Minnesota

Major Long had been accompanied from Fort Snelling to Pembina by an Italian gentleman of a romantic and enterprising nature, Giacomo Constantino Beltrami by name. Little is known of his early life beyond the facts that he had held military and civil appointments, and had, for reasons not revealed, found it desirable to absent himself from Italy. He came to America full of zeal to be the discoverer of the true source of the Mississippi, and thus place himself in the company of great Italian explorers. Agent Taliaferro came upon him in Pittsburg and offered to further his ambition. They reached Fort Snelling on the 10th of May, 1823, by the steamboat Virginia, the first steam vessel to reach that post. The crowd of wondering Indians gathered on the levee were sufficiently impressed by the bulk of the white man’s fire canoe; but the scream of her steam whistle, opportunely let out, sent them scampering far off on the prairie.

When Beltrami at Pembina found Major Long pointing his canoes down the Red River, he detached himself, and with a slender outfit and uncertain guides struck out to the southeast, where he expected to find the object of his journey. After a few days of hardship he reached the south shore of Red Lake, and there he found a “bois-brulé” who guided him up a tributary then called Bloody River. It is marked “Mud Creek” on modern maps. A short portage brought him to a small, heart-shaped lake, to which he gave the name “Lake Julia,” in memory of a deceased friend. Here on the 28th of August he reports himself as resting at the most southern source of the Red River and the most northern source of the Mississippi. He found no visible outlet to his lakelet and fancied that its seepage was indifferently the true source of the two rivers. His dream fulfilled and his ambition satisfied, he made all possible haste to Fort Snelling. He proceeded to New Orleans and in the next year (1824) published in French his “Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi.” An English version appeared under the title “A Pilgrimage in Europe and America.” Lake Julia is still on the map, lying some two miles north of Turtle Lake, which David Thompson had charted twenty-five years before. The Minnesota geologists found no connection between it and Mississippi waters. It is noteworthy that Beltrami placed on his map a “Lac la Biche” as the “western source of the Mississippi,” which later explorers identified as approximately the true source. This knowledge he may have obtained from the intelligent guide, whom he praises highly, but whose name he neglected to report.

It has been mentioned that Henry R. Schoolcraft, mineralogist of Cass’s expedition in 1820, was by no means satisfied that Cass Lake was the true source of the great river. Appointed Indian agent of the Chippeways, he resided for many years at the Sault Sainte Marie, longing for another plunge into the wilderness of the upper Mississippi. It was not until 1832 that the War Department, deferring to Governor Cass, was content to give him leave, and then by indirection only. The instructions given Mr. Schoolcraft were to proceed to the country at the head of the Mississippi, to visit as many Indians as circumstances might permit, to establish permanent peace among them, to look after the Indian trade and in particular the trespasses of Hudson’s Bay traders, to vaccinate Indians as many as possible, and to gather statistics. He had no commission to explore. An officer of the army, Lieutenant James Allen, with a small detachment of soldiers, was ordered to be his escort. Traveling by way of Fond du Lac and the Savanna portage, Schoolcraft’s party was at Cass Lake on July 10. The same day his guide Ozawindib (the Yellowhead) collected five small canoes and made all needful preparations for the further journey, which began the morning after. The Yellowhead led the party up to and across Lake Bemidji, and from its southern limb up an east fork now mapped as the Yellowhead River, to a lakelet at its head. A six-mile portage to the west brought Schoolcraft, about two o’clock P. M., on the 13th of July, to a body of transparent water, which his guide assured him was the true source. In expectation of that moment the ardent explorer had cogitated on a suitable name. The missionary Boutwell, already mentioned, was a member of his party, having joined it to spy out the land for evangelical work. When asked by Mr. Schoolcraft the Latin for “true source,” the reverend gentleman could only remember that the Latin for truth was veritas, and for head caput; and he obligingly wrote the two words on a slip of paper. The leader cut off the head of the former and the tail of the latter, and joining the remaining syllables made the word “Itasca,” as beautiful an Indian name as could be desired. On the island, bearing still his name, Mr. Schoolcraft erected a flagstaff and flew the American colors. Lieutenant Allen in his report uses the French name Lac la Biche, the same communicated to Beltrami. How much attention the explorer gave to gathering statistics, vaccinating Indians, pacifying the Indians, and the like, may be inferred from the promptness with which he set out for home the very same day, and the speed of his journey. Taking an unused canoe route via Leech Lake and the headwaters of the Crow Wing, he was at Fort Snelling on the 24th of July. Leaving his escort, without a guide he hastened with all possible celerity by the St. Croix-Brulé route to “the Sault.” In his report to the War Department, dated December 3, 1832, he makes not the slightest reference to his excursion from Cass Lake to Itasca. His published narrative, however, shows no such gap. He had no orders to discover anything.

