Edward Wellington Backus (1861 – October 29, 1934) was a timber baron, dam builder, mill owner, financier, developer of the northern reaches of Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

, and president of the Ontario & Minnesota Power Company and Minnesota and Ontario Paper Company. He was responsible for the construction, commencing in 1905, of a hydroelectric dam at Koochiching Falls between International Falls, Minnesota

International Falls, Minnesota

International Falls is a city in and the county seat of Koochiching County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 6,424 at the 2010 census....

, and Fort Frances, Ontario

Fort Frances, Ontario

Fort Frances is a town in, and the seat of, Rainy River District in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. The population as of the 2006 census was 8,103 and Fort Frances' population peaked in 1971 at 9,947...

, an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company

Hudson's Bay Company

The Hudson's Bay Company , abbreviated HBC, or "The Bay" is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and one of the oldest in the world. A fur trading business for much of its existence, today Hudson's Bay Company owns and operates retail stores throughout Canada...

, which generated much power for the region. It helped drive the paper mill industry of the area, which he also helped finance.

After logging the shoreline timber, his plans to transform the entire Boundary Waters

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness , is a wilderness area within the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota under the administration of the U.S. Forest Service...

 region by building seven dams in the area were opposed by environmentalist

Environmentalist

An environmentalist broadly supports the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities"...

s, notably Ernest Oberholtzer

Ernest Oberholtzer

Ernest Carl Oberholtzer was an American explorer, author and conservationist.Nicknamed "Ober", he was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa, but he lived most of his adult life in Minnesota. Oberholtzer attended Harvard University and received a bachelor of arts degree, but left after one year of...

.

He began his lumbering career in 1882 at the Lee and McCullock Company, which soon became Lee and Backus, and then in 1899 Backus-Brooks Company. He overextended himself in the 1920s and suffered severe losses in the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, and died of a heart attack in New York in 1934.