Historian John Anfinson has spent much of his adult life working in jobs that keep him close to the Mississippi River, first with the US Army Corps of Engineers, then later with the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, a part of the National Park Service. In this episode, we have a wide-ranging discussion about his career as a river historian. During his tenure with the Corps of Engineers, for example, he learned of the work of Henry Bosse, whose photographs and maps documented the Mississippi before the lock and dam system was constructed. We discuss the early history of the lock and dam system, including a brief overview of the forces that propelled that project forward. Anfinson also describes the origins of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, how they’ve driven greater engagement with the river, and the challenges they face just letting people know they exist. We conclude with a few thoughts about the future of the river, from short-term challenges to the hope that more people will get involved to shape the river’s future.
Show Notes
Here are links to some of the places we talked about in this episode:
Mississippi National River and Recreation Area
Henry Bosse photographs (scroll down on this page)
Books with Henry Bosse’s photographs:
- Mississippi Blue by The Photographs of Henry P. Bosse by Charles Wehrenberg
- View on the Mississippi: The Photographs of Henry Peter Bosse by Mark Neuzil
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Transcript
Sun, Nov 03, 2024 1:37PM • 1:11:03
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Mississippi River history, Upper Mississippi Refuge, Henry Bossy photographs, lock and dam system, Mississippi National Recreation Area, river navigation, environmental movement, indigenous communities, river recreation, river challenges, river future, river restoration, river education, river conservation, river passion
SPEAKERS
Dean Klinkenberg, John Anfinson
John Anfinson 00:00
So if you want to change the river into something you want today, look at what people did in the past to get what they wanted. Look at their movements, look at their tenacity. Look at their passion. And I also incorporated a piece in that book, then on the environment and the creation of the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge. In chapter seven of the book is really about the refuge creation, but that’s another movement where someone said, you know, we can have a different vision for this river, a different purpose, one for fish and wildlife and recreation. And Will Dilg and the Isaac Walton League did that 100 years ago this year. And so again, it showed that it’s not just navigation, but you can take a whole different perspective and push for it and make it happen.
Dean Klinkenberg 01:06
Welcome to the Mississippi Valley traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg, and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007 join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers, read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going. Welcome to Episode 52 of the Mississippi Valley traveler podcast. Historian John Anfinson has spent much of his adult life working in jobs that have kept him close to the Mississippi River, first with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and then later with the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, which is part of the National Park Service. So I thought it’d be fun to have him on this episode and have a wide ranging discussion about his career as a river historian. During his tenure with the Corps of Engineers, for example, he learned about the work of Henry Bossy, whose photographs and maps documented the Mississippi before the lock and dam system was constructed. So we have a nice, lengthy discussion about Bossy and his photographs. We also discussed some of the early history of the lock and dam system, including a brief overview of the forces that propelled those projects forward. After that, we kind of transitioned into a discussion about the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, like specifically how that got started. Turns out the history of that recreation area went back much further than I was aware of. Some of the challenges that that John faced during his years with that recreation area, including the years he served as superintendent, which include things like just letting people know that the Recreation Area exists. And we finish with a few thoughts about the future of the river, some of the short term challenges facing the river, and our hopes that more people will get involved to shape the river’s future. And we talk about one project in particular that John is hopeful about, one that could reshape part of the Mississippi, particularly that stretch through the Twin Cities and and it could have ramifications down river from there. So stick around. It’s a it’s a fun interview. I think you’ll enjoy it. Thanks to all of you who showed me some love through Patreon. You can join the Patreon community for as little as $1 a month, just go to patreon.com/deanklinkenberg, you can join there, and joining even for that $1 a month level will get you early access to the podcasts. If Patreon is not your thing, well, buy me a coffee. I do have a caffeine habit that, and I would appreciate your help sustaining it. I want to know how to do that. Just go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and you will find instructions about how to buy me a coffee at that same address, MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast. You’ll also find the back episodes, all 51 previous episodes. Click on one of those episodes to listen and to read the show notes from each of those as well as the show notes from this episode. Thank you for listening, and now let’s get on with the interview. Dr John Anfinson has been researching, writing and speaking about the Upper Mississippi River for over 30 years. He spent the first half of his federal career with the St Paul district US Army Corps of Engineers as a historian and Cultural Resources Program Manager. He joined the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service in 2000 where he served as superintendent from 2014 to 2020. John is also the author of “The River We Have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi” and “River of History.” John holds a PhD in US history from the University of Minnesota. Welcome to the podcast, John.
John Anfinson 05:20
Thanks for having me.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:23
You know, John, I’m looking over your long career with the Mississippi and it always makes me wonder, makes me curious about people’s backgrounds and where they grew up. So tell me a little bit about where you grew up and if the outdoors played any role in your life when you were a child.
John Anfinson 05:38
I grew up in a small town of about 3200 people in western Minnesota called Benson, and it was a typical small agricultural community. But I my outdoor experience really came from our cabin up at Lake Minnewaska, about 25 miles north, one of the biggest well, one of the top 20 lakes in the state in terms of size. And my family had a an area where there were about three cabins, but it was all family, and it was large woods on either side. So we would go up there every summer, and, you know, spend a lot of time there, and I just run around the woods, and my brothers and I and cousins, and we just loved getting up there and then swimming in the lake and fishing and so. So nature was just embedded in my growing up.
Dean Klinkenberg 06:25
Absolutely, that sounds fun to me. So those were summers, obviously, then, because you wouldn’t go up there in the winter time too much, I imagine.
John Anfinson 06:32
Oh, we, we went up ice fishing a few times, which taught me never to get into ice fishing. But we just have one of those fancy, you know, fancy new fish houses that people have.
Dean Klinkenberg 06:47
Was your, did your family have any hunting traditions or fishing traditions, besides going up north?
John Anfinson 06:53
No, you know, we I went hunting a number of times. My dad was not a great hunter. One of my uncles would always hang ducks on our fence in the in the back, just to kind of taunt my dad, because my dad would rarely get ducks, and he always got them.
Dean Klinkenberg 07:09
So, what the what was the first like, Miss, how did you get connected to the Mississippi? Then let’s go there. Like, what? What did you know about the Mississippi growing up? When? What did you get first, sort of what was your first direct experience with the river that you can recall?
John Anfinson 07:25
So my grandmother was from Brainerd, Minnesota, North of the Twin Cities, and she lived in this house close to the Mississippi. And you just cut through two houses and you go down to the river. And of course, the mantra was, don’t you kids dare go near the Mississippi River. So my first experience was with the Mississippi was not to go near it, so that, that was my growing up experience. And then I went down from Benson to the University of Minnesota to go to college, and the main campus spans the Mississippi River. So you’re going back and forth between the east and west banks. And I go back and forth and back and forth hundreds of times, and I was amazed that the river never changed its height much. I didn’t understand locks and dams at that time, that there was a lock and dam one downstream, that was a and I was walking over a reservoir the whole time. So that didn’t sink in at first.
