Eric Sevareid · 1935 · survival

In June 1930 two Minneapolis boys just out of high school launched a secondhand canvas canoe into the Minnesota River and paddled two thousand two hundred and fifty miles to Hudson Bay - no motor, no radio, no good maps, and almost nobody who thought they would arrive. Sevareid wrote it up five years later and went on to become one of America's great broadcasters.

1. 1
   Fort Snelling

   June 1930, and two boys just out of high school put a secondhand canvas canoe into the Minnesota River - Eric Sevareid seventeen, Walter Port nineteen, no motor, no radio, no good maps, and fifty dollars from a newspaper.

2. 2
   Mankato

   Upstream against the current for weeks, which is the wrong way to start a two-thousand-mile journey - and the first of the people along the way who tell them plainly that they are not going to make it.

3. 3
   Big Stone Lake

   The Minnesota-South Dakota line and the height of land, where the water stops running south to the Gulf and starts running north to Hudson Bay - and everything after this is downstream, which is the only good news for a month.

4. 4
   The Bois de Sioux

   A river that is mostly swamp, waded to the hips for days through insects and channel that keeps disappearing - and they almost wept with relief, Sevareid writes, when it finally ran clear.

5. 5
   Fargo

   The second-largest town on the whole route, and a doctor who tells them not to let anyone convince them the trip cannot be finished - which by then is the only encouragement they have had from an adult.

6. 6
   Winnipeg

   Down the Red River across the border into Canada and through the city - and out into Lake Winnipeg, which is two hundred and fifty miles of open water and the thing every northern paddler is warned about.

7. 7
   Berens River

   A Cree settlement halfway up the east shore, where the weather pins them down for days - and they take the steamer on to Norway House rather than lose the season, which Sevareid records without excusing.

8. 8
   Norway House

   The old Hudson's Bay depot at the top of the lake, and the start of the last five hundred miles - the wilderness jump they had been told was impossible, through the Echimamish and down the Hayes.

9. 9
   The Hayes River

   Hundreds of sets of rapids run in an open canoe by two teenagers with no whitewater experience, and portages through bog - and the freeze-up coming down behind them faster than they are going.

10. 10
    York Factory

    Salt water in October, ragged and hungry, at a Hudson's Bay post founded in 1684 and now abandoned - 2,250 miles, and Sevareid wrote it up as an undergraduate and became a journalist on the strength of it.