Adventures on the Ottertail

A long, long time ago, most of this country that we now call the United States belonged to the Native American people, or, as the pioneers called them, "Indians". In northern Minnesota these Native American people called themselves the "Anishinaabe". The new "white" settlers that came from a far-away land called "Europe", called them the "Chippewa". They lived all along the river called "Ottertail", where they hunted and fished and harvested wild rice for thousands of years. The...
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A long, long time ago, most of this country that we now call the United States belonged to the Native American people, or, as the pioneers called them, "Indians". In northern Minnesota these Native American people called themselves the "Anishinaabe". The new "white" settlers that came from a far-away land called "Europe", called them the "Chippewa". They lived all along the river called "Ottertail", where they hunted and fished and harvested wild rice for thousands of years. The Ottertail River was so named by the early fur trappers. They named it "Ottertail" because; where the river flowed into Otter Lake, it formed a very long narrow peninsula that curved out into the lake. To the early fur trappers, this resembled the tail of an Otter In the late 1880's; (that's over a hundred years ago), the Feiffer pioneer family had recently arrived from their home country called Germany to start a new life in America. They were just starting to build their new farm at the edge of the prairie on the banks of the Ottertail river. The Feiffer family included; August, the father, Annie, the Mother and their four children; Joseph, Martha, Gretchen and Franz. They lived at the edge of the new settlement called Otter Falls. The new railroad called the Northern Pacific crossed the river at the falls and went right past the Feiffer's house There was a large saw-mill on the river's edge at the falls, which sawed the logs into lumber. These logs were harvested from the forests all along the Ottertail River and around the White Pine Lake, just to the north of Otter Falls. Also at Otter Falls was a brewery, where the farmers from the prairies to the west brought their barley grain to be brewed into a beverage called beer. August Feiffer worked at the brewery. Kerosene lamps provided light at night. There was no electricity, no TV, no radio even. There were no I-phones, or phones of any kind. Needless to say; no video games, I-pads, or computers, nor internet. No Wi-Fi or satellite signals; because no satellites yet circled our planet. The automobile had not yet been invented and all roads were just dirt roads, traveled by horses and wagons and 'buggies'. Before the roads and the railroads were built into the wilderness, the main means of transportation was the river. Indians and fur rappers traveled up and down the Ottertail River by canoes. Then came the loggers, or "lumberjacks", who floated their logs down the river to the saw mills. All summer long, the river became a 'river of logs', flowing downstream to the saw mills. Here the logs were sawed into boards and beams used to build houses and stores for the new settlers arriving almost daily.