Bemidji: First City on the Mississippi

Bemidji takes its name from an Ojibwe word meaning 'a lake with crossing waters,' because here the Mississippi River flows directly through Lake Bemidji on its way south. That makes Bemidji the first city the river passes through after leaving its headwaters at Lake Itasca, about thirty miles southwest, and the city leans into that fact, billing itself as the First City on the Mississippi.

The Ojibwe people knew these waters long before European contact, harvesting wild rice, netting fish, and tapping maple syrup along the river corridor for hundreds of years. In eighteen thirty-two, geographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was led to the true headwaters of the Mississippi by his Ojibwe guide Ozawindib, a journey that had eluded explorers for generations. The town of Bemidji came later, platted in eighteen ninety-eight as a lumber boom pulled white settlers into the north woods.

For several decades this was a major logging and sawmilling center. When the big timber ran out, Bemidji reinvented itself around lakes, tourism, and education. Bemidji Normal School opened in nineteen nineteen with just thirty-eight students; it became Bemidji State University in nineteen seventy-five and now serves more than five thousand students.

But the town is probably best known for the two statues on the lakeshore: a giant plaid-shirted Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe, built by the local Rotary Club for a winter carnival in nineteen thirty-seven. Life magazine ran a full page on them that year, and other northwoods towns have been building their own Bunyans ever since. The figures capture something real about the logging mythology that once defined this part of Minnesota.