Red River Valley

The first trace in print is a Milwaukee newspaper in 1887, which ran the words after readers asked for them, and a handwritten copy of the lyrics is marked with Nebraska county names and the years 1879 and 1885. Sheet music printed in New York in 1896 called it "In the Bright Mohawk Valley" and named James J. Kerrigan as the writer.

Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke thought it went back to the 1870 Wolseley Expedition to Manitoba, but the evidence for that is thin. The valley is most likely the northern Red River, on the Minnesota and North Dakota border. Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett made the first record under the familiar title for Columbia in 1927.