{"id":15235,"date":"2025-04-09T16:38:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T16:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/?p=15235"},"modified":"2025-04-11T13:31:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T13:31:05","slug":"how-to-use-newspaper-archives-crafting-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2025\/04\/09\/how-to-use-newspaper-archives-crafting-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Researching a legendary race: How to use newspaper archives in crafting a narrative"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Not long ago, I came to the realization that I\u2019d written a lot of stories about canoeing. It made sense: I live in Minnesota, and that\u2019s what we do. I\u2019d written about Guinness World Records<\/a>, paddlers trapped in wildfires<\/a>, and even my own near-death experience<\/a>. Before long I started to dream of trying to bring these stories together in a collection that someone could have at their cabin\u2026or even take on a canoe trip.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But as I was assembling the collection (“Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories<\/a>“) 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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Finding an eyewitness account<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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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\u2019s 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\u2019d seen how their canoe building influenced the course of modern racing, something never before reported. Smith\u2019s story was key to making the derby come alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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But it wasn\u2019t the whole story. There were at least nine other derbies between 1940 and 1960, and Smith didn\u2019t know much about the other races.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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To fill this in I went to the Gale Family Library<\/a> at the Minnesota History Center<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Keyword searches and constructing timelines<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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While not perfect, the archive let me search back to the early 1900s for terms like \u201ccanoe derby\u201d and \u201ccanoe marathon.\u201d Using that and several other databases, I dug up a \u201cwater marathon\u201d that had taken place in 1919 on the Mississippi River in the era of \u201cmarathon mania\u201d and a 500-mile race on the river that took place in 1928.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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There were literally hundreds of articles about the derby. I wasn\u2019t 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, \u201cWhich Way Bena?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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\u2019t. 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:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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When Smith and Bergstrom started across, the lake was calm. \u201cOnce we got out on the water, the wind picked up and it got pretty wavy,\u201d says Smith, at ninety-three, in an interview at his small home in Shorewood, Minnesota.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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Water washed over their gunnels. The boat began to fill. \u201cBefore the race started,\u201d Smith says, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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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. \u201cHe came bouncing on top of these waves. Then he came over, picked up our canoe, and dumped out the water. We said, \u2018Thank you,\u2019 and we took off. He saved the day for us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Subscribe to Storyboard<\/h2>\n \n
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Get insights into the craft of journalism and storytelling in your inbox, delivered on Fridays.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n \n

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Finding inspiration from ‘The Boys in the Boat’<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Through all of my research, I was inspired partly by Daniel James Brown\u2019s “The Boys in the Boat<\/a>,” 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.)<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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\u2019t 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\u2019t always clear who was where when, unless you read them carefully and studied the daily standings.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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\u2014and the history of canoeing.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Another surviving racer appears<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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I did find a few descendants of the racers, but most of them didn\u2019t know much about the derby. I did, however,\u00a0 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<\/a>.”\u00a0 After it came out, I heard from the family of Harlow Thompson, who\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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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\u2019t 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\u2019re immersed in writing history, it can be easy to let the stories sweep you away.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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***<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Frank Bures is a writer based in Minneapolis, and the author of “Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories<\/a>.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In telling the story of a canoe race, Frank Bures had to find a way to blend firsthand accounts with archival news coverage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":15236,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[429,448,449],"topics":[],"authors":[246],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-15235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-on-craft","tag-books","tag-history","tag-research","authors-frank-bures"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nResearching a legendary race: How to use newspaper archives in crafting a narrative - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2025\/04\/09\/how-to-use-newspaper-archives-crafting-narrative\/\" 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