Dean Klinkenberg 08:17
What’s interesting, so many people, so many of us, like our first impression of the Mississippi is like adults are telling us, don’t go anywhere there. It’s there’s a sense of danger, and we should be afraid of the river. And it sounds like that was definitely the message you were given. Yeah,
John Anfinson 08:32
it’s interesting that I was warned not to go the river, but we always went swimming in the lake, so rivers just had that different they could carry you away. You know, maybe physically as well as mentally.
Dean Klinkenberg 08:44
Right at that time at the University of Minnesota, was there, much like explicit, was there a culture of Mississippi River recreation at all at the university, or anything like that?
John Anfinson 08:58
Not at all that I was aware of. It was, however, I mean, it was 1972 the environmental movement is in full swing, and there is a tremendous interest in, you know, the environment and protecting the environment. But I just, you know, I was a freshman, sophomore, junior, I just was, I was not connected into all those yet, right?
Dean Klinkenberg 09:20
So was your education continuous? Did you go right from undergrad to grad school?
John Anfinson 09:25
I went from my undergrad to my master’s and then my doctorate.
Dean Klinkenberg 09:29
And what was yours? Did you have a specialty or a niche within the history world?
John Anfinson 09:34
I had a double undergrad degree in anthropology, archeology and then history as well, and my master’s and doctorate were in American Indian history.
Dean Klinkenberg 09:43
Wow, that must have been an interesting time to be researching that, because that was also around the time you had the American Indian Movement kind of growing in the Twin Cities area, and a greater consciousness of trying to do to write our history or rewrite our history. Of American Indian history to be more faithful to what really happened.
John Anfinson 10:04
You know, it’s interesting that that never bled into the academia world that I was in and I was studying with, you know, indigenous scholars. But I didn’t, we really didn’t talk about that a lot. We did some. It’d be much more, much more infused in over there today,
Dean Klinkenberg 10:23
Right, right. We’ll get to that too, but I imagine that it became a more important part of your work when you were with the park service as well connecting with us. But we’ll come back to that a little bit. So when did you get your when did you start working for the Corps?
John Anfinson 10:41
Early in my master’s program, I was, there was a position for an archeologist student trainee at the and so I applied for it, and I knew so little about the Corps that I spelled, spelled it, C, O, R, E on the envelope I sent them, and they hired me anyway. So I hired as a student trainee, but as an archeologist. They didn’t hire historians at that point.
Dean Klinkenberg 11:08
So what was your what would you what were your responsibilities as a student archeologist?
John Anfinson 11:13
They threw me in pretty quick, and I remember them sitting me down right away with the federal regulations for cultural resource management. Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 and under that act, federal agencies had to take into account the impacts of their work on the cultural environment. So my job was to review Corps’ projects for their impact on historic and archeological sites. For example, there’s a big flood control project of Portage Wisconsin, and the levee they were proposing was going to cross the mouth of the portage Canal, which was a on the National Register of Historic Places. And we also, they’re also gonna build this long levee, and we had to decide, you know, it’s gonna destroy some archeological sites in the area. So I was that was one of my bigger projects I worked on early on in my career with the Corps.
Dean Klinkenberg 12:06
So would the reports that you write influence the construction of those projects? And would they then have to find ways to minimize damage to those cultural heritage sites or or just say, Oops, sorry. Let’s document as much as we can, but we have to build it this way. How did that generally work?
John Anfinson 12:25
You’ve captured part of it. There’s a triage. Number one is, can you avoid it? Can you avoid the damage? Number two is, can you minimize it? Do it in some way that’s not going to destroy it completely. And third is, if you can’t do either those other two. How do you mitigate the damage? And for the portage canal, they had to build the levee across the mouth of the canal, and so we did a publication on it that told people about the history of the canal, and that was the mitigation, all right.
Dean Klinkenberg 12:58
Well, you must have done something right, because you ended up getting hired permanently at some point, right? So, when did you become the historian and work with the cultural resources?
John Anfinson 13:10
You know, I’m not sure the exact date, but, you know, I just kind of, they kept pushing me to go permanent. And I said, I’m not going to go permanent till I finish my PhD, because I knew if I went permanent, I’d never finish it. I finished that in 1987 because I was working half time for the Corps all through my master’s and doctoral program. So it took a little longer than I wanted it to, but I was working half time. So about 1987, ’88 I went permanent with the Corps of Engineers, and it would take about five more years to convince them that they already had four other archeologists on staff, that maybe we could change my title, to Historian, and they’d actually have a historian. There were 72 archeologists nationwide, in the Corps at that time, and I think four or five historians. Wow.
Dean Klinkenberg 13:58
So when you were imagining that role of historian, then what did you picture your what kind of projects work did you imagine you would be doing for the Corps as the historian?
John Anfinson 14:07
Well, it wasn’t about what I imagined. It was about what they told me. So. So one of the bigger projects I worked on, and was the major maintenance, major rehab program for the locks and dams of the St Paul district, locks and dams three through 26 and they were going to upgrade them. They’re going to build all new central control stations on them. And so my job was to find out, first of all, do these locks and dams merit inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, and if they do at what level, local, regional, national and so I started looking at the history of the of the locks and dams that were built during the 1930s and I made an argument that they were nationally significant, that this was about, you know, connect to the whole system three through 26 of making the Upper Mississippi River. And. A navigable highway for the nation, and in the design and the engineering were really unique. And so I propose that they’d be eligible for the national register, which did not go over big with some people within the Corps, but the State Historic Preservation Office of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Iowa agreed, and they became eligible and eligible as being the same as being listed, you have to follow the National Historic Preservation Act if they are. So I got to help work with the architects on the design of the new buildings so that we could make sure they fit the historic character of the communities they were in, or the historic character of the locks and dams themselves. So so it got to influence design and as well as history.
Dean Klinkenberg 15:47
Wow, interesting. So, yeah, I remember like there was a period of time when there was a major every year, every year, like they take on two or three locks to overhaul with major rehabilitation projects of what it must have gone on for 20 years, or something to get through all of them.
John Anfinson 16:04
Yeah, it took a long time, yeah, which was good, because I had to work on, you know, helping on the design of each of those control stations in each one of the locks and dams. Used to have a lock Masters House and an assistant lock Masters House. They lived on site, and they were removing all of those too, because they thought that the lock master should just rent a place or buy a house in the towns they lived in. So we worked with Guttenberg, Iowa to save the last lock Masters House and work with the city to take it over as kind of a museum for the city. So if you go to lock and dam 10, the house is still there on site.
Dean Klinkenberg 16:40
Yeah, I think that museum is open seasonally, if I remember, right. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it’s a decent living living quarters. If you’re the lock master, and it’s a you can’t beat the commute from there.
