About Ranier

Ranier has a truly rich, varied and interesting history. Located in northern Minnesota, spitting distance from Canada, where scenic, island-dappled Rainy Lake flows into Rainy River, this village is a literal time capsule. Beginning in the 1600’s, hundreds of years before the surveyors platted this town , it served as a meeting place and resting spot for the French fur traders (Voyageurs) and Ojibwa (Chippewa) aborigines. Early in the 1800’s explorers searched (starting from the Gulf of Mexico northward) for the source of the mighty Mississippi River, which they believed was near here (and is, at Lake Itasca). After our Revolutionary War with England in the late 1700s, we Americans fought them once more in the War of 1812. The peace treaty, negotiated in Paris, France, provided for part of the border between British Canada and America to be Rainy Lake and Rainy River. For most of the rest of that century this area was relatively peaceful and the slow pace of life went on much as it had in the past. Things were about to change dramatically as the 1800s came to a close.

Beginning in 1893, gold was discovered on Rainy Lake, the first of three significant events which were to alter the fundamental character of this wilderness area forever. In a matter of a few years hundreds of excited miners rushed in, seeking to strike it rich (not to be). Next, a visionary entrepreneur, E.W. Backus, built a railroad from central Minnesota north to Rainy River, to tap into the vast timber resources that were here for the taking. He damned the powerful river as an energy source for his paper mill (two miles downstream from what is now Ranier at a waterfall/rapids called Koochiching Falls, now International Falls). Finally, the Canadians completed a transcontinental railroad from their resource-rich western provinces eastward, as a means of delivering these goods to the insatiable growing American market. They chose as one of their main points of entry in the U.S. the narrows where Rainy Lake empties into Rainy River. The magnificent rail bridge which spans these narrows is still in use today. This point became the Port of Ranier, first surveyed as a proposed town in 1907 and officially incorporated in 1908. Once this railroad was in place, commercial fishermen swarmed in to harvest the schools of fish that populated Rainy Lake, because they now had means to transport their catch in cork-lined, ice-cooled refrigerated rail cars to big cities across the U.S.

Ranier, in its early boom days, was a true “Wild West” town. Booze, brawls and brothels typified much of what passed for business as usual. Imagine what the railroaders, loggers, fur trappers, hunters, boatmen, miners and fishermen, deprived from company (sometimes for months) somewhere on the far reaches of Rainy Lake would behave like on their forays into Ranier. Add to that the assorted motley collection of local gamblers, con men, and unscrupulous saloon owners who preyed on them and weren’t above (or below) any means to separate these often inebriated fellows from their hard-earned scratch. During the prohibition era (1920s and early 30s), “rum running” by scofflaws across Rainy Lake and Rainy River from Canada to Ranier was endemic (some of whom included the author’s grandfather, and grandfather’s brothers).