Can dogs hike in Lake Carlos State Park?

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The lake in front of you goes down one hundred sixty-three feet, and it is the largest and deepest lake in the Alexandria chain. A river starts here too: the Long Prairie River begins at Lake Carlos and winds east to meet the Crow Wing River. This is Lake Carlos State Park, eleven hundred fifty-four acres of hardwood forest, prairie and marsh on the lake's north end.

Before the park

Under one of the park's campgrounds, archaeologists found what was probably a seasonal camp of Late Woodland peoples.

The prairies and woods along this river gave hunting and fishing to the Dakota and the Ojibwe. Ojibwe warriors sometimes came by canoe from Leech Lake and Mille Lacs, up the Crow Wing and the Long Prairie, on a war road to the Minnesota River valley.

Seven Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe, nations govern in Minnesota, Leech Lake and Mille Lacs among them, and the Dakota govern four communities in the state.

In the summer of eighteen forty-eight, the United States moved the Ho-Chunk out of northeastern Iowa to Long Prairie, downstream on the river that leaves this lake. The Ho-Chunk said the land was not chosen by them but forced on them: too far north, too cold, too overgrown with trees, and too sandy. In May of eighteen fifty-five they began moving again, south to Blue Earth County. The Ho-Chunk Nation, the People With the Big Voice, governs now from Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

Before eighteen sixty, a homesteader near Alexandria named Glendy King, once a student at West Point, named this lake for a friend back in the eastern states.

Making the park

The state wanted a public recreation ground in one of its summer resort centers. The legislature put up the money in nineteen thirty-seven. The state bought the first four hundred four acres during the Depression. Lake Carlos was one of fourteen state parks set up in nineteen thirty-seven and thirty-eight.

The building fell to the Works Progress Administration, one of the federal relief programs of the Great Depression, working from National Park Service and state designs.

The crews worked in split stone. They raised a water tower and pump house in nineteen thirty-eight and thirty-nine, a sanitation building in nineteen forty, and a bath house at the beach in nineteen forty-one and forty-two. The bath house's changing wings, walled in rough boards sawed from native logs, are gone, but their low stone walls remain.

In nineteen ninety-two the stone buildings by the lake went onto the National Register of Historic Places.

One story

In August of eighteen twenty-five, at Prairie du Chien, two American commissioners, William Clark and Lewis Cass, met leaders of the Dakota, the Ojibwe, the Ho-Chunk and other nations.

The treaty they signed opens with regret: wars had for many years been carried on between the Dakota and the Ojibwe. Its answer was a firm and perpetual peace, and a line between the two countries. Neither side was to hunt across that line without the other's consent.

The line was to run to a lake at the head of the Prairie River, which is supposed to enter the Crow Wing River on its south side. Supposed. The treaty does not name the lake.

Now look around. The river that leaves Lake Carlos is the Long Prairie, and it runs east to meet the Crow Wing. Whether this was the treaty's lake, no record says.

The Minnesota Historical Society says the treaty's boundaries made it simpler for the government to buy tribal land later. In eighteen fifty-one, at Traverse des Sioux, the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota gave up twenty-one million acres for about seven and a half cents an acre. Eighteen twenty-five: a border drawn to a lake no one named.

Today

By the state's count in twenty sixteen, more than one hundred seventy thousand people a year come here.

The live argument is in the water. Channels join Lake Carlos to its neighbors in the chain. Invasive zebra mussels were found in one of those neighbors in two thousand nine, and by early twenty fourteen the county counted twenty-eight infested waters. Douglas County answered with public warnings and limits on boat travel through the channels between lakes. Lake Carlos is one of the state's Sentinel Lakes, and its monitoring began before the mussels were first detected, so researchers can compare the lake before and after the invasion.

On land, the park has restored one hundred sixty acres of tallgrass prairie along its prairie loop.

From the park road, look for the stone water tower the relief crews built. This is Lake Carlos State Park.