John Anfinson 16:52
No, you can’t. I when it first opened, as we had an exhibit there of these Henry Bossy photos of the Mississippi River, and people just came to see the Bossy photos, in part, but it was also their first chance to come and see the house. They had never been able to get in and see what the house looked like. So there was quite a good crowd there when we opened it up.
Dean Klinkenberg 17:16
So at Guttenberg, would there have also been a separate house for the assistant lockmaster?
John Anfinson 17:21
There was and that was taken away, moved someone, moved back.
Dean Klinkenberg 17:26
The Corps has been involved with the river for so long. It’s probably unimaginable to be the amount of materials and resources and information they must have accumulated over time when you were working for the Corps as the historian, you must have had access to this, these incredible archives, this incredible history of the river.
John Anfinson 17:50
When I was working on that part of Wisconsin project on the Wisconsin River, I was looking through the Wisconsin maps drawer and map files, and I came across a set of a dozen hand ink and water colored poster sized maps of the Wisconsin River, from Portage to the mouth of Wisconsin River, signed by General Warren, Governor K Warren, the hero of the Battle of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, and the First District Engineer for St Paul, and it’s just in the drawer they’re beautifully hand in watercolor maps in with the everyday maps and and because I found stuff like that, I started creating drawers that were historic map drawers and historic documents files. And would take things of that of that significance out and begin separating them out from the regular working files. And in the Henry Bossy photos are probably the best example of of that of all.
Dean Klinkenberg 18:50
Right, where, most of those were glass negatives, is that, right? The originals?
John Anfinson 18:56
There were about eight glass negatives in Rock Island that they found. Most of them were destroyed, but there were about five albums, and each has a different set of images. So I don’t know how much you want me to go into that, but it’s a fascinating story of just.
Dean Klinkenberg 19:11
Oh yeah, let’s go there, because, like, that is a big story. And there are a few places here and there. Well, there’s one place I can think of where you can still see some of the photos easily, in Winona at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. But yeah, tell us a little bit about Henry Bossy.
John Anfinson 19:25
So I so I was working at the Corps, and I received a call from a guy named Mike Connor in Washington, DC. And Mike said, Hey, I got these set of Blue Oval photographs, or 11 by 14. I have 169 of them in this album, it belonged to General Alexander Mackenzie, who was the Corps’ Rock Island District Engineer for about 16 years, when Bossy was there, and they went on to become the chief of engineers in Washington, and took it to Washington with him. When he left, they, must say, given him an album, and it said views on the Upper Mississippi taken under the direction of Alexander Mackenzie by Henry Bossy draughtsman. And so Mike had taken it to a photographic show his album. He had inherited it, and they are someone offered him 20,000 on the spot for it. So Mike wanted to know, are there more albums like this around? He wanted to know how valuable the album really was. And I said, I know we got these black and white images, but I’ve never seen the originals. And so Mike and I talked a few more times. He brought his to Swan auction galleries in New York, and Denise Bethel would go on to become the head of photography. Head of photography for Sotheby’s said the album ranked among the top 10 albums that she had ever seen in terms of photography, artistic photography. And so Mike would place it,his album with Sotheby’s to be sold, and they valued it at 40 to $60,000 and Mike and I were talking, and he was describing, in the frontispiece, this ornately sketched frontispiece, that there were some figures in the rock outcrop of the bluff. And so I had these padded black, I mean, photographs and padded albums, and then you open it up, and it was like back to back photographs and vinyl sleeves. And so I pulled the image of the sketch out to look at it closer. And behind it was another photograph, a third photograph that had been hidden, and it said fused on the Upper Mississippi, presented to US Dredge, William A Thompson, by Mrs. William A Thompson. So I called the chief of maintenance, and I said, there isn’t an album of blue photographs on the Dredge Thompson is there? It was the district’s principal dredge one. He said, Yeah, it’s in the pilot house. I said, Well, you know, it’s worth a little bit of money, but the dredge is down by St Louis. So when I got up to the fountain city, Wisconsin Boat Yard, I went down and got it. I was worried we have donut stains and grease stains and coffee stains all over it, but it was in immaculate condition. And Connor’s album sold at Sotheby’s for $66,000 and the guy who really bought the majority of it eventually called me up from San Francisco an art dealer. He said, John, they didn’t show that album very well. It’s worth far more than $66,000 I can sell that album today for $650,000 it’s going to be worth a million and a half before I’m done with it. The album has now been valued by Sotheby’s at 5 million.
Dean Klinkenberg 22:17
Oh my goodness.
John Anfinson 22:19
And Henry Bossy’s photographs have gone on so they broke up the album that sold at Sotheby’s. The individual prints have gone all over the place now, some to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, some to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the National Museum in Washington, did a special exhibit the first 100 years of photography. Now they get to choose anybody’s photographs as their lead photograph on their web page. They chose a Bossy and then the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did a an exhibit on photography of the West, and they they led with a Bossy image as well. Called it out. So bosses, Bossy’s regarded as one of the premier photographers in America of the 19th century.
Dean Klinkenberg 23:07
So let’s review quickly what he did. What was the time period when he was taking pictures, and at the time he was just documenting the river for the Corps, if I remember, right, right? He was an employee of the Corps?
John Anfinson 23:18
Yeah, he was an employee of the Corps. He was a draftsman. He was mapping the river. He would produce the first detailed map of the Mississippi River, the first navigation charts, if you will. And so he’s working on that project. And from 1883 to about 1893 he will take these photographs. And I think he come. He combines photography with cartography. The detail the maps, is so amazing that it must have been informed by his understanding of the river photographically, and so they really overlap. He’s filming the landscapes, the bridges, the communities. He’s filming the course work of the working boats on the river, the building of wing dams and shore protection. He’s filming the wrap boats, the lumber wrap boats, the Commerce on the river, wagon bridges and railroad bridges, which you know the railroad bridges are the competition, and their peers are obstacles. So he’s but he’s doing it in such an artistic way that I had a lot of artists and people who know photography come and look at his album. And I had one of the producers of Ken Burns’ Civil War series come and look at the album. And she said to me at one point, after we’ve been going through it for a little while, there are 136 images in Saint Paul’s collection. She said, John, look out my arm. I’ve got goosebumps. We never saw anything of this quality in the Civil War series.
Dean Klinkenberg 24:42
Wow. it’s remarkable. So I know a lot of those pictures were reproduced in a book, and I’m blanking on the name now, who produced the book, or who wrote the book? Do you remember?
John Anfinson 24:52
There’s two books? Uh, Charles Wehrenberg, the guy who did the who bought many of the photographs from San Francisco, did his own book called Mississippi Blue. That’s probably not the one you saw. There was one by Mark Neuzil called, I think it’s just named after Bossy’s “Views on the Mississippi.” Mark. Mark was a professor at St Thomas University in St Paul.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:16
Right. Who also wrote the natural the history of canoes in North America.
John Anfinson 25:20
Exactly, yeah,.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:22
He’s been on the podcast, so.
