CHAPTER XI. 



RANDOM CASTS IN THE LAND OF LAKES. 



THE state of Minnesota is so emphatically the land of lakes that this designa- 

 tion should become peculiarly its own. No other region of the globe can compare 

 with it in this respect. In its central portion the greater area is water. The 

 known number of lakes is seven thousand, and an estimate of its unnamed and 

 unexplored lakes adds half as many more at least ! I remember to have sent you 

 a year ago or more an enumeration of the larger number, given by counties. 



As Commissioner of the Department of Lakes and Summer Resorts, repre- 

 sented at the New Orleans exposition last winter, it came within my province to 

 visit no less than fifty-eight of the counties in this state, and this duty has made 

 me familiar with their physical features. In the "Park Region," now easily 

 acsessible by the St. Paul and Manitoba Railroad, where the lakes are most 

 numerous, I have been interested in noting the many pairs of lakes considerable 

 bodies of water separated by narrow strips of land which are often a mile or more 

 in length. Some of these are mere causeways, like a railroad embankment, wide 

 enough for two carriages to pass abreast, while others are studded with oak trees 

 of many years' growth, contributing much to the sylvan beauty of the landscape. 

 These causeways invariably unite what were origihally projecting points of land in 

 an individual lake. It is a peculiarity of nearly all the larger lakes that, wherever 

 there is a point, a bar makes out, dropping down at the end into deep water. 

 These bars are sometimes wholly of sand, but the submerged portions are usually 

 made up of round boulders. In the deep water are the best fishing places for black 

 bass in mid-summer. I suppose these bars are formed mainlv in early spring by 

 shoves of ice, assisted at various times by wave action. I notice that the shores of 

 many lakes are encircled by a narrow embankment or ridge some three feet higher 

 than the land behind it, and these are being continually enlarged by storms and 

 movements of ice. I have found many of these ridges bordering meadows and on 

 high ground in the midst of growing timber, indicating shore lines of ancient 

 lakes, which existed at a time when a larger portion of the country was submerged 

 than now. Geological inference easily accounts for such formations, but they are 

 often puzzling to the uninformed. 



The distribution of fish throughout these lakes is very interesting. The pickerel 

 everywhere prevail. Bass are found within a large but circumscribed area, of 

 which the greater part lies east of the Mississippi River. In the northeastern lakes, 

 east and north of the St. Louis River, lake trout are found, notably, and I don't 

 know but exclusively, in the three extensive counties which border Lake Superior. 

 The great northern pike and the mascalonge are found in many of the lakes in 

 company with the black bass. Wall-eyed pike are even more widely distributed 

 than the black bass, but far less so than the pickerel. In Cook County Mr. John 

 M. Miller, the county auditor, informs me that there is a variety of white bass 

 speckled blue, but I have not seen it myself. It is caught in a lake in Range 5, west 



Referring to the weekly records of big catches which are printed in the 

 American Angler, I confess to a feeling of something like disgust whenever I read 



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