The River That Runs Uphill

Stand at the edge of the Red River in Fargo and watch the current. It moves north. That alone is enough to orient yourself to something unusual about this place. Most rivers in the United States drain south and east, following gravity toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Red River of the North drains toward Hudson Bay. It is one of the few rivers on the continent that genuinely runs uphill, at least in the imagination, northward through the flat old lake bed that cradled it, on its way to Winnipeg and eventually the Arctic watershed.

The valley the Red River crosses is not naturally a valley at all. It is the floor of glacial Lake Agassiz, a body of water so enormous it makes the Great Lakes look modest. About nine thousand five hundred years ago, that lake drained away, leaving behind silt-loam sediments so deep and fertile that the Red River Valley became one of the richest agricultural floors in the world. The river that runs through it winds in great slow loops, barely moving, through some of the flattest terrain in North America.

Indigenous peoples had lived along its banks for thousands of years before Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, a French voyageur, explored this region in the seventeen thirties searching for a water route to the Pacific. The Ojibwe and Métis peoples had long used the river for trade and movement. Long before them, the Dakota and their ancestors had crossed and hunted this plain.

The river's name, Red, came from the reddish brown silt it carries, the ground-up mineral legacy of the old lake bed that makes the farmland so extraordinarily productive. The same sediment that colors the water is the same sediment that drew the railroad, the homesteaders, and eventually the city of Fargo to this crossing.