John Anfinson 25:24
Good.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:26
And if people want so, I imagine they’re you can go online and search for these and find digital images online of a lot of these pictures to see them in person, like I know, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum a few years ago, at least, they had a display of some of the pictures. I don’t know if those were a permanent display or just a temporary.
John Anfinson 25:44
Those are reproductions, so they were among the first images shown in the museum, but they are reproduction, so they’re long gone at this point, but the St Paul district has his album in a safe deposit box right now. Rock Island has a couple sets of images which are really unique and different. They have all kinds of treatments around them. They’re not just simple ovals. The Dubuque Museum has a wonderful set of images and a couple albums. They have like, two and three page fold outs, and they have a every album has a different images in it, and no single album has all of them. And there’s one other album that is at the Mayo Clinic Foundation in Rochester. It was given by the University of Minnesota Board of Regents to William Mayo upon his retirement from the board. You know, the Mayo has had a boat on the Mississippi and often traveled on it. So if you search the Mayo Clinic Foundation site, you will find magazines they’ve done and videos they’ve done of the Bossy photographs kind of in connection with the Mayo’s experiences on the Mississippi.
Dean Klinkenberg 26:50
Wow. So the Dubuque museum, you mentioned, that’s the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque. And are the I don’t remember where those photos would be? Are they out somewhere for the public to view in the museum? Or do you have to go into the archives?
John Anfinson 27:08
No, I had to go to the archives. And they took them out of the archives for me to photograph.
Dean Klinkenberg 27:15
All right. Yeah, that’s the thing about having valuable photos like that. They’re not necessarily out and most accessible for people who are just visiting a museum, you got to kind of know where they are and ask, I guess.
John Anfinson 27:26
You do. And it’s hard when it’s an album, because can only show if you want to show it. You can show one image at a time, right?
Dean Klinkenberg 27:34
Yeah. I mean, when you think about like he spent a good 10 years of his life pretty much every day, or nearly every day out there next to the river, studying it and taking these pictures and drawing the maps. He probably in that at that point of time, there was probably nobody who knew that part of the river better.
John Anfinson 27:53
Yeah, the obituaries about him talk about that, that he was the most knowledgeable person in the river’s topography alive. And we just after I retired, I I followed up on a lead that I had had and that I hadn’t followed up on before, because it didn’t make sense that the attribution seemed all wrong. And so I started looking into it, and there was a reference to a guy named Schwatka who took the first winter expedition to Yellowstone in 1880s and I looked into it deeper, and it mentioned that Schwatka hired Bossy to be the sketch artist, to come with him, and the art the sketches are going to be published in the New York World and one of Joseph Pulitzer’s magazines So and they also took one of the Yellowstone’s most famous photographers with to be the photographer. So they get to Yellowstone, Schwatka falls seriously ill, but they they still do the photographs in in Yellowstone. And there’s pictures of Bossy in Yellowstone during this like a 50 below winter in Yellowstone, and there’s some of the photos still there, but we don’t know where Bossy’s sketchbook is of Yellowstone.
Dean Klinkenberg 29:11
Wow, maybe tucked away in the archive somewhere where somebody doesn’t know quite what they have.
John Anfinson 29:18
That’s what I’m hoping. I’d love to find the at a used bookstore.
Dean Klinkenberg 29:23
Yeah, wow, that’s a remarkable story. Probably we could do it an entire episode of that. So I will post a link in the show notes to a place where people can look at some of the pictures online. I’m sure there must be something out there
John Anfinson 29:37
That’d be great. And then, and then I do a full I’ve given probably 40 presentations on Bossy including at Corps headquarters in Washington to the head of army art, the two star general head of civil works, and others. But on his tombstone in Davenport, it says, born on the estate of his grandfather, General Neithardt V. Gneisenau,Magdeburg, Prussia. The day before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon has pushed the Prussians back. They were, they’re retreating. He turns on Wellington and the Dutch the next day and attacks Gneisenau, along with Blucher, who’s the head of the Prussians. Rally the Prussians bring him back to Waterloo and defeat Napoleon. So he grows up on the estate that his grandfather is given in reward. But he’s he’s a late son of one of the daughters, and he emigrates to America then, because he’s not in line to inherit but he’s trained in art engineering in Europe before he comes to America, and that art engineering both come to play in his photographs, in his mapping.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:42
So he was an adult when he came to this country then.
John Anfinson 30:45
Yeah, he was I think, about 21 when he came, he started a card and stationery shop in Chicago.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:55
Wow, that was his first job.
John Anfinson 30:59
Yeah, with a fellow German immigrant, and then he started working for the harbor improvement office of the Corps in Chicago. Then shortly, went to St Paul stayed there for a little bit, and then went to Rock St Paul district, and then went to Rock Island district.
Dean Klinkenberg 31:13
Yeah, there are. There were some very big characters in our rivers world over time, and he’s definitely one of them. So I may have to think about a way we could do, you know, do more about that. I’ll definitely post links, though, to where people can see some of the pictures, because they are really dramatic, and it’s a pre lock and dam era photos, although the river was already being altered quite a bit with wing dams and some other structures.
John Anfinson 31:36
This is, you know, if you look at my book, “The River We Have Wrought”, it was done in stages on Corps projects, the locks and dams history. Piece of it came from that major, major, major rehab, major major rehabilitation project. My research into the history of locks and dams informed that part of the book, the section the book on wing dams and channel constriction, early river, was informed in my research into Bossy’s work in his photographs. So every time I worked on a Corps project on the river, I would take a piece of it and start accumulating it into this bigger work,
Dean Klinkenberg 32:09
Just like a good historian.
John Anfinson 32:12
The cumulative process.
Dean Klinkenberg 32:15
Well, let’s move into that book a little bit then, because, well, you began to work for the park service in 2000 and your book, “The River We Have Wrought,” came out in 2003. What was your essential goal when you started writing that book, “The River We Have Wrought?”
John Anfinson 32:33
I’ve been attending a lot of meetings, and the Corps was getting beat up at these meetings. It was about the expansion of the locks and dams, building longer locks and dams, 1200 foot locks and dams, they might have been wrapped up in the in the lock and dam, 26 redo of that, of that lock and dam. And people were blaming the Corps for doing this to the river and that to the river. And I was like, as a historian, I knew that the Corps didn’t do anything without Congress telling it to and Congress didn’t do anything without people telling it what they wanted. And so I started researching that and trying to look at why was the Corps doing what it was doing. And I found out. So the book is really a history of every major navigation project who pushed for it. What were their their dreams and their hopes? What were their arguments? How did they convince Congress to authorize a project? How do they convince Congress to fund it? And so what I wanted to show people was that it wasn’t the Corps doing this or doing that, it was the people doing this or that through the tool of tools of Congress and the Corps, and I think it’s an empowering story. What I wanted to tell people was, if you want to change the river into something you want today, look at what people did in the past to get what they wanted. Look at their movements. Look at their tenacity. Look at their passion. And I also incorporated a piece in that book, then on the environment and the creation of the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in chapter seven of the book is really about the refuge creation, but that’s another movement where someone said, you know, we can have a different vision for this river a different purpose, one for fish and wildlife and recreation. And Will Dilg and the Isaac Walton League did that 100 years ago this year. And so again, it showed that it’s not just navigation, but you can take a whole different perspective and push for it and make it happen.
