Eighty years in the making: A legislative history of Voyageurs National Park

Witzig, Fred

Voyageurs National Park is situated at the western end of a federal recreational corridor stretching from Lake Superior to International Falls. This region of spectacular natural beauty with its many lakes, streams, peninsulas, and islands, was the French voyageurs preferred route to the North American interior during the fur trading days of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The region, therefore, has natural and cultural attributes that prompted late nineteenth and early twentieth century American and Canadian citizens to look for ways to shield this valuable heritage from the often destructive consequences of traditional settlement and development. Voyageurs was wrapped in controversy from the beginning. Creating a national park where land ownership had evolved into a complex mix of private and public holdings made land acquisition policy a constant issue throughout the campaign for the park. Local residents had become accustomed to essentially unrestricted recreational use of private and public lands in the proposed park area. They were stunned at the prospect of losing these advantages in their “backyard”- an area that had suddenly been declared to have “national significance”. Both sides had to endure periods of bureaucratic inertia and wrangling and interminable, unexplained delays with reports, public hearings, and responses to questions germane to the controversy. And park supporters in particular were often frustrated with the cautious demeanor of the congressman who was carrying the park legislation in the House of Representatives. This study identifies and presents the central issues involved in the lengthy debate over Voyageurs National Park in a chronological fashion. The time frame is 1962 to 1975 when the president signed the authorizing legislation. Archival documents from the Minnesota Historical Society, Voyageurs National Park, the Midwest Regional Office of the National Park Service in Omaha, the Legislative and Congressional Office of the Department of the Interior in Washington, records of the Superior National Forest in Duluth, newspaper files of the Northeast Minnesota Historical Center at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, personal interviews, and the personal files of the author were used in preparing this document.

Eighty years in the making: A legislative history of Voyageurs National Park

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