St. Croix River

About

Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, 1679-80 — First European Explorer. The St. Croix runs 24 miles along the Wisconsin–Minnesota border through five Wisconsin counties — Douglas, Burnett, Polk, St. Croix, and Pierce — a Class I river that gauge 04077630 measures at an average of 139 CFS. Paddlers looking for a manageable flow find it in the 70–200 range, water low enough to read but steady enough to move a canoe through the forested banks between the two states. Long before those gauges, the valley flowed through the ancestral territory of Indigenous peoples, serving as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. The cession framework that followed took shape through 1800s-era treaties, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the allotment era of the 1840s through 1890s.

European contact came with du Lhut. The French fur trader and explorer, who lived from about 1639 to 1710, traveled through what would become Minnesota and Wisconsin in 1679 and 1680, and in 1680 claimed the upper Mississippi and St. Croix region for King Louis XIV at a gathering of Dakota and Ojibwe leaders. The city of Duluth, Minnesota, is named for him. The river he mapped became a major artery of the French fur trade, its waters threading the dense pine country that would later draw a very different industry.

That industry was timber. From the 1830s through the 1920s the St. Croix watershed was logged to feed the regional timber trade of 1850 through the 1910s and the railroad expansion that ran alongside it from the 1860s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators along the corridor. Large-scale cutting ended as the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910, state forestry conservation began in 1915, and state forests were established in the 1930s. The river's hydrology was catalogued in parallel: USGS surveys ran through the 1870s to 1890s, gauging stations went in from the 1880s onward, and state geological streamflow assessments followed into the 1930s.

Industry left its heaviest mark in the gorge below St. Croix Falls. There the Saint Croix Falls Dam, a hydroelectric station spanning the river between St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, and Taylors Falls, Minnesota, was constructed in 1905 and opened in 1907. It remains the point where the river's working past is most visible, just upstream of the Taylors Falls play water that paddlers still run today.

The conservation era changed the river's trajectory. In 1968 the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway was established as one of the original eight rivers protected under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the corridor is now managed by the National Park Service. That protection carried into modern watershed work: since 2010 the Wisconsin DNR, working with local watershed partnerships, has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts, with streambank stabilization from 2015, native fish restocking from 2017, nutrient-reduction strategy from 2018, and water-quality gains from 2020 onward. Paddlers today put in at named runs like Nelson's to Soderbeck, Gordon Dam to CCC Bridge, and the Taylors Falls park-and-play, following the free-flowing current du Lhut first recorded more than three centuries ago.