What fortune or misfortune brought the French astronomer, Jos. N. Nicollet, to this country early in the thirties is not well known. Like Beltrami, he had the fever for exploration and discovery. In the midsummer of 1836 this gentleman went from Fort Snelling up to Leech Lake, where he was sheltered by the missionary Boutwell. Here he found guides who took him by a new route out of the west arm of Leech Lake to Lake Itasca at the point reached by Schoolcraft. He made camp on Schoolcraft’s Island and proceeded to take its latitude, longitude, and height above sea. So far he was merely confirming the work of Schoolcraft and Allen. Selecting the largest of three tributary inlets, he traced it three miles through two lakelets to a third, from which he found “the infant Mississippi flowing with a breadth of a foot and a half, and a depth of one foot.” In the years 1889 and 1891 J. V. Brower, commissioned by the Minnesota Historical Society and the governor of Minnesota, devoted many months to a careful examination of the region above (south of) Itasca Lake. The result was the confirmation of Nicollet’s work, with a further discovery of an “ultimate bowl” in the highlands (Hauteurs des Terres) from which Nicollet’s lakes were fed. And then the long quest came to an end.

The first white settlers in Minnesota, or rather squatters, for the region was not open to settlement for nearly twenty years after the military occupation, came from an unexpected quarter. A Scotch nobleman, the Earl of Selkirk, of a romantic turn, formed a scheme for relieving congested European districts by planting colonies abroad, and in Canada preferably to the United States. He bought of the Hudson’s Bay Company a tract of something over 100,000 square miles, south and west of Lake Winnipeg, and in 1812 sent over a small party of Highlanders and a few Irish. Later additions were made to the colony, among them two hundred Scotch in 1815. What with the persecutions of the bois-brulés, of the Northwest Company, the destruction of crops by rats, grasshoppers, early frosts, and high water, the colonists led a stormy and precarious life for some years; but they survived. In 1821 came a party of one hundred and fifty or more Swiss clockmakers, wiled from their homes by the seductive allurements of an ingenious agent.

When the deluded people reached Fort Douglass and Pembina they found things far different from their expectations. Five families at once took the trail for the American fort. Two years later thirteen more families followed. In 1826, after a devouring flood in the Red River, two hundred and forty-three persons, Swiss and others, left Pembina for the south. In following years the migration continued, and by 1836 nearly five hundred had come over the border. The greater number of them journeyed on to the French settlements down the river in Illinois and Missouri, but many preferred to tarry on the Fort Snelling reservation. The military gave them protection, allowed them to pasture their cattle and cut grass on the bottoms, and to fence in and cultivate considerable farms.

