Researching a legendary race: How to use newspaper archives in crafting a narrative

Not long ago, I came to the realization that I’d written a lot of stories about canoeing. It made sense: I live in Minnesota, and that’s what we do. I’d written about Guinness World Records, paddlers trapped in wildfires, and even my own near-death experience. Before long I started to dream of trying to bring these stories together in a collection that someone could have at their cabin…or even take on a canoe trip. 

But as I was assembling the collection ("Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories") I felt it was still missing a history of canoeing in our region. This, I thought, would give an idea of how the culture of today was connected to the one of the past, and would make the whole collection feel more deeply rooted. So I started researching possible narratives. A subject that emerged quickly was the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, a 450-mile race held on the Mississippi River in the 1940s and 1950s. The name had resonance among the old-timers, but no one seemed to know much about it.

While I was casting around for this, I heard about a guy who had raced in the derby, and who still remembered a lot about it. Bill Smith was 93 years old, and had competed in the 1947 and 1949 races. A few months later, I sat down with him. Smith’s recall was vivid and clear. Even better, he had known most of the top racers, some of whom belonged to the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. He’d seen how their canoe building influenced the course of modern racing, something never before reported. Smith’s story was key to making the derby come alive. 

But it wasn’t the whole story. There were at least nine other derbies between 1940 and 1960, and Smith didn’t know much about the other races.

To fill this in I went to the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center, which began collecting material in 1849. The clippings file was spotty, and there were only a handful of physical photos. But I did find an amazing digital archive called the Historic Minneapolis Tribune. It was a scanned version of all the papers that eventually merged into what is now the Minnesota Star Tribune, and it could only be accessed at the library.

While not perfect, the archive let me search back to the early 1900s for terms like “canoe derby” and “canoe marathon.” Using that and several other databases, I dug up a “water marathon” that had taken place in 1919 on the Mississippi River in the era of “marathon mania” and a 500-mile race on the river that took place in 1928.

When it came to the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, which started in 1940, the old papers were a treasure trove: Two Minneapolis newspapers sent reporters down the river in motorboats accompanying the paddlers. The reporting started a few days before the start, ran throughout the 10 or so days the paddlers were racing down the river, and went on a few days after the finish.  On July 17, 1949, for example, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune reporter Ed Shave wrote about the difficulties racers had crossing the massive, and dangerous, Lake Winnibigoshish. He wrote:

There were literally hundreds of articles about the derby. I wasn’t quite sure how to manage all that, so in the end, I just downloaded some 643 news stories, and ended up with 157 photos and items from other sources. I arranged these by year and read through them several times to attempt to reconstruct the events of each race. Other information came from obituaries emailed to me by Lilah Crow, executive director of the Itasca County Historical Society, and from a thin book written about the 1959 race called, “Which Way Bena?”  

The daily reporting from the Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Tribune reporters was essential for keeping the facts of the races straight, for looking at the times and standings on a daily basis, and for keeping many of the small details that human memory is not good at retaining. But the eyewitness interviews were key for adding color, for tracking relationships between paddlers, and for making the race come alive in a way news accounts can’t. For example, in my interview with Smith, I learned there was much more to the 1949 Lake Winnibigoshish crossing, and was able to fill in details that had never been reported before:

Through all of my research, I was inspired partly by Daniel James Brown’s "The Boys in the Boat," which is an amazing feat of reporting. In that book, Brown seemed to have combed through news accounts of the various races, then turned them into a real-time, riveting account of the races his characters took part in. (Brown also was able to interview at least one surviving team member, who was his main character.)

The contests in "The Boys in the Boat" were national and international news, so Brown must have had some rich material to work with. I didn’t have quite as much, but I used what I had: From all that reporting, I had to figure out who was in the lead on each day, what the most dramatic parts of each race were, who the main characters were, and what were quotes and other information I could actually use. This was challenging because often the newspapers would report something that happened several days earlier, because some of them were morning and evening papers. So it wasn’t always clear who was where when, unless you read them carefully and studied the daily standings.

As I was putting these together, I also realized that the races had to work together as chapters to create an overall narrative in terms of the history of the race—and the history of canoeing.

I did find a few descendants of the racers, but most of them didn’t know much about the derby. I did, however,  find one other surviving racer to interview: Stan Droogsma was 91 years old, and had competed in the 1960 race. Then in the summer of 2024, I published a 6,000-word version in "Minnesota History Magazine."  After it came out, I heard from the family of Harlow Thompson, who’d won the 1951 race and competed in several others. Thompson was 99 years old, still lucid and still remembered many details of the derby. We arranged for a Zoom interview, and I spoke to him for about an hour. Afterward, his son told me he learned more about the race in that hour than he had in the previous 70 years. Thompson has since passed away, but now his stories will live on in the book. 

After that, I expanded the story into a 30,000-word piece, which now appears in "Pushing the River." The story of the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby ended up taking up more than half the book.

Sometimes, while I was busy in the historical society basement, I would get lost in the research then look up and remember that it wasn’t 1949. It was easy to forget where I was, which I took as a sign that I was onto something. Time flows as relentlessly as a river, and when you’re immersed in writing history, it can be easy to let the stories sweep you away.

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Frank Bures is a writer based in Minneapolis, and the author of "Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories."