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THE MINNESOTA INTERLAKEN 



£y CHARLES HALLOCK 



ROF. WINCHELL, 

 state geologist, has 

 publicly estimated the 

 number of the Min- 

 nesota lakes at eleven 

 thousand. A large 

 majority of them are 

 unknown to carto- 

 graphers, but familiar enough to wood- 

 runners, trappers and Indians, through 

 and among which there have - been long 

 established canoe routes leading to 

 trading posts and frontier reservations. 

 The, area covered by these routes may 

 be safely reckoned as containing more 

 lakes than the settled portion of the 

 state. But eleven thousand ! That is a 

 great number. Now-a-days people talk 

 flippantly of numbers, especially of dol- 

 lars, without a conception of their vast 

 aggregate. Why, it would occupy a 

 life-time of travel to visit them all. In 

 many parts of the United States a 

 natural lake is so rare a thing of beauty 

 and attraction that it is made the ob- 

 jective point of a one hundred mile 

 journey; but out in the park region of 

 middle Minnesota one is never out of 

 sight of them. There nature reproduces 

 them all in aquamarine and clear colors. 

 We are not obliged to restrict ourselves 

 to the shadow of a gravel walk, or to 

 an umbrella tent, as in a city park, but 

 we may drive at will across the prairie, 

 and pitch our sheltering canvas beside 

 waters whose borders are paved with 

 rare pebbles, and whose sward is ever 



kept green by the ripples which kiss it. 

 Following the same route which was 

 only a cart trail when I went up there 

 forty-seven years ago with the Kinkaid 

 boys, who started the town of Alex- 

 andria before Minnesota was a state, I 

 pitched down last June beside the Hotel 

 Alexandria and once more looked out 

 upon the expansive bosom of Geneva 

 Lake. It was a happy experience — 

 something like a renaissance. There 

 could be no mistake about Geneva. It 

 had charmed me in the old days, and it 

 remained constant now. The- environ- 

 ment had somewhat changed, 'tis true; 

 fewer tepees and more houses in sight, 

 but the same old ripple was on the lake, 

 the same pebbles on the beach, and the 

 same fringe of rushes around the shore. 

 In fact I could fancy that I saw the 

 same great overfed bass swinging along 

 outside the marginal weeds. Many a 

 time,. in the past, I had let my dug-out 

 canoe drift along the shore line when 

 the wind was fair and picked up a score 

 of them on a troll in an inning. It is 

 no trick at all to take a mess of fish 

 in this and adjacent lakes — no more 

 to-day than it was then. You can catch 

 them with frog, minnow, pork, spoon, 

 fish spawn, cawfish, caddis, worm, or 

 fly. Everyone who knows how to fish, 

 men, women, children, old and young, 

 all bring in good strings, and the fish 

 run large, too. I saw some gentlemen 

 of St. Paul bring in a lot of fifty-two 

 on July i, not one of which would 



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