The reports of the military, the open secrets of the American Fur Company, the revelations of explorers, and later the correspondence of missionaries, at length made the upper Mississippi valley known as a land of promise. Travelers from Fort Snelling to “the head of the lake” by the old St. Croix canoe route had disclosed the existence of magnificent bodies of pine timber. A market for pine lumber had been opened about the Galena and Dubuque lead mines and the prairie regions abutting on the river. The voracious lumbermen of Wisconsin, mostly emigrants from Maine, were fierce to get their axes into this pine. As early as 1822 a sawmill had been built on the Chippeway River near Menominee, and the stumpage bought of Wabashaw, chief of the lower Sioux, for one thousand dollars a year in goods. But there was no white man’s country in Minnesota, except the Fort Snelling tract bought by Pike in 1805 and paid for in 1819, and that was not open to settlement, unless by tolerance of the military. The time came for extending the area of settlement and cultivation, and that was effected by two Indian treaties made in 1837. By a treaty with the lower Sioux the United States acquired all their lands east of the Mississippi up to the Sioux-Chippeway partition line of 1825. The consideration was a half million dollars; but two hundred thousand dollars went to the traders and half-breeds in nearly equal sums. That was the price paid by the government for the use of their influence with the Indians. The Chippeways sold east of the Mississippi from the partition line up to the line running a little north of east from the mouth of the Crow Wing River. The delta between the Mississippi and the St. Croix up to the Crow Wing line was thus opened to settlement on the ratification of the treaties, on June 15, 1838. When the tidings of the ratification reached Fort Snelling a month later, the grass did not grow under the feet of waiting citizens, who had made notes of good locations. A claim abutting on the Falls of St. Anthony, on the east bank, was staked out before daylight of the following morning, and the falls of the St. Croix were preëmpted before sunset, all in accordance with law and custom.

The first collection of people in Minnesota, aside from the garrison of Fort Snelling, was the little hamlet of Mendota, inhabited by French half-breeds and their Indian wives and children. At times its numbers were swelled by traders from outposts coming in to headquarters to bring their furs and obtain supplies. Mendota is a French hamlet to-day. The first American settlement was made at Marine, on the St. Croix, early in 1839, where a sawmill was put into operation August 24. In the year following, on a claim previously made, Joseph R. Brown laid out the town site of Dakotah on land now forming a part of Stillwater. This city was not laid out till 1843, when settlement was begun in full confidence that Stillwater was to be the great city of the region. Its progress for a few years seemed to justify that expectation. Later many of its people migrated to the new towns on the Mississippi. In the year of the treaties (1837) the officer commanding at Fort Snelling had a survey made, to carve out of the Pike tract of nine by eighteen miles the land to be held by the government for military use. The bounds included practically all of Reserve Township of Ramsey County, the east line passing through the “Seven Corners” of St. Paul. Because of growing scarcity of timber, and alleged trespasses of the squatters, Major Plympton in the spring of 1838 ordered all those settled on the main reserve west of the Mississippi to move over to the east side. A very few had sufficient foresight to place themselves beyond the military lines, – among them one Pierre Parrant, a Canadian voyageur, who, not waiting for the ratification, built a whiskey shanty near the issue of the streamlet from Fountain Cave, in upper St. Paul, thus becoming the first inhabitant of that city. The evicted Swiss mostly settled on ground within easy reach of the fort, and there built their cabins anew. They were, however, not long allowed that indulgence. Their number was reinforced by a few voyageurs, discharged soldiers, and perhaps some other whites. Among the whites were a few who opened grog-shops at which the custom of the soldiers was very welcome. These places became so intolerable that the commandant begged the War Department to require all squatters to get off the reservation. His recommendation was adopted, and on the 6th of May, 1840, a deputy United States marshal, supported by a detachment of soldiers, drove them all over the lines and destroyed their cabins. What did they do but reëstablish themselves just beyond the line, about Parrant’s claim? French fashion, they grouped their cabins and formed a little French village, the nucleus of the capital city of Minnesota. A memorial of the evicted Swiss to Congress for indemnity for loss of improvements on land they had been suffered to occupy and cultivate, and for the destruction of their shelters, was ignored.