Dean Klinkenberg 34:40
Right. It was a remarkable period of time there in the 1920s when you had with these seemingly competing interests, the folks who wanted to preserve the river as it was and protect the natural environment, and then the folks who are pushing for major changes to make the river more reliably navigable for bigger boats.
John Anfinson 34:58
Yeah, by 1917 there is no through commerce between Minneapolis and Saint and Saint Louis. All the traffic, almost all of the traffic, it goes only about 10 miles between origin destination. And it’s all to build wing dams. It’s rock and brush being all for wing dams. There’s there’s no commercial traffic. And so when Will Dilg and the Isaac Walton League began this movement in 1922 and take the 24 to create the refuge, navigation is gone. It looks like they have the river to themselves. Uh, there’s still wing dams under the six foot channel now, but, but navigation looks like it’s fading away. So when the movement for the for the nine foot channel really begins in 1925 and will grow up until 1930 it’s going to challenge this, this view of what the river is going to be.
Dean Klinkenberg 35:52
Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here, interrupting myself, just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River. Check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the Mississippi. My newest book, The Wild Mississippi, goes deep into the world of Old Man River learn about the varied and complex ecosystem supported by the Mississippi, the plant and animal life that depends on them. And where you can go to experience it all. Find any of these wherever books are sold. Well, there’s so many directions to go with this. And I, because I am kind of curious, well let’s do this much at least. So what were, based on your research, what were some of the primary reasons river navigation had essentially stopped by that point in time, by about 1910?
John Anfinson 36:51
The inherent nature of nature, because wing dams function, you know, these rock and brush piers that stick into the river. They’re piers a rock and brush they narrow the river like the nozzle of a garden hose. The tighter you turn down the nozzle, the faster the water flows. And then it starts cutting through those sandbars by itself. Imagine the sediment in the bottom of a glass, and then you start spinning the glass around, the sediment goes up into the column, right? And if you stop moving it, it drops back to the bottom. So what the wing dams did is they would sculpt out that sediment, get it moving up into the water column. It’d go between the wing dams, slow down and settle out. One engineer said it was not as much about narrowing the river as growing the banks. So they were growing the banks in the naturally narrow the river so it could scour itself. The problem is, there was always someone at the spigot turning down the spigot. Nature, in the fall, later part of the year, it’s turning down the water. Well, you know what happens to your halls, even if you got it on the jet setting, if there’s not enough water coming, it can’t move that sediment. So it was right back down in the river bed. So even though the Corps had a four and a half and then a six foot channel, they couldn’t guarantee that depth in the fall. And when do farmers want to get out their products? In the fall. So there was there was just too unreliable. They would have to go to railroads, and railroads knew they had an advantage and took advantage of it. So there’s two aspects to that. One is the actual inability of the river to ship the commerce, and two is railroads taking advantage of that, so they so navigation boosters would make both arguments, we need a navigable river to ship and we need to compete with railroads.
Dean Klinkenberg 38:41
Right. Yes, well, and then in retrospect, like it’s always easy to second guess this stuff, but at the time, I don’t think anybody really thought this much about it. But it seems like the other alternative was, whoever was this was the 1930s so FDR, or maybe, who was it Hoover or Coolidge was president before FDR, I should know my presidents better. But instead of taking on like this massive expense, an ongoing expense for the federal government, they could have just chosen to try to regulate the railroads and go after them from that perspective, but they didn’t do that. They decided to just build this entire new system to compete with them.
John Anfinson 39:23
Yeah, they tried that regulating railroads in the late 19th century, when the four and a half foot project would be authorized and the Granger Movement, or the patrons of husbandry, mushroomed into this massive farmer movement across America and became politically very powerful, and they got some things passed, called the Granger laws, which were to regulate railroads, but the Supreme Court overturned the laws. And so they tried that route. And so when they realized they politically and legally, they weren’t going to win, they went to navigation as the alternative. Roosevelt could have tried it again, or, you know, Hoover was in office right before him, but they they just had tried that in the past, in the memorable past for those people, and it had failed, right? And there’s also, I mean, some people think that the the locks and dams were just a New Deal make work project. And what I tell them is, no, it wasn’t. That project was teed up to pass Congress in 1930 when the Depression hit. They had been working on it for five years. So there were already locks and dams on the Ohio so it wasn’t like it was something new we were going to do in America. It was it was already baked, but it didn’t hurt to make it in a make work project, so it got it done faster than it would have otherwise.
Dean Klinkenberg 40:48
Right. Maybe it was a tipping point, you know? Maybe it’s one of those things that would have languished even longer and then until there was no chance it was going to happen if conditions had changed. But the the depression and the need to put people to work kind of gave it that extra push to get it through Congress. And there was a lot of opposition for a while, as I recall.
John Anfinson 41:08
Of course, was the biggest opponents of it.
Dean Klinkenberg 41:11
Yeah, right. Well, we could go on about this, and maybe I would love to do a deep dive into this someday, but you’ve had such an interesting career, I want to make sure we have time to get on to the second part, because you’ve had you’ve worked for the federal government for a lot, but kind of the first part of your career, you’re working for the Corps and really supporting navigation in these commercial interests. And then you switch to the National Park Service, where you’re working with the public and recreation. So tell me a little bit about that switch, like how you got to work for the National Park Service?
John Anfinson 41:46
It was because of my work with the Corps. Because every project I worked on for the Corps, and I could have been a, maybe a typical government employee, I could have, I could have done my piece for it, done that background on the for the National Register. Was it qualified or not, and then moved to the next thing. But every time I did something, I found it so fascinating, I would do a presentation on it, and then I’d get asked to do the presentation around or that write an article for a journal on it. I just had that academic background that I wanted to keep going, even though I wasn’t in academia. And so I kept writing and publishing and speaking, and the Park Service didn’t have a historian. The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area is established in 1988 it’s just getting going into the 1990s and so by the late 90s, they’re coming to me a lot to do presentations to understand the history of the river, and I’m always helping them out. And I think finally they said, you know, we should just get John over here and create a position for him. And the other book that I wrote, in part with some other authors and edited, but I wrote most of it was “River of History,” which is a history of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area stretch of the river 72 miles through the Twin Cities. And if you look at the cover of that book, which is available online from the park, it’s got both the Corps of Engineers castle on it and the National Park Service arrowhead. I wrote that jointly while I was with both, and then the Park Service finally created this position that I applied for and got so I could start their history program and Cultural Resources Program in 2000.
