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.

Finding an eyewitness account

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.

Keyword searches and constructing timelines

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:

It was an impressive sight as the teams paddled the 20 miles across Winni. Every resorter on that lake was on hand with boats to patrol the course. As a result of their cooperation, the committee was able to send the racers across. Several canoes upset, but immediately boats were on hand to aid them in being righted.

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:

When Smith and Bergstrom started across, the lake was calm. “Once we got out on the water, the wind picked up and it got pretty wavy,” says Smith, at ninety-three, in an interview at his small home in Shorewood, Minnesota.

Water washed over their gunnels. The boat began to fill. “Before the race started,” Smith says, “I noticed the experienced paddlers had coffee cans in their boats. I thought they were for peeing, but I found out the hard way it was for bailing. So we just slowly sank.”

The two were in the water, hanging on to the swamped canoe, when a small motorboat came skimming across the lake. Piloting it was Jesse Tibbetts, a fifty-six-year-old Ojibwe former canoe racer from Ball Club, Minnesota, a small town on the Mississippi that, like Lake Winnibigoshish, sits within the Leech Lake Reservation. “He came bouncing on top of these waves. Then he came over, picked up our canoe, and dumped out the water. We said, ‘Thank you,’ and we took off. He saved the day for us.”

Finding inspiration from 'The Boys in the Boat'

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.

Another surviving racer appears

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.

***

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."

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Sometimes the idea for a book springs from what you don’t know.

David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage tribe in early 20th century Oklahoma.

Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker and something of a history writer himself, couldn’t believe that the sinister campaign targeting the oil beneath the Osage reservation land was so little known.  So he started looking into the killings.

There wasn’t much online. No one seemed to have told the victims’ story in a comprehensive way, even though, as Grann puts it, the campaign was “one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.”

He started sending off requests to places where documents about the murders might be stored. Slowly they arrived and began to pile up in the corner of his office. When he finally looked through them, he could see they told an epic story of racial injustice and greed, in which white settlers positioned themselves to inherit mineral rights from tribe members, whom they then killed.

Grann got on a plane to Tulsa and drove out to Pawhuska, where he found the Osage Nation Museum. There he stood in front of a 1924 photo of the entire tribe gathered with white settlers. But oddly, a piece of the photo that had been cut out. When he asked the museum director about it, she pointed to the blank space and said, “The devil was standing right there.”

Grann knew then he had to write the book that became “Killers of the Flower Moon," published this month.

I asked him a few questions about the process.

Both “Killers of the Flower Moon” and your previous book, “The Lost City of Z,” [about the explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925] are historical narratives mixed with some first person, but they’re also different kinds of stories. Do you see them as having anything in common?

Both books have some element of intrigue. “The Lost City of Z” probes a great exploration mystery of the 20th century, and in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I try to peel back the layers of a murder mystery. But, in most respects, they are very different—in subject matter, worlds and narrative structure. Every time I start a new project, I want to be investigating something new, with its own set of challenges and rewards.

You’ve said there are three things you need to write a book. What are those things? 

I haven’t done enough books to have any fixed rules. But at least with “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” I looked for at least three crucial elements before beginning. The first is the most obvious but also the hardest to find—and that is a story worth telling. Is the subject matter gripping? Are the people involved interesting? Are there things to discover along the way? I also want to make sure the story is about something larger than just the particulars. “The Lost City of Z” is a tale of adventure, but it is also fundamentally about whether an ancient civilization could exist in the Amazon and how such a discovery would transform our understanding of what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a crime story with many twists and turns, but ultimately it’s about a grave racial injustice and about the formation of the United States as a country.

