It’s been a beautiful day with great weather. Jim
dealt with the water heater……the new element didn’t work because the problem
was in the switch which he found and fixed….then it blew the breaker because we
have only 30 amp power here and it must have come on at the same time as the
air conditioning. Back to heating by propane and no more problem.
What we did today will mainly be of interest to family but
you never know. We spent the morning at St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery
where a lot of family members are buried. We found all but three people I
was looking for plus a couple I had no idea were there, so it was very
successful. I was amazed we did so well because it’s a really
disorganized cemetery with graves facing both east and west, old flat stones
right up against big vertical ones, crooked rows, family names in more than one
group…..everything higgledy piggledy. Very easy to miss things.
Couldn’t figure out what plan, if any, they had when they started burying
people there so didn’t know where to look for the oldest graves. We never
could find my great-great-grandmother’s marker from 1887 which, according to
findagrave.com, is there. We found the LaTendresse plot with my
great-grandparents and the rest of the LaTendresses who didn’t move to
Washington State. Their gravestones have Americanized names……Francis and Virginia
rather than their given names of Francois and Virginie. They spoke French
at home (my father didn’t learn English until he went to school) but Virginie
never learned to speak English at all so it’s odd her name would have been
anglicized.
We heard a funny story yesterday from our campground’s
owners who are very knowledgeable about the town. Pierre Bottineau was
the founder of the town and, naturally, a very important person in Red Lake
Falls history. He was the one who led a group of French families from the
Twin Cities area to Red Lake Falls in 1876, my great-great-grandparents among
them (Elie and Sophie Cyr, not the LaTendresse side which came from
Quebec). Bottineau, ND, was named after Pierre. The Catholic priest
here was afraid the town of Bottineau was going to claim Pierre’s body from
it’s grave in a non-Catholic cemetery west of town and have it reburied in ND.
So one night the priest and a couple of other men dug him up and moved
him to St. Joseph’s Cemetery where, being consecrated ground, it could not be
disturbed. It worked because he’s still here.
One of two hills in town, undoubtedly here because of the
river. My father skied on barrel staves when he was a kid so this was
probably the hill. All those cars in the mid-distance belong to the
people who come from all over to spend a day tubing on the river. They
come regularly from as far as Fargo, ND (110 miles), Grand Forks, ND (40
miles), and Winnepeg, Manitoba (160 miles). The Canadians are crazy wild,
according to our hosts…..much rowdier than the Americans who come here.
Fortunately for us, the Canadian national holiday on July 1st falls
in the middle of the week so there aren’t that many of them here. And I
always thought Canadians were calm and peaceful. Apparently not so.
A dangerous load on this truck going through town from the
campground. Hope they didn’t have to go very far. If those floats
came loose they could cover the windshield of the vehicle behind them.
According to a very old map of Red Lake Falls, this is where
my great-grandfather’s farm was located over 100 years ago. Now there’s
nothing but fields planted with crops as far as the eye can see. And it
is FLAT. Kansas couldn’t be any flatter than this.
The Red Lake County court house in Red Lake Falls with the
date 1910 on the front. It was built when my father was 12 years old so
there is still something here he would recognize today. It’s a beautiful
and impressive building.
I said yesterday the river would be too cold for us to
consider tubing in it. Turns out it’s not cold at all. It’s about
75 degrees today. This is because it’s coming out of Lower Red Lake with
a maximum depth of only 84 feet so the water isn’t all that cold, plus it’s a
shallow river so warms up even more as it flows towards Red Lake Falls.
There aren’t any falls here either. The name comes from the fact that the
elevation drops gradually from Lower Red Lake to here which causes the river to
fall 200 to 300 feet over that distance. Doesn’t make any sense to me to
have “falls” in the name of the town when there aren’t any but maybe it made
sense to those who named it. Or maybe they thought they’d make people
wonder about it as long as the town lasted.
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