WCHM Author Talk: Frank Bures – “Pushing the River”

On July 11, 2025, at 6:00 PM, the WCHM will be hosting author Frank Bures on his new book, Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, A Lost History, A Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories.
Bures is an award-winning author, having won “The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2022,” Gold Award Feature Story at the MMPA Excellence Awards in 2018, and many others. Pushing the River was released this April, and features a collection of true canoeing stories “as varied as the waters, weather, and rhythms of a canoe trip.” His collection features two kayakers who escaped the 2011 Pagami Creek Fire in the Waters, a supernatural scare in Quetico Provincial Park in the 1970s, and Bures’s experience.
His largest essay, which is also told in an article, through the Minnesota Historical Society, is an account of the battle for the Mississippi River paddling record. Bures’s narrates the lost history of the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby in the 1940s and 1950s. The 450-mile race on the Upper Mississippi features the dominance of racers from the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, canoe-racing legend Gene Jensen, members of the Tibbets family, and the unacknowledged contribution of the Ojibwe canoe builders Jim and Bernie Smith, whose design features are now part of the modern canoe-racing landscape.
Bures will be discussing his book and the essays and tales within it at the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum in Spooner, Wisconsin, on July 11 at 6:00 PM. Admission is free. We are also honored to host Northwind Book & Fiber as they will be selling copies of Bures’s book.