In 1856, the fur trader Joseph Brown directed four men to establish a route from the Red River on today's Minnesota-North Dakota border to Traverse des Sioux, in what is now Nicollet County, just north of the town of St. Peter.
En route, the men passed Green Lake, the gem of present-day Kandiyohi County, and were so taken with its beauty, they vowed to return and establish homesites on its shores.
Nearly a century would pass before Roger Strand, who died last week at age 87, would see Green Lake for the first time, but even as a kid he was similarly beguiled by the 5,500-acre, viridescent body of water.
Brought from Minneapolis by his parents to the family cabin on the north side of the lake, Strand would spend his childhood summers in this beautiful part of Minnesota, where prairies meet woodlands, and both flourish.
Strand's childhood impressions of the region would stick, and after he graduated from college, and then medical school, and after he married his wife, Kay, he returned to Willmar, the Kandiyohi County seat, where, as a skilled surgeon he specialized in resolving injuries of the hand — the bane of cash-crop farmers — and was renowned as a kind man who wielded an exacting scalpel.
Strand's father, Orrin, had been similarly entranced by this part of south-central Minnesota, whose glaciated prairie soils are pockmarked with crystalline lakes surrounded by pines, but also oaks and ashes, elms, maples and basswoods. The elder Strand was particularly interested in the region's many shallow lakes and wetlands, which in fall attracted migrating flocks of mallards, teal, pintails and other fowl.
"My father had one hobby, hunting ducks,'' Roger Strand told me in 2019, the last time we visited in person. "And he always wanted us kids to have a place to hunt.''
So it was that in the middle part of the last century Orrin Strand purchased 80 acres of ponds and woodlands in Kandiyohi County, and shortly thereafter, in 1955, erected a concrete-block structure, dubbing it the Stoney Lake cabin.
