On an early-June expedition down a portion of the Yellowstone Trail, I took a side trip to visit several Minnesota parks that are part of their own named road. Although it has a longer formal name, the route is known more simply as “The River of Stories.”

The Minnesota River Valley National Scenic Byway, a federally supported effort involving both local and state entities, runs from Browns Valley on the Minnesota-South Dakota border through a large swath of the western and southwestern part of the state before turning northeast and ending at Belle Plaine, about a half-hour from the southwestern outskirts of the Twin Cities.

I’d somehow not heard of the byway, but wanted to see a few Renville County parks as part of my visit to Danube, a Yellowstone Trail community of about 500 that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

I learned about the byway only when I visited the first of four Renville parks I was to see in one day, but I quickly became enamored with the history and beauty of the area.

Skalbekken County Park, the westernmost of seven in Renville County, surprised me with its scenery and spacious facilities, especially for camping, as well as its focus on history. That impression repeated itself throughout the day, which culminated with a fantastic interpretive experience at Birch Coulee.

There, a major battle with Native Americans had ended badly for federal forces, but there’s always more to a river of stories.

Renville County Parks highlight rustic camping

Skalbekken is about four miles southwest of the small town of Sacred Heart, approachable from Renville County Highway 10 when coming from the general direction of Wisconsin. There are two different routes to approach it from the west, if you’re coming from Granite Falls: a northern route that eventually meets up with County 10, and a southern route on Minnesota Highway 67 (on the south side of the river) that meets 10.

Consulting maps may be more necessary in this area than others, as these four parks and much of the byway are off the beaten path. The byway also isn’t a stickler for the idea that there has to be a single road that makes up a byway, so it occasionally offers alternate routes. 

See www.mnrivervalley.com/destinations-along-the-byway to get started; I didn’t find the official byway site until later and relied on Google Maps, my car’s geographic positioning system, and a general sense of direction, as I often took unpaved Renville County roads while I dawdled my way to the parks.

My cluelessness about this byway made it and the Renville parks a delightful surprise. My kids and I had seen the beautiful bluffs just northwest of here on an earlier trip, but I somehow had missed the fact that Skalbekken was part of the riverine ecological and cultural system until I arrived – and there was the river.

A fine-looking river it is. Where it curved around to a nicely landscaped Skalbekken pavilion, it looked almost as if I could walk across it. That lent an intimacy to the park that was supplemented by the park’s location at the base of heavily wooded bluffs.

In addition to the tidy, attractive pavilion, with its picnic tables and benches to look out over the river, the park had excellent and well maintained facilities all around, from its bathrooms to its signage. I was most impressed by the size and quality of most of the campsites in the main portion of the park; although simpler than those of most state parks, without camping pads, there seemed to be ample, level and grassy areas to pitch tents.

This was more the rule than the exception at the four parks I visited that day. This was true whether the campsites were in the less rustic portions of the parks (generally, near the primary day-use areas, with their exhibits, paths, running water and restroom facilities) or the more isolated rustic spots.

The rustic spots in each park – not quite “primitive” in the traditional sense – struck me as preferable, as they often had tables and either stone or metal fire rings and frequently were in well-selected and very private spots of natural beauty.

Such was the case in the first rustic spot I saw in Vicksburg County Park, the second park I visited, about 10 driving miles southeast of Skalbekken, depending on the route taken.

I couldn’t tell if the site was actually one or two spots.  There appeared to be only one numbered marker. 

But there were two metal fire rings, two picnic tables, a plastic trash bin and a circular driveway in a broad grassy area on the riverbank – well cleared and open to the sun, but with several large trees to provide shade in its open parts, plus plenty of surrounding forest.

Most attractive was the large granite outcropping near the far table and fire ring. It’s a perfect spot for kids to clamber over and perhaps give a little division between tent areas if more than one family or group set up in the spot.

Other spots I saw – like a tiny, uneven-grounded site on Beaver Creek in Beaver Falls County Park – had a different kind of charm. Hemmed in on all sides by slopes and trees, rocky and truly primitive except for the wooden picnic table, this site boasts the soothing sound of the rushing creek, which tumbled over a heavily bouldered bed all through the park.

Plenty of history, too

What makes the Renville Parks special enough to be part of the byway, however, is the focus on history. Each of those I visited had its own special places and stories.

At Skalbekken, it’s the 1868 Odean Skalbeck log house, the former home of county commissioner Odean Skalbeck. There’s also the park’s connection to the Upper Sioux Agency State Park across the river, accessible by horse trail across the river (there’s a horse camp in the park, as there is in Beaver Falls Park).

At Vicksburg, the park area was home to the county’s first business, a trading post run by French fur trappers in the 1780s. A few decades later, Joseph Renville, for whom the county was named, operated a fur-trading post there.

At Beaver Falls, once the county’s seat, the park’s excellent interpretive exhibits give both a fine understanding of the wildlife of the prairie and creek bottomland, the impact of fire, and the tragic story of conflict between Dakota tribe and settlers.

You can see the dilapidated former town hall just outside the park boundaries, near what remains of the village. “Situated as it is a mile and a half from the river and having no railway outlet it is not wonderful that its early prosperity has come to grief in an almost utter stagnation,” lamented a 19th-century history of the area made available online by the National Genealogical Society.

The most poignant of all stories in the four parks I visited is probably the one told at Birch Coulee Park. There, a series of exhibits by the Minnesota Historical Society on a looping interpretive trail allow a haunting re-imagining of the Battle of Birch Coulee on Sept. 2 and 3, 1862.

This particular battle ended in the deaths of 22 U.S. soldiers and 90 horses, with 47 more men severely wounded (I haven’t found information on Dakota casualties, which were minimal in comparison).

The U.S. forces were camped in a low-lying, exposed area of prairie surrounded by tall grass, some wetlands and the heavily wooded coulee (a deep streambed with steep sides) to the east. Knowing this, it is a simple matter to stand at their campsite, take a long look around, and understand the sense of unease those soldiers must have felt despite their commanders’ reassurances that they were in a safe position.

The exhibits use simple techniques to let the land tell most of the story: concrete ground markers pointing toward where each band of Dakotas hid out of sight, but with poles marking those positions in the distance. Turning toward all of them, a viewer gets an ominous sense of being surrounded.

Although what had been a mostly cloudy day had become much sunnier when I walked the battlefield trail, it was easy to feel the chill of hopelessness. I sensed if for both, for the U.S. soldiers, whose camp could have been easily overtaken, and for the Dakota, who could break for meals provided by the bands’ women during the battle – but whose later sorrows are well documented both at the park and elsewhere.

As in all battles, victory and defeat at Birch Coulee are only in the eye of the beholder.   Birch Coulee was the most deadly for the U.S. forces in the Dakota war. The later hangings of 40 Dakota men who fought for their homeland in the war were still to come.

The Birch Coulee prairie is peaceful now. The park, like all of Renville County, is a fine place to visit.

Thoughtful visitors, however, will always find more in such places than just their physical beauty, and Renville County’s parks on the scenic byway can give its users pause to consider both our past and our future.