burly French-Canadian canoemen who swung through the northern woods toting their great bundles of furs and trade goods and plunged their fat cargo canoes through endless white water rapids, singing at the top of their lungs! They are to Canadian history what cowboys are to America: national icons.

Also amazing are the stories of several of the key explorers like La Verendrye, Alexander MacKenzie and that great exploring map-maker, David Douglas, who, in the late 1700s, travelled 55,000 miles over 27 years, surveying everywhere he went. The end result was his creation of two enormous maps, as exquisitely beautiful today as they were incredibly accurate and influential in their time.

Nute also takes the story into the 20th century, up to 1941. the reader is dismayed by early twentieth century environment destruction wreaked by lumber and iron ore mining industries but also heartened by the way Canada and the US have continued to cooperate to preserve much of the original deep forest as well as the pristine lakes that make up the border lakes region. This is indeed a worthy read!