At all the trading stations of the American Fur Company there was a group of employees and hangers-on. At Mendota, the headquarters, the number was greater than elsewhere. In 1837 there were twenty-five such. When in July, 1839, Bishop Loras of Dubuque made a visitation there, he found one hundred and eighty-five Catholics gathered in to approach the sacraments of the church. In May of the following year the Rev. Lucius Galtier, sent up on an hour’s notice from Dubuque, reached Mendota to begin a mission there. He naturally took under his care the Catholic families just then getting themselves under cover on the hillsides nearly opposite. November 1, 1841, he blessed a little log chapel the people had built under his direction, and dedicated “the new basilica” to St. Paul, “the apostle of the nations.” The name “St. Paul’s landing,” for a time used, gave way to the more convenient St. Paul’s and, later, to “St. Paul.” Père Galtier, however, remained at the more considerable Mendota till called to other duty in 1844. Father Ravoux, succeeding him, divided his time between the two hamlets till 1849.

Up to 1845 St. Paul was a straggling French village of some thirty families, a floating population of voyageurs and workmen, to which two or three independent traders had joined themselves. In the next years Americans arrived in increasing numbers. In 1846 a post-office was established, and in the year after a regular line of steamboats began to ply down river in the season.

The city at the falls was later in getting its start. The lucky citizen who preëmpted the land abreast of the falls on the left bank of the Mississippi did not lay out his town site of St. Anthony’s Falls till late in 1847. A sawmill built that year went into operation the next, and the manufacture of lumber has since remained a leading industry. At Pembina, in the extreme northwest corner of Minnesota, was an aggregation of French half-breeds of some hundreds. The rural population of the whole region well into the fifties was very sparse. A few farms had been opened along the St. Croix in Washington County. The principal part of the subsistence for man and beast was brought up from below in steamboats.

When Iowa Territory was organized in 1838, Wisconsin Territory was restricted on the west to the line of the Mississippi. Minnesota East then formed part of Crawford County of the latter territory. In the same year the governor of Wisconsin appointed as justice of the peace for that county a man who was to play a conspicuous part in Minnesota affairs. Joseph Renshaw Brown came to Minnesota as a drummer-boy of fourteen with the Fifth Infantry in 1819. Honorably discharged from that command some six or seven years later, he went into the Indian trade at different posts, at some of which he opened farms. He appreciated, as perhaps no other man in the region did so clearly, the possibilities of the future, and was fitted by nature, education, and experience to lead. In 1840 he was elected a member of the Wisconsin territorial legislature from St. Croix County, a new jurisdiction separated from Crawford County by a meridian through the mouth of the Porcupine River, a small affluent of Lake Pepin. The county seat was of course Mr. Brown’s town of Dakotah, already mentioned. There is reason to surmise a disappointed expectation that this town might become the capital of a state. In 1846 Congress passed an enabling act in the usual form for the promotion of Wisconsin to statehood. About the same time the Wisconsin delegate introduced a bill to establish the Territory of Minnesota. It was understood that Mr. Sibley would be the first governor and that Mr. Brown would not be neglected. The bill passed the House and reached its third reading in the Senate, when it was tabled on the suggestion of an eastern senator that the population was far too scanty to warrant a territorial organization.

CHAPTER VI

THE TERRITORY ORGANIZED

On May 29, 1848, Wisconsin was admitted to the Union as a state, with her western boundary fixed where it has since remained, on the St. Croix River line, Congress having refused to extend Wisconsin’s area to the Rum River line. The delta between the St. Croix and the Mississippi was politically left in the air. In the earlier correspondence and personal conferences of Minnesotians the only thought was of obtaining from Congress the establishment of a new territory. On August 4 a call signed by eighteen prominent residents of the wished-for territory was issued, for a convention to be held at Stillwater on the 26th. Sixty-one delegates appeared and took part in what has since been known as “the Stillwater Convention” of 1848. The proceedings resulted in two memorials, one to the President, the other to Congress, both praying for the organization of a new territory; in corresponding resolutions; in the raising of a committee to prosecute the purposes of the convention; and in the election of Henry H. Sibley as a “delegate” to proceed to Washington and urge immediate action.

