Red River of the North
— — the prairie river that flows the wrong way home.
Not only on a wall.
“Most American rivers run south to a gulf. The Red River of the North runs the other way — out of Lake Traverse on the Minnesota and South Dakota line, north along the border with North Dakota, past Fargo and Grand Forks, into Manitoba, and out into Lake Winnipeg. Its valley is the old bed of glacial Lake Agassiz, which is why the wheat country it crosses is so flat and so black.
Red River of the North, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Red River of the North forms at the confluence of the Bois de Sioux and Otter Tail rivers at Wahpeton, North Dakota, and Breckenridge, Minnesota, then runs roughly 885 kilometres north into Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. The river marks the border between Minnesota and North Dakota for its entire United States course and is the principal drainage of the Red River Valley, the old lakebed of glacial Lake Agassiz. The basin covers about 287,500 square kilometres and supports some of the most productive wheat, sugar-beet, and soybean cropland in North America.
The Red runs slow and dark, the colour of strong tea, because it carries fine clay and organic matter from the Agassiz lakebed. Its gradient is unusually shallow — less than 13 centimetres per kilometre on average through the valley — which is why spring snowmelt cannot drain quickly and the river floods almost yearly. The 1997 flood inundated downtown Grand Forks; the 2009 crest at Fargo reached about 12.4 metres, the highest on record. Dyke and diversion works ring both cities. In summer the river warms and supports channel catfish and walleye.
The river runs through four hard seasons. Late March and April are flood season, when frozen ground refuses meltwater and the slow gradient cannot move the volume south to north fast enough. Summer is the visitor window: the cottonwood gallery forest along the banks fills out and the cropland on either side of the valley turns green. Fall brings combines and the smell of sugar-beet harvest around East Grand Forks. By December the river is locked under ice. Lewis and Clark never saw it; the Métis cart trains to Winnipeg followed its course in the 1840s.