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. The section of the river from Holcombe to Chippewa Falls was called "the wild Chippewa" by log drivers, because it dropped rapidly through falls and rapids at Holcombe, Cornell, Jim Falls, Chippewa Falls, and other places as it flowed through what would become modern Chippewa County. Most of these falls are now submerged by reservoirs. Then it slows down through Eau Claire, Dunn, Pepin and Buffalo counties, before emptying into the Mississippi River. 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 largest reservoir by far is the Chippewa Flowage, which is the 3rd largest lake in Wisconsin.
The river's primary tributaries include the Couderay, Thornapple, Flambeau, Brunet, Jump, Fisher, Yellow, Eau Claire, Red Cedar and Eau Galle Rivers. The river's confluence with the Red Cedar is just north of the Driftless Zone, at which point its floodplain widens out considerably, and includes numerous riverine islands.
The primary settlements along the river's course include Cornell, Chippewa Falls, Eau Claire, and Durand.
Different segments of the river were formed in different eras. The newest part of the river is in the north, where it flows through the till plain left by the Wisconsin glaciation - the most recent continental glacier - which receded about 10,000 years ago. The part of that glacier that bulged down the Chippewa valley is given the name of the river - the Chippewa lobe. Before receding, it reached a little past Cornell, below where the river crosses today's Ice Age Trail. 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.
In the 1700s, during a hundred-year war between the Dakota and Ojibwe, the Ojibwe people took control of much of northern Wisconsin, including the upper Chippewa valley. The river's name on the 1742 Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du is "Rivière de bon Secours ou Hahatonouadeba". "bon Secours" means something like "good help" and "Hahatonouadeba" is from the Dakota language Ḣaḣatuŋ[waŋ W]atpa, meaning Ojibwe River. In 1767, English explorer Jonathan Carver ascended the Chippewa on his way from the Mississippi to Lac Courte Oreilles and Lake Superior. He provides an early description of the lower Chippewa: The country adjoining to the river for about sixty miles, is very level, and on its banks lie fine meadows, where larger droves of buffaloes and elks were feeding, than I had observed in any other part of my travels. The track between the two branches of this river is termed the Road of War between the Chipeway and Naudowessie Indians. He goes on to describe the upper river:The country to the Falls...is almost without any timber, and above that very uneven and rugged, and closely wooded with pines, beach, maple, and birch.... Near the heads of this river is a town of the Chipeways, from whence it takes its name. It is situated on each side of the river (which at this place is of no considerable breadth) and lies adjacent to the banks of a small lake. This town contains about forty houses, and can send out upwards of one hundred warriors, many of whom were fine stout young men. The houses of it are built after the Indian manner, and have neat plantations behind them..."
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. Eau Claire's first sawmill was built in 1846. 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. In 1848, when Wisconsin became a state, the infant Chippewa County's boundaries followed the Chippewa River's watershed almost to upper Michigan - evidence of the river's commercial importance at that time. Reprinted in the front pages of Wisconsin Past and Present - A Historical Atlas, 1998, University of Wisconsin Press.
Journey of a log
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.
In the early years, supplies were hauled up the river as far as Chippewa Falls on keelboats. Steamboats began to travel up to Eau Claire starting around the early 1850s. Above Chippewa Falls, the tote road was the main way to move supplies and men to the camps upriver. The Chippewa Trail was a tote road that ran from Chippewa Falls north for about thirty-five miles to Big Bend in modern Rusk County, then followed the west bank of the Chippewa River roughly along what is now highway 40 past the sites of modern Bruce and Radisson to a place called Trading Post, which now lies beneath the Chippewa Flowage. This tote road was especially busy in spring and fall; during one trip down the trail in November of 1873 a traveler counted sixty horse teams and about 200 men walking. By 1878 a livery stable in Chippewa Falls operated a horse-pulled stage on the trail. Every five or ten miles along the way was a stopping place, which ranged from a backwoods hotel to a barn where men and horses could rest for the night under a roof. At the Hall-Raynor stopping place near modern Ojibwa a visitor recalled, "you had to step high at night after the stoppers retired, as 100 men often slept on the floor."
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.
To make the drives more efficient and reliable, the loggers changed the river somewhat, dynamiting troublesome rocks, cutting trees that would snag logs, building up the banks in places, and damming the river and its tributaries. In 1878 a large splash dam was built at Little Falls (modern Holcombe), with so much capacity that when fully opened, it was said to raise the Chippewa three feet 100 miles downstream. Over the Chippewa and its tributaries, the loggers built at least 148 logging dams of various sizes and purposes. At the end of the drive, logs were captured in log booms and holding ponds above Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire, where they could be sorted and passed on to the owning sawmill.