The second critical element I look for is whether there is enough source material. As a nonfiction writer, there are lots of stories I would love to tell, but I often can’t because there’s simply not enough living sources or historical records. In the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I spent months trying to assess what source material existed. I sent letters to courthouses and police departments. Using the Freedom of Information Act, I filed requests for documents with the FBI and other government agencies.  While I was waiting for a response, I worked on other stories at The New Yorker. As materials began to trickle in, I would put them in the corner of my office and not even glance at them. Finally, after nearly a year, I began to comb through these materials. They were only a fraction of what I would need to write the book, but they gave me the confidence to commit to the project, which would take me nearly another four years to complete.

The final element that went into my decision to do a book is less rational. It’s whether, at some emotional level, I feel compelled to tell this story. I know how long books take, and if I don’t feel that need—indeed, even a compulsion—I’ll lose my mind and undoubtedly write a terrible book.

One of the challenges of writing historical (or any) nonfiction is finding a solid narrative thread. For this book, you had almost endless characters and murders to choose from. How did you know when you’d found the right ones for the book?

You asked me about the three things I generally need to do a book. In the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” there was a fourth element that was essential, which was coming up with a structure. Early on, I had no idea how to tell the story; it spanned so many years and there were so many characters and investigations, I was overwhelmed. And what I didn’t want to do is just write a book cataloguing the dead. I wanted to make sure that there was a deep sense of who these people were, how they lived, how they felt. And it was only when I resolved the structure—telling the story in three separate chronicles, each largely from a different individual’s perspective—that I felt that I could concentrate on the material and write the book.

The first chronicle is told largely from the perspective of an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart, whose family had become a prime target of the murder conspiracy. The second chronicle is told from the perspective of one of the investigators. And the third chronicle is told from my perspective in the present. This structure also allowed me to deepen one of the themes of the book, which is that each of us are often only able to glimpse part of history as it is unfolding; only with time does a fuller portrait emerge, and even then, there are parts that elude us.

Some of the most valuable material for this book you found by going to archives yourself, and by being in Osage County talking to people—good old-fashioned reporting. Do you have any thoughts on the value of real-world reporting, versus online reporting, for writers these days?

Research online can help you identify possible archives or people involved in a story. But then I always try to meet with people involved and visit the archives that might contain documents. I find you get so much more information that way. When I was researching “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I spent weeks visiting a branch of the National Archives, in Texas. Each day, I would pull boxes that I thought might contain materials related to the case. Much of the time I turned up nothing of interest and was miserably bored, and then suddenly I would open a box and discover something revelatory. One time I found the secret grand jury testimony from many of the murder cases, which was not identified in a catalogue and I didn’t even know existed. During the research for the book, I also tried to find descendants of both the victims and the murderers. These sources were critical in allowing me not only to learn more about what happened in the past, but also to understand how this history still played out in the present.

You say there was “a culture of systematic murder” in Osage County during what the Osage call the “Reign of Terror.” When did that become apparent?

Before long, I got some hints of it from the Osage I spoke to. I also read Dennis McAuliffe’s excellent memoir, “The Deaths of Sybil Bolton,” which was published in 1994 and detailed his investigation into the mysterious death of his Osage grandmother. He documents how she, too, was murdered for her oil money during the Reign of Terror. Yet her case had never been probed by the FBI or been included in the official tally of murders. So early on I knew there were additional leads I needed to pursue. But it was only over many years, as I spoke to descendants of previously unknown victims and pored over archival materials, that I had sense of the breadth of this systematic campaign of murder.

Do you have any thoughts on why this dark chapter in American history was forgotten in the larger (non-Native) American culture?

When I learned about these crimes several years ago, I was shocked that, like so many Americans, I had never learned about them in school or read about them in books. After the FBI’s investigation, in the 1920s, the crimes—or at least some of them—were well known. But over time they faded from the headlines. And I think that, just as many of the crimes were covered up because of racial prejudice, this chapter of history was neglected because of prejudice.

How do things stand today in Osage County, with regard to the Reign of Terror?  

The Osage I spoke to still remember the victims and decorate their graves. Some of them still try to investigate unsolved cases to try identify the perpetrators. Unlike so many Americans, they cannot forget what transpired.

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