Dean Klinkenberg 43:24
Well, I don’t know if people outside of Minnesota understand how this this recreation area that that was created, and how unique this is. So tell us a little bit about it. so it’s 72 miles through the Twin Cities, basically from the suburban north reaches following the river down to the southeast. How did we end up with this National Recreation Area in the middle of this urban area?
John Anfinson 43:53
You know, I was trying to figure out how to how to summarize that question into something fairly simple. So let me just say I’ll see how quickly I can do this for you. The late 1960s this guy gets this idea, this developer, he’s going to build two 24 story tall condominiums at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, down in the flood plain. They will look down on historic Fort Snelling. You’ll be able to look down on the International Airport. They’ll loom over the whole river valley, because they’re going to come right out of it. And he starts working on it in the early 1970s but 1970s as the environmental movement, is taking off. It’s, I mean, it’s already taken off in the late 60s. Its mushroom in the early 1970s and so people started protesting against this. The Minnesota Historical Society said this is going to ruin the view shed from historic Fort Snelling. The Metropolitan Council, which has a lot of missions within the Twin Cities metro area, said, oppose flood plain development. Supported protecting the site for recreation. It was a it was a part parkland. It would become park land. But in 1973 the developer drove 800 steel pilings 90 feet down into the sand, and was going to begin developing this project. In the same year, Governor Wendell Anderson then signed the Minnesota Critical Areas act, and it allowed the governor to designate areas in Minnesota that were of critical environmental historic significance for protection under gubernatorial executive orders. And so 1973 to 74 the Citizens League of St Paul really gets a deep interest in preserving and protecting the Metro riverfront, and they and others will then start pushing on the governor’s office to designate 72 miles of the Mississippi through the Twin Cities a critical area. And so in 1976 Governor Anderson creates the Mississippi River Corridor critical area. And so now we have 72 miles of the Mississippi, 54,000 acres within its boundaries, protected by gubernatorial executive orders 1979 but it had to be renewed. And then in 1979 Republican governor Albert Quie renews it. And then in 1980 the Met Council will make it permanent. And so 1980 we have a permanent, critical area of protection. But the but the promoters wanted more they wanted more protection. They wanted National Park status for this. And Peter Gold was a significant player in it. He was at age 26 or seven. He became the first Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Commissioner gubernatorial office at 26 or seven. He would go on to work in the National Park Service office in Washington as the liaison to the Capitol for the National Park Service to Congress. And so he knew the mechanism, the mechanisms to get things moving for the National Park Service designation, and he’d be one of the key factors behind this. He worked with Bruce Vento in DC. Any any knew Dave Durenburger, very well. Senate, Republican senator, so between Peter Gold, Bruce Vento, Democratic congressman, Republican senator, they proposed this idea for a National River and Recreation Area. And in 1988 Congress established it, and they got that but, but, but, since there’s already this critical area, they made the national park footprint exactly the same as the Mississippi River cortical critical area. So the big change came in the Governor’s executive orders weren’t very strong. Communities along the river just kept there’s 21 cities and towns and four townships within the 72 miles, five congressional districts. It’s a very complex area, but friends of the Mississippi River and others then started pushing to get the executive orders made rules. And that almost cost us the designation altogether, but they came back, and in 2017 the state established rules. So every city in the in the corridor has to put in their plans these rules and address them. They have to adopt the rules. Well, so tell us a little bit about the practical side of this. Then, because the this, in this 72 mile corridor, the Park Service actually doesn’t own very much land, Like 64 acres out of the 54,000.
Dean Klinkenberg 48:23
Right. So what, what is the what does the Park Service do with that corridor? Then, What? What? What is their influence? What are they actually doing with that?
John Anfinson 48:33
Well, you know, it’s one of the one of the things was that the park really has three missions. Congress gave it three missions in the authorizing legislation, protect, preserve and enhance the significant values of the Mississippi River corridor through the Twin Cities, through that 72 miles, encourage the coordination of federal, state and local programs, and then what I love the most is ensure orderly development along the river. So how do you do that well, the governor’s executive order, but then the rules really help us try, you know, do good development along the river, you know, but we don’t have federal laws and regulations, except where there’s federal land or federal money involved, so we have to rely on the local communities and the Department of Natural Resources to do things. So everything is about partnership, every success, all the interpretation education the park does of the river, all the development project reviews really depend on partnerships and pushing people to do the right thing for the Mississippi. It is the National Park Service Unit whose mission and focus Is the Mississippi River. There’s Jazz and John Lafitte in New Orleans. There’s the Arch in St Louis, where you are, there’s Effigy Mounds, there’s Trails Across the River, but this is the only one whose mission is the Mississippi River. So it is the Mississippi Rivers National Park in essence.
Dean Klinkenberg 49:57
So. So during the course of those 20 some years when you worked for for the recreation area, then how much change did you see in the way the public engaged with the Mississippi?
John Anfinson 50:14
You know, it was, it was the most frustrating thing in the world I could walk out of my building downtown St Paul in uniform, my National Park Service hat on, and someone would stop me and say, you work for the DNR. Are you a sheriff? You work for the law enforcement? I say, No, no, I’m a national park ranger. So what state park do you work for? I said, No, I point to the arrowhead on my shoulders. I’m with the National Park Service to be so what are you doing here? And then I’d have to explain to them that there was a national park here, because people just didn’t know. And so that was the number one problem when I was superintendent and working for the park, and it still is, getting people to know the park exists and that the River Corridor is a national park unit. And so that was one of the things we would we would work hardest on. And so the predecessor to me, the superintendent before me, Paul Labovitz had this bold idea. When he came in, he said, I’m going to put 10,000 kids on this river every year. And people laughed at him. We only had like two canoes in the office. And by the time he left, he had started something called the Urban Wilderness Canoe adventures program, and was putting 10,000 kids, middle school, high school kids, on the river a year in the metro area in Voyageur canoes. And so it really, you know, so if you can start getting these kids learning about the river, they’ll tell their parents about it, and it starts growing it. And then my philanthropic partner, the missus, I say mine. That’s when I was with the Park Service, my philanthropic partner, the Mississippi Park connection, they got this bold idea that instead of doing a bike share program, why don’t we do a kayak share program? So they developed this program called Paddle Share so you can rent go to this locker in different parts of the river, get a code online. Pay for it online. It costs maybe about $25 to $30 for a couple hours. And you can key in a code. You can get a life jacket, a paddle and a kayak. You canoe down river, kayak down river. With it, you come to your stop, and then you’ve deposited the kayak on a rack and put the life jackets inside a bin. Then you can either take a, you know, a bike share bike back, or call an Uber or Lyft, or have a friend take you back to where you started. So it’s been a very popular program within the Twin Cities. So we’re trying to get people on the river to experience it.
Dean Klinkenberg 52:32
Was, I think that was the first place where a paddle share program like that was tried. Is that right?
John Anfinson 52:37
It is. It actually became. We had people calling us from Florida and Germany and other places about the program.
