Cannon River

About

Cannon River and the Kid Curry Holdup. Long before European surveyors arrived, the Cannon River valley was Dakota (Sioux) territory and prime agricultural land held before treaty cessions. Earlier still, the Oneota Indian culture settled the river's terraces in sizable villages, clearing and cultivating the bottomlands while hunting and fishing its waters. The river drew its first surveyors of European descent in 1853, when Richard and William Freeborn traced its course upstream to the falls and staked their claim the following year.

The settlement that grew around those falls left a tangible mark. The 1888 Cannon Falls Fire Hall still stands, now home to the Cannon Falls Historical Museum and counted among the nation's oldest surviving fire halls on the National Historic Register. It is a physical thread connecting the frontier-claim era to the present-day town.

The watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding the regional timber industry that ran from roughly 1850 to the 1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s through the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. That era wound down as the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910, state forestry conservation began in 1915, and state forests were established in the 1930s. Hydrologists took the river's measure in parallel: the USGS survey of the 1870s through 1890s, gauging stations established from the 1880s into the 1910s, and state geological streamflow assessments of the 1910s through 1930s were the first comprehensive studies of the Cannon. Later state water pollution control studies of the 1950s through 1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 onward addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts.

The river also collected its share of frontier lore. Faribault, on the Cannon, was associated with the outlaw Kid Curry — Harvey Logan, 1867 to 1904 — of the Wild Bunch, though the reputed 1878 stagecoach holdup at Faribault is poorly documented in primary sources. Downstream, the Cannon runs through Nerstrand–Big Woods State Park, whose remnant Big Woods landscape inspired Laura Ingalls Wilder's "On the Banks of Plum Creek," published in 1937.

Protection came to the fore in 1975, when Congress authorized a study of the Cannon River for potential inclusion in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Though never designated, the study raised awareness and led to state-level protections, including the Cannon River Wilderness Area near Cannon Falls. Today the river carries the designations Cannon River Wilderness Area and Wild & Scenic Study River.

For paddlers, the Cannon breaks into three natural runs. The 20-mile Faribault to Northfield stretch is a gentle college-town paddle. The 25-mile Northfield to Cannon Falls section threads wooded bluffs and offers the best scenery. The final 20 miles from Cannon Falls to Red Wing approach the Mississippi bluffs. At a Class I rating with an average flow of 620 CFS, it is an accessible river rather than a technical one — a working landscape of towns, terraces, and preserved landmarks best read from the seat of a canoe. Cannon River Canoe Rental in Cannon Falls outfits day trips.