Emo

From the Little Forks Reserve, Du Vernet canoed west to Emo, a town along the northern side of the Rainy River. Emo was settled in the early 1880s under the Rainy River Free Grants and Homesteads Act. Emo’s short name was devised by the Irish pioneer Alex Luttrel, who, noting the lack of formal education in most of his fellow settlers, proposed the town take the easy-to-spell name of a village in Ireland.

Settlers and travelers reached Emo by taking the Canadian Pacific Railway to Rat Portage and then a steamboat across the Lake of the Woods and up the Rainy River. Du Vernet followed much of this route, traveling by train to Rat Portage but instead taking a steamboat to Little Forks, east of Emo, and then canoeing westward to the town. In 1901, just two years after Du Vernet’s visit, the Canadian Northern Railway reached the town. Providing year-round transportation for settlers and freight, the railway enabled more settlers and goods to come to region more quickly and in greater numbers than the steamboat or the canoe.

Today, Emo remains a small town in the Rainy River District.