Dean Klinkenberg 52:45
I know a few others have popped up here and there. I think there’s one in Quincy, Illinois, in the bay, if I remember right. I should probably look that up before I just talk off top my head. But I know there’s been a lot of interest in trying to replicate that in different parts along the river, including here at St Louis, and that may happen here in the next couple years, but it’s a very it’s an inspiring program. And I think a lot of people were probably very skeptical that something like that would work, but it’s been a it’s been a big success.
John Anfinson 53:15
It’s been a great success in terms of getting people on it is it has been underwritten by my funds, philanthropic funds and other funds. It’s hard to make it go financially. So they’re still working on that piece of it to make it a, you know, a really profitable endeavor. They might have done that since I left. I’m not positive, all right.
Dean Klinkenberg 53:35
Interesting, yeah, well, I know, like that part of the river, it seems like it’s there’s a lot of recreation. Now, I don’t know, maybe 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case. But, you know, I was just up in Minneapolis last week, and on my way out of town, I caught in the distance, I saw a group of like, five or six kayakers on the Mississippi. I forget exactly where that was in the Gorge, but it was somewhere along the Gorge. This is late, you know, October. And of course, it’s unusually warm for October, but even that late in the year, there were people out there trying to get, you know, the last last paddle. Maybe they can get in before the river starts to get to get too cold and freeze up. But there’s a lot of recreation along there. There are private groups that take people out on paddle trips.
John Anfinson 54:25
Yeah. So, so I often tell I often ask people on tours. I do hear this question, how many Mississippi’s are there in the Twin Cities? And of course, people look at me weirdly, and they’ll say the St Croix and the Minnesota. And I say, No, how many Mississippi’s are there? And then they really positive, and I’ll tell them, there’s three distinct rivers in the 72 miles of the metro area within the national park unit. The river enters the northern Metro as a Prairie River. There’s banks, not bluffs, there’s islands, there’s not huge, there’s some back waters. You never see anybody sandbagging above Minneapolis on the Prairie River. Then at St Anthony Falls downtown Minneapolis, the river drops into what we call the Gorge, which you’ve referenced from St Anthony Falls eight and a half miles down river to the confluence of the Minnesota River, the Mississippi drops 110 feet. It’s the steepest drop anywhere on the whole river through the tightest, narrowest canyon. The bluffs are a quarter to a third of a mile apart, 80 to 100 feet high. River drops 110 feet so dramatic drop. You get to the mouth of the Minnesota River, and you enter the big Mississippi, the large flood plain River, the the river of image, myth and metaphor, the river of Mark Twain, really begins there at the confluence. So and then you see the big river this, you know, big back waters, high bluffs, braided channels, locks and a lot more locks and dams. So there’s three very different rivers, and the development along is each the recreation is different along each. Nowhere in the entire Mississippi does it change so much over such a short distance.
Dean Klinkenberg 56:01
Yeah, that’s pretty remarkable. And you said there’s different kinds of recreation in each in each stretch.
John Anfinson 56:08
Kayaks, canoes, you know, in the Gorge and above, up in the Prairie River, big boats like you see down in St Louis, recreational boats, big marinas all along that large flood plain River.
Dean Klinkenberg 56:20
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I hope people in the Twin Cities appreciate how special that part of the river is. Like, I’m envious every time I go up in that area in St Louis. We do have some recreational boating north of St Louis, closer to Alton in that area, but we’re so industrial down here, there’s very little recreation directly, you know, that touches the city of St Louis, where I live. So I get a little envious at times when I go up to the Twin Cities, at least when its warm and and see how easy it is and how accessible the river is up there.
John Anfinson 56:56
Yeah, it’s it’s spectacular. I was just north of St Louis. I can’t remember how quite far I was on an American cruise lines trip as a speaker. And it was like a holiday weekend, and I saw 54 boats pulled up to a beach. An armada. I’ve never seen that many 54 boats pulled up along a beach. That’s unbelievable recreation on the river?
Dean Klinkenberg 57:23
Absolutely. Well, one of the other changes across time is that indigenous communities, indigenous people, have a much greater voice in how we manage the river and the natural world. Now, can you talk a little bit about like from the park service perspective, from the recreation areas perspective, how your relationship with indigenous communities changed over time and and how that affected the way you think about managing the park.
John Anfinson 57:54
So my so my doctoral degree was in American Indian history. I studied the Mandan on the Missouri River, and so when I went to the Corps, I became tribal coordinator, working with tribes through multiple states. One of my biggest successes was the Lafarge Wisconsin project. It was a, it was going to be a big dam at Lafarge Wisconsin flood protection dam. They built the dam. They built the control tower. They bought out all the farmers, 8700 acres. And then the National Environmental Policy Act passed in 1969 and so they tried to revive it. They couldn’t. So finally, Congress passed an act saying that 1200 acres of this land is going to going to go to the Ho-Chunk Indians in Wisconsin. The rest is going to going to go to the Kickapoo reserve management board for ecotourism. And so I ended up becoming the Corps’ major negotiator, really, in person on the project, attended 26 meetings over a year long period. We had one year and completed and we did it. And so it was a spectacular success. And it it took what was going to be a big reservoir, flood control reservoir, and made it into a reserve. And it gave the Ho-Chunk the biggest piece of land they had. They had like 96 acres before that, and there was over seven archeological sites in that valley. So they chose the lands they wanted. So that that was a, you know, one of my roles as travel coordinator was to help with those things like that, with the core. And so I continued that role when I went to the park service. So travel coordination was a big, big part of what I did. And there’s, you know, if you look at today, how much when I first started, you know, we were coordinating with multiple tribes to Dakota, of course, in Minnesota, that would give a lot within Minnesota, as for recognized, federally recognized Dakota tribes, nine Ojibwe tribes. But we’d also coordinate with tribes outside of of the park. At one time, we coordinate with 50 some tribes on a project at Coldwater Spring, a new property we’d acquired. But I think you know today in what happened was, you know, it was like formal consultation tribes would reply. But it was more disengaged it seems like. It transitioned over the last decade, or tribes are far more engaged in wanting a voice in what happens in the metro region. It harkens back to those days of the American Indian Movement that you mentioned. Not, not, not that radical in sense, but is deliberative in wanting a absolute voice in how we do things in the Twin Cities. And there’s two places where that’s really happening. In 2014 Congress passed an Act directing the Corps to close the upper St Paul’s lock in 2015 and so the Corps is leaving that lock that all the navigation that went through that lock had to go through the one right below it, lower Sandy Lock and Dam and lock and dam, one downstream in the Gorge. So the Corps wants to close all three right now at the upper lock, the Park Service initially took over interpretation education there, but now there’s a Dakota led group that’s come in that wants to repurpose the lock as an as a Dakota Indian site. They’re called Owámniyomni Okhódayapi, okay, it’s hard to say that last one, Okhódayapi is their name and Omni. Omni is St Anthony Falls, the Dakota word for St Anthony Falls. And so they’ve really taken over envisioning the future. What that lock is going to become, making it more natural, making a place for people in the metro area to come and hear a Dakota story, of which was a very sacred site to them, St Anthony Falls. The other site is the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary just below downtown St Paul. And there’s another Dakota led organization that is taking on the redo of that that parkland, there was a cave there called Carver’s Cave or “Wakan Tipi”. Jonathan Carver was an English columnist who visited the area in 1766 and he described this cave in about the petroglyphs carved over the top of it and very detailed in his book. And so it was, became part of a big railroad yard. But then before I, before I left the or we had the chance to change that into and then early years with the park service change that into parkland with the Department of Natural Resources and others in the lower Phalen Creek project. So it was remade, part of it into this nature area in honor of Bruce Vento, but because of that sacred site there that cave, and right above the cave is Mounds Park, which is, you know, it’s got burials going back 2000 years, almost above the cave. And so it’s a very, very very significant indigenous site. So that site has also been the lead now for that is the Dakota led group, and so they’re helping to find it. They’ve got significant money from the Minnesota Legislature to build a new interpretive center there, and that’s under construction, I believe. So it’s, it’s far bigger presence, far bigger voice is, is has come back.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:03:02
Yeah, it’s really a remarkable change in a fairly short period of time, if you like, it feels like and it’s attracted some attention to on the BBC website, I think a couple weeks ago, there was a lengthy article about how Minneapolis had kind of become this epicenter of a resurging indigenous autonomy and cultural renaissance, and if folks, maybe I’ll see if I can find that and post a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, that’d be great. That would be there was a really good overview, because, you know, there’s so many different little areas where it’s happening, like the restaurant, Sean Sherman’s restaurant, yeah. Also, you know, was mentioned in that article, and that’s, it’s also located very close to St Anthony Falls and the river.
