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2008 Federal Duck Stamp Contest Phone: 218-768-2402 |
Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge has a self guiding auto tour. The tour is 9.5 miles and you will often see waterfowl, deer, grouse, bear and other wildlife. The auto tour is open to the public dawn to dusk. Brochures are located at the Refuge Headquarters and at kiosks along the tour route.
The tour will take about 45 minutes, longer if you stop to hike or watch for wildlife. The auto tour is clearly marked with numbered signs.
Key Points of Interest: Evidence suggests that Eastern Dakota Indians occupied the Rice Lake area 1200-1300 years ago. Attracted by wild rice and plentiful game, the Dakota probably lived here in temporary hunting and ricing camps. Archaeologists believe their main villages were at Mille Lacs Lake, southwest of here. In Twin Lakes an ancient dugout canoe was discovered in 1969.
Perhaps, the canoe was used by Indians to gather wild rice and hunt game. For a few weeks in the fall, Indians centered their activities around the harvest of wild rice. They poled their canoes through dense stands of wild rice, bending the stalks, dislodging the grain into the bottom of the boats.
On shore, they parched the rice over a fire and placed the grain in shallow holes in the ground, trampled out the kernels from the husk, and winnowed out the grain. They took the wild rice back to their villages where they stored it in pits for use during winter.
A local band of Ojibwa still gather wild rice here each September. The Dakota and Ojibwa people took resource from the land which were renewed each year: maple syrup, wild rice and game. But, in the late 1800's the use of the land changed dramatically.
As the railroads extended westward, more European settlers moved into the area. The resources, which for centuries were used for subsistence, became commodities.In the 1900's, a livestock farm began operating in and around Rice Lake.
Wishing to harvest Rice Lake's marsh hay with machinery, the farmers made two unsuccessful attempts to drain the lake. The ditch they dug was too small to be effective. The observation tower at Rice Lake provides a vista of the 18,000 acre refuge and the 4,500 acre lake.
In the fall, Rice Lake holds concentrations of 100,000 - 250,000 waterfowl. The majority of these birds are ring-necked ducks, whose primary food source is wild rice. Loggers harvested the towering white pine and maple trees from the forests that surround Rice Lake.
During the winter, logs were hauled to the lake and unloaded on the ice. A boom was made around the logs and when the ice melted, the log raft was towed to the lake's outlet. Lumbermen drove the logs through the Rice River and on to the Mississippi River, 20 miles to the northwest.
The main Refuge road which travels east to west was a branch of the Soo Line Railroad, known as the Cuyuna and Iron Range. This line which was constructed in 1910, carried ore from the iron mines of the nearby Cuyuna Range, and timber from the surrounding area to Lake Superior ports.
This line was abandoned in the 1920's.President Franklin Roosevelt established the Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge in 1935 to help restore wildlife and provide employment during the depression. The Federal Government operated a Civilian Conservation Corps camp here from 1939 to 1941.
While little remains of the camp, the product of the corpsmen's work is still evident. Through their labor, water control structures, dikes, and buildings were constructed and trees were planted.
