‘Pushing the River’: Read Some of the Wildest Canoe Stories Never Told

Once upon a time, the Mississippi River hosted one of the gnarliest canoe races anywhere. It was called the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, an annual 450-mile race on the Upper Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s. This massive river competition changed the course of modern canoeing, and a new book reveals the lost history of its impact on water sports.

In Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories, award-winning writer Frank Bures takes a deep dive into canoe adventure. Recounting the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby remains the “heart of the book,” but the non-fiction anthology offers many other stories as well.

You’ll read about the “terror” of two kayakers who barely escaped the 2011 Pagami Creek Fire in the Boundary Waters. Then there’s the spooky tale of two young campers who experienced a supernatural scare in Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park in the 1970s. Bures even shares a story from his own life on the river, with a miraculous rescue that shows what happens “when you push the river.”

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With the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, Bures delves into the forgotten contributions of the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, who long dominated the race. In the excerpt below, you’ll also learn about the unacknowledged influence of Ojibwe canoe builders Jim and Bernie Smith.

Their design features are now part of the modern canoe-racing landscape, says Bures. Currently living in Minneapolis, Bures’ work has appeared in Harper’s, Outside, and The Atlantic, as well as the Best American Travel Writing anthologies.

So take a moment and travel back 76 years to a canoe race that changed the trajectory of the sport.

(The following is excerpted from Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories, by Frank Bures, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2025.)

A Race and a Rescue in 1949

In the early morning hours of Saturday, July 16, 1949, 18-year-old Billy Smith Jr. and his partner Bob Bergstrom, a speed skater in his early 30s, settled into their canoe and started paddling across Lake Winnibigoshish, a reservoir on the Mississippi River in north-central Minnesota. At 16 miles across, it’s one of the most dangerous stretches on the Upper Mississippi River.

The two were racing in the 450-mile Paul Bunyan Aquatennial Canoe Derby from Bemidji to Minneapolis. Of the 49 teams that left Bemidji the day before, only 34 would remain by the end of Saturday. 

When Smith and Bergstrom started across, the lake was calm. “Once we got out on the water, the wind picked up and it got pretty wavy,” says Smith, at 93, in an interview at his small home in Shorewood, Minn. 

Water washed over their gunnels. The boat began to fill. “Before the race started,” Smith says, “I noticed the experienced paddlers had coffee cans in their boats. I thought they were for peeing, but I found out the hard way it was for bailing. So we just slowly sank.”

The two were in the water, hanging on to the swamped canoe, when a small motorboat came skimming across the lake. Piloting it was Jesse Tibbetts, a 56-year-old Ojibwe former canoe racer from Ball Club, Minn., a small town on the Mississippi that, like Lake Winnibigoshish, sits within the Leech Lake Reservation.

“He came bouncing on top of these waves. Then he came over, picked up our canoe, and dumped out the water. We said, ‘Thank you,’ and we took off. He saved the day for us.”

‘These Guys Are My Friends’

It was the second time in 2 days that Smith and Bergstrom had been saved by Ojibwe paddlers. The day before, after the race had started on Lake Bemidji, they got stranded in the middle. “I was so excited,” Smith says, “that I broke two paddles on Lake Bemidji. And I was sitting there with my partner Bob.”

Then along came two other racers, brothers Jim and Bernie Smith (no relation to Billy Smith), also Ojibwe men from Ball Club, Minnesota. This was their fourth derby, and they had placed in the top five in every race so far. They pulled up next to Billy Smith Jr. and threw him a paddle. “Here,” one of them said. “Use this.”

Billy noticed right away that the paddle was different. “It was an interesting design,” he says. “It was shorter with a very thick grip — almost twice of what you see now. But there was no slippage.”

The three Smiths already knew each other. In fact, Bill Smith was actually paddling the canoe Jim and Bernie had used in the previous year’s race. Now they’d gone above and beyond. They had even gone against their own interests.

“I never quite understood why they’d do that,” says Smith, “because it cost them a place, which was important to them financially. But even when we came in that day, who was waiting for me but Jim and Bernie Smith? They shook my hand. I wasn’t even out of the boat yet, and they said I could keep the paddle. It was a homemade paddle that they used. And that’s when I decided: These guys are my friends.”

It wouldn’t be a good year for Jim and Bernie Smith, who dropped out at Aitkin, less than halfway through the race. But Billy Smith and Bob Bergstrom would finish fourth overall, winning $750 (nearly $10,000 in today’s dollars), enough for Billy to pay for a year of college at the University of Minnesota.

Race History

The 1949 race was the biggest and richest Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby yet. It was the seventh time the race had been run since starting in 1940, and it attracted competitors from across the United States and Canada. 

The canoe derby started in 1940, and it was conceived as a grand event leading up to the Minneapolis Aquatennial celebration. For more than a week, teams would paddle a section of the river, stay overnight, then start again the next morning. Each team’s time for the lap would be recorded, and the race standings were then calculated every night. 

In the morning, the canoes lined up on the shore, and the teams were released at 1- or 2-minute intervals in reverse order of their finish the night before. The last canoe went out first. The previous day’s first-place paddlers started last and had to chase everyone else down. 

The race began in Bemidji near the Paul Bunyan statue. On many years, the race’s start took place during the city’s Paul Bunyan celebration, which went by various names. The day before the derby, there was always a short sprint race, usually 1 mile long, on Lake Bemidji. 

After 8 or 9 days (depending on how the stages were divided), the racers arrived in Minneapolis. The final lap ended just above St. Anthony Falls. After that, the canoes were trucked or portaged around the falls to the East River Flats below the University of Minnesota, where a final sprint race to the Franklin Avenue Bridge was launched. The finish of the race marked the start of the Aquatennial.

After 10 days of breathless race reporting on radio stations and front-page coverage in newspapers, enormous crowds, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 spectators, turned out to watch the finish. The race brought an awareness of the Mississippi, of the towns along the way, and of canoeing as both adventure and a sport to countless Minnesotans. The derby tapped into and deepened our love affair with the canoe. 

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Pain, Heroism, and Brilliance

The Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby was the first and longest race of its kind: only Quebec’s La Classique Internationale de Canots de la Mauricie (the Mauricie International Canoe Classic), a 3-day, 120-mile race that began in 1934, is older. It was also the richest canoe race in North America, with the total purse reaching $10,000 in later years — well over $100,000 in today’s dollars. 

America. It was there that canoeing legends like Gene Jensen, Irwin “Buzzy” Peterson, Karl Ketter, and Tom Estes all got their start. 

Yet the derby was something else too. In the early days, many of the top competitors were from Ojibwe (also known as Anishinaabe or Chippewa) communities of northern Minnesota. Their relatives had been plying those same waters for hundreds of years, using canoeing traditions that go back millennia. 

The canoe derby was a rare neutral ground where white and Native outdoorsmen could compete on an even field, exchanging knowledge and ideas and the occasional paddle. As they made their way downstream, they developed friendships and rivalries and connections that would last long after they crossed the finish line. It was an event that blurred some of the painful divides in our culture and history, as the men (and a few women) raced down the river in pursuit of glory and riches. 

The long shadow of the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby is known to many in the canoeing community. But even there, the history of the derby, with its pain, heroism, and brilliance, has nearly been lost. And few are aware of the longer history from which the derby emerged.

Want to read more? Pushing the River is available on Amazon for $20.

(Excerpted from Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories, by Frank Bures, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2025.)