John Anfinson 1:03:47
It’s right there in St Anthony Falls, you have a great view of the Falls if you go eat there.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:03:53
Owámni, is that right?
John Anfinson 1:03:55
Yeah.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:03:58
Well, you have been you know, one of these lucky people to spend. You’re lucky, from my perspective, to have spent so much of your life and career working on the Mississippi. What are a couple of the lessons that you have learned about our relationship with the river during all those those years of your experience?
John Anfinson 1:04:19
I would say the biggest lesson is that if you want to change the river and want a different future for it, you got to take action. Every single thing that has happened to this river, every lock and dam, every levee, every refuge has because has happened because a dedicated group of people wanted to make it happen, and they did. And that’s like I said, it’s a really empowering concept that we’re going to have a conversation about the future of the locks and dams right here in the heart of the Twin Cities. It’s already started. The Corps has said, “Imagine there’s a for sale sign on these locks and dams. We we want to get rid of them.” So. So what are we going to do with the locks and dams right in the heart of the Twin Cities? Two of them, lower, St. Anthony Falls lock and dam, Lock and Dam 1, upper, you can’t get rid of the dam because St Anthony Falls would go away, and the Dakota are planning out what’s going to happen with the lock itself. So the other two locks and dams were where there’s going to be a significant indigenous voice as well. What happens to the river and this coordination going on that for that right now? But do we leave them in and have two reservoirs? We have a land of over 14,000 lakes. These are like lakes. You could take out those two locks and dams and restore the natural rapids of the Gorge at 100 and be about a 64 foot drop from below, St Anthony Falls to the Minnesota River. This phenomenal rapids would come back and with it, the rock and gravel and boulder strata at the bottom was a spawning bed for all kinds of fish. When Jonathan Carver, that English colonist, reached St Anthony Falls in 1766, he said there are all kinds of eagle’s nests at St Anthony Falls because of all the fish trying to migrate above it, it was the head of fish migration in the whole river. And so, you know, we could have that back. And so what I’m telling people is the question before us is, locks and dams are the concrete and steel embodiment of past visions, past passion for the river, are those our visions? Are those our passions for a 21st century relationship to the Mississippi or do we have a different vision? That’s a question we have to ask ourselves. And I think we have a tremendous opportunity here to do something new and different and restore a really critical piece of the Mississippi River. We could, if we could restore the Gorge and a fishery of it in that spawning beds, it could impact the fishery for 100 miles or more downstream and up various tributaries. So, so it’s, it’s that passion is that drive it determination to create a river we want in the 21st century. It can be done, because people in the past have done it? That’s my biggest lesson.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:07:03
Yeah, absolutely. What are there? Are there particular challenges that worry you the most about the river’s future over the next 50 to plus years?
John Anfinson 1:07:15
You know, I was thinking about that, and, you know, I can talk about invasive carp, agricultural sediment, runoff, nitrogen, phosphorus, climate change. I mean, those are the big three I see for the upper Mississippi anyway, but, but I think the bigger problem is, if not apathy, just not knowing and being distracted by too many things. Now, there’s too many things coming at us, too much distraction. The biggest part is getting people to know there’s even a problem that we need to address. That’s the hardest thing. And so podcasts like yours are one of those mediums that can help educate people. There is this river out here. It’s one of the greatest rivers in the world. It’s a phenomenal world, famous, worldwide significant ecological system that we need to be aware of and in in more than ecological system. And it’s a water supply, it’s navigation, it’s recreation, it’s all these things. How do we balance those in the best way that demonstrates the 21st century relationship.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:08:20
Right. And we have the, as you said, we can advocate for a different balance, in different ways that we balance all those different needs. We’re not bound by what people decided 100 years ago.
John Anfinson 1:08:32
No, we have to. Every generation has to hit the reset button and say, Is this the world I want, or do I have something better in mind, because we’ve changed who we are as as people. You gotta ask the questions that every I mean, like this chance with the in the locks and dams in the Twin Cities, with the locks stay in or and dams stay in or come out, I want at the end of the process to know we made the best decision for this river at this time in history.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:09:02
Amen. Well, John, we’re probably pushing the limits of time here too. So this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it. If people want to know more about you or follow your work, what would be the best way to do that?
John Anfinson 1:09:18
You know, I people said, John, you should get a website. John, you should, you know, have a podcast, and I haven’t done any of that. I’ve been, I’ve been involved in so many things, river things, since I retired. I’m people say I’m busier than I was when I was superintendent. I just tell them, I’m just pursuing my passion now. I’m back to being a river environmentalist story on the river and on multiple boards and commissions and and doing what I can to make people aware of this river and its importance. So I don’t have that those websites, but I I’m certainly available if you search me on the internet, and I’m happy to talk to people anytime.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:09:56
Well, John, thank you very much. I appreciate the conversation today.
John Anfinson 1:10:00
Dean, it’s been my pleasure.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:10:03
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free, but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon to help keep the program going, just go to patreon.com/deanklinkenberg, if you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that’s set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time you.
I agree! I just bought Mississippi Blue for the photos in it.
The Bosse photos are amazing 🙂