Chippewa River (Wisconsin)

thumb|250px|The Chippewa River as it passes through [[Pepin County, near Ella, WI.]]

The Chippewa River of northwest Wisconsin flows over 200 miles, starting about forty miles from Lake Superior and running southwest to the Mississippi River below Pepin. A half dozen dams along its course produce electricity. The man-made lakes above those dams support boating and cottages. Fishermen, canoeists, kayakers and sightseers enjoy all parts the river.

Long ago, Native Americans traveled and fished the Chippewa. In the late 1800s, when there were no roads or railroads in northern Wisconsin, lumbermen used the river and its tributaries to transport huge amounts of pine timber from the forests of northern Wisconsin to sawmills downstream and to lumber markets far down the Mississippi.

Geography

The upper reaches of the Chippewa consist of two forks: the West Fork and the East. The West Fork rises at Chippewa Lake in southeastern Bayfield County, forty miles southwest of Ashland. The East Fork rises in the swamps of the southern part of the Town of Knight in Iron County, Wisconsin, thirty miles from Ironwood. The two forks meet at Lake Chippewa, a reservoir in central Sawyer County. From there, the river flows generally southwest through Rusk County. Sediment build-up at the river's mouth forms a delta that protrudes into the Mississippi, creating Lake Pepin.

Major lakes along the river's route include the Radisson and Holcombe Flowages, Lake Wissota and Dell's Pond, all of which are reservoirs.

The river's primary tributaries include the Couderay, Thornapple, Flambeau, Brunet, Jump, Fisher, Yellow, Eau Claire, Red Cedar and Eau Galle Rivers. Below Cornell the Chippewa flows through the till plains of older glaciers until it enters the Driftless Area near the Mississippi. As the glacier receded, its meltwater cut the river's channel through the northern till plain, dumping sediment into the older river channel downstream. This sediment formed outwash plains in the old river valley. As the glacier retreated and sediment reduced, the flow of water cut new channels through the outwash plains, often exposing Precambrian igneous bedrock in the upper Chippewa and Cambrian sandstone in the lower.

History

Indians, explorers, names, and land cessions

Various Native American peoples lived along the Chippewa over the years. Paleo-Indians arrived soon after the glacier retreated. By the 1600s Dakota people dominated the Chippewa valley. In 1680 Father Hennepin ventured about 30 miles up the Chippewa from the Mississippi. He called the river "la Riviere des Taureaux Sauvages" - the River of the Wild Beefs. In 1686 French explorer Nicolas Perrot built Fort St. Antoine near the mouth of the Chippewa River and traded with the Dakota for furs. "bon Secours" means something like "good help" and "Hahatonouadeba" is from the Dakota language Ḣaḣatuŋ[waŋ W]atpa, meaning Ojibwe River.</blockquote>

By the late 1700s, fur traders had established posts at the headwaters of the Chippewa. The modern name "Chippewa" is a rendering of the name "Ojibwe."

In 1837 the U.S. forced the Dakota to cede the lower Chippewa valley, from what is now Eau Claire down to the Mississippi. That same year in the White Pine Treaty, the U.S. forced the Ojibwe to cede much of northern Wisconsin, including the Chippewa valley above Eau Claire. These land cessions cleared the way for logging.

Logging in the wilderness

Of the forests in Wisconsin in the 1800s, the Chippewa River system held more pine timber than even the Wisconsin River. It is estimated that the Chippewa system drained 34% of Wisconsin's pineries, as compared to 21% for the Wisconsin, 14% for the St. Croix, and 7% for the Black. Before logging, the Chippewa Valley probably held about 46,000,000,000 board feet of lumber. Frederick Weyerhaeuser described it as "a logger's paradise, a very large part of its area being heavily forested with the finest quality of white pine timber, while rivers, streams, and lakes offered an excellent network of transportation facilities." If the whole Chippewa watershed is thought of as a factory, the rivers were the conveyor belts - but unruly, fickle ones at times.

The first sawmill in the Chippewa watershed was probably functioning at what would become Menomonie around 1831. By 1840, Jean Brunet and associates were sawing wood at Chippewa Falls. Floods destroyed all these early mills, but the lumbermen rebuilt. A great supply of timber lay upstream and a great demand for lumber lay downstream - frame houses and barns were needed at growing cities like St. Louis and at farms on the treeless prairies of Nebraska and beyond. That combination attracted industrious men with the promise of huge profits.

Journey of a log

thumb|upright|Loading logs onto a sleigh in western Taylor County, in the Chippewa watershed, 1909

Logging camps upstream cut logs to send to each mill. Generally the logging camp was constructed in the fall, near timber that the logging company had rights to, near a water source, and within a few miles of a river or decent-sized stream. The shanties (buildings) were rough, low structures built from whatever trees were handy. In the cold days of winter, lumberjacks would crawl out of their bunks before dawn, walk out into the woods, and fell trees with axes. A pair of sawyers would remove the limbs and saw the trees into logs - typically sixteen feet long. A "scaler" measured each log and stamped the mark of his lumber company on the end. A "skidder" and his oxen (or horses) pulled each log out to a skidway in the woods. There a teamster loaded the logs onto a sleigh and his horses pulled them to a river or stream bank - usually less than six miles away. Then they were piled up into "rollways" or pushed onto the ice, waiting for spring.]]

The 16-foot logs were floated down the rivers in the spring and early summer, when the ice and snow thawed and the rivers were high. Above Chippewa Falls, where the river was rough and rocky, masses of individual logs were floated down on the flood, shepherded by log drivers. The most agile drivers went ahead and tried to unblock log jams as fast as they formed, racing out to the jams in bateaux or walking on the floating logs. Other drivers brought up the rear, wading in the shallows and pushing along logs that stalled on sandbars and in brush. Driving crews were usually supported by a wannigan - a floating cookhouse that fed them hot food after long hours working in cold water. This was all dangerous work. In one terrible day in 1905, eleven log drivers drowned while trying to untangle a log jam near modern Holcombe.

Hydro-electricity

thumb|[[Hydroelectricity|Hydroelectric dam on the Chippewa River in Eau Claire]]

Hydro-electric dams were built at Cornell and Jim Falls around 1911. With these, logs could no longer be driven down that section of the river, so had to be loaded onto rail cars at places like Holcombe for shipment. In 1948 Northern States Power built the hydro-electric dam that now impounds the Holcombe Flowage. Paddlers experience a variety of conditions on the river, from calm, slow-moving water to small rapids and whitewater. Fishing is a popular activity: the river is known for musky, smallmouth bass, walleye, and northern pike.

The river is easily accessible for bikers and pleasure seekers via the Chippewa River State Trail, which follows the river from Eau Claire to Durand. Chippewa River Bottoms, along the river in Buffalo County, has been designated a National Natural Landmark.

References

thumb|Fishing below the High Bridge in Eau Claire