Kenora is situated on the traditional territory of the
Ojibway people. Among the earliest Europeans in the Lake of the Woods area was explorer and fur trader
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye. — the community kept that name until 1905, when it was renamed
Kenora. Kenora officially became part of the province of Ontario in 1889. Boundaries were drawn up for the provinces and the
Northwest Angle on Lake of the Woods which definitively drew the borders between Ontario, Manitoba, and the U.S. state of
Minnesota. Gold and the railway were both important in the community's early history: gold was first discovered in the area in 1850, and by 1893, 20 mines were operating within of Rat Portage, and the first Canadian ocean-to-ocean train passed through in 1886 on the
Canadian Pacific Railway. Among the entrepreneurs attracted to the town was the Hon. JEP Vereker, a retired British army officer and youngest son of the 4th
Viscount Gort. Later, a highway was built through Kenora in 1932, becoming part of Canada's first coast-to-coast highway in 1943, and then part of the
Trans-Canada Highway, placing the community on both of Canada's major transcontinental transportation routes. The original barrier to the completion of the highway concerned the crossing of the Winnipeg River at two locations. The single-span arch bridges are among the longest of their type in North America. During the
Prohibition era in the United States, the Lake of the Woods served as a smuggler's route for the transport of alcohol. In December 1883, there was a large fire in Rat Portage, rendering 70 of the town's then population of 700 homeless. The
Stanley Cup was won by the
Kenora Thistles hockey team in 1907. The team featured such Hall of Famers as
Billy McGimsie,
Tommy Phillips, and
Art Ross, for whom the
Art Ross Trophy is named. Kenora is the smallest town to have won a major North American sports title. Rat Portage is mentioned in
Algernon Blackwood's famous 1910 story, "The Wendigo". On November 22, 1965, around 400 Aboriginal protesters, inspired by the
Selma to Montgomery marches against white supremacy and racial discrimination in the
Southern United States, undertook a quarter-mile march against anti-indigenous racism along Main Street to Legion Hall, where they expressed their grievances to the city's mayor and councillors. This march became widely referred to as Canada's first civil rights march. In 1967, the year of the
Canadian Centennial, Kenora erected a sculpture known as
Husky the Muskie. It has become the town's mascot and one of its most recognizable features. A
dramatic bank robbery took place in Kenora on May 10, 1973. An unknown man entered the
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce heavily armed and wearing a "
dead man's switch", a device utilising a clothespin, wires, battery and dynamite, where the user holds the clothespin in the mouth, exerting force on the clothespin. Should the user release the clothespin, two wires attached to both sides of the pin complete an electrical circuit, sending current from the battery, detonating the explosives. After robbing the bank, the robber exited the CIBC, and was preparing to enter a city vehicle driven by undercover police officer Don Milliard. A sniper, Robert Letain, positioned across the street, shot the robber, causing the explosives to detonate and kill the robber. Most of the windows on the shops on the main street were shattered as a result of the blast. Later, Kenora Police submitted DNA samples from the robber's remains to a national database to identify him; however, the suspect was never positively identified. The importance of the logging industry declined in the second part of the 20th century, and the last log boom was towed into Kenora in 1985. The tourist and recreation industries have become more important. ==Geography==