The late governor of Wisconsin Territory, Hon. Henry Dodge, had been elected United States senator. The secretary of the territory had been Mr. John Catlin. A letter written by him August 22 was read before the Stillwater convention. It embodied the suggestion that the Territory of Wisconsin might be considered as surviving in the excluded area. He transmitted a letter from James Buchanan, Secretary of State, expressing the opinion that the laws of Wisconsin Territory were still in force therein, and that judges of probate, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and constables might lawfully exercise their offices. Such being the case, what was there to hinder him, Mr. Catlin, from assuming the position of acting-governor of Wisconsin Territory, and performing the proper duties? In particular, why might he not appoint an election for the choice of a delegate to Congress in a regular manner, if a vacancy should occur? His judgment was that a delegate elected “under color of law” would not be denied a seat. This scheme, which seems to have made no impression on the Stillwater convention, was rapidly incubated after its dispersion. Mr. Catlin took up a constructive residence at Stillwater. John H. Tweedy, delegate from Wisconsin Territory to the Thirtieth Congress, obligingly put in his resignation. Thereupon Acting-Governor Catlin issued a call for an election of a delegate to be held on the 30th of October. The result was the choice of Mr. Sibley against a slight and ineffective opposition.

The delegate-elect presented himself at the door of the national House of Representatives at the opening of the second session of the Thirtieth Congress. His credentials had the usual reference to the committee on elections. Mr. Sibley’s argument was ingenious and exhaustive, and it proved effective, for the committee absorbed its substance into their favorable report. On January 15, 1849, the House by a vote of 124 to 62 accorded Mr. Sibley his seat as delegate from Wisconsin. The same House refused, however, to make any appropriation for the expenses of a territory existing by virtue of mere geographical exclusion. A bill for the establishment of the Territory of Minnesota had been introduced into the Senate in the previous session. It was identical with that which had been strangled on the last day of the Twenty-ninth Congress. Mr. Sibley properly devoted himself to advancing the progress of the bill. It was promptly passed by the Senate, but it lagged in the House. The Whig majority had no consuming desire to favor a beginning likely to result in a Democratic delegation from a new state. They therefore clapped on an amendment, to which the Senate could not possibly agree, that the act should take effect March 10, six days after the expiry of President Polk’s term of office. The end of the session was but four days away. A House bill for the establishment of a Department of the Interior was still pending in the Senate. It provided for a goodly number of officials to be named by the incoming Whig President. Senator Douglas, acting for colleagues, authorized Mr. Sibley to give out to his Whig opponents that the Senate would be better disposed to passing their interior department measure if they should find it agreeable to recede from their offensive amendment to the Minnesota bill. On the last day of the session Mr. Sibley had the pleasure of seeing his bill pass, under suspension of the rules, without opposition. No one was so much surprised at the outcome as Mr. Sibley himself. It took thirty-seven days for the good news to reach St. Paul by the first steamer of the season from below. The boundaries of the new territory were those of the state later admitted, except that the west line was pushed out to the Missouri River, thus including an area of some 166,000 square miles. The governorship fell to Alexander Ramsey of Pennsylvania, then thirty-four years of age, who deserved well of his party in its late campaign and had done some excellent service as a member of the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Congresses. He had been well educated in the best school, that of a life of industry and aspiration. Clear-headed, cautious, patient, he knew how to anticipate the courses of things and to plan for the probabilities of the future. He identified himself from the first with his new territory, and remained to the end of his long life, in 1903, a steadfast, loyal Minnesotian.

On May 27, in a small bedroom in Bass’s log tavern on the site of the Merchant’s Hotel in St. Paul, Mr. Ramsey wrote out on a little unpainted washstand his proclamation declaring the territory duly established. On June 11 he announced the division of his immense jurisdiction into three provisional counties, assigning to each one of the three judges, Goodrich, Sherburne, and Meeker, who had been appointed by the President. At the same time he directed the sheriff of St. Croix County to make a census of the population. The reported total did not measure up to the conjectures of hopeful citizens. After counting the 317 soldiers at “the Fort,” all the attachés of the trading posts, 637 dwellers at Pembina and 66 on the Missouri River, the footing stood at 4680 souls.

Pursuant to the organic act Governor Ramsey by proclamation of July 7 divided the territory into seven council districts, and ordered an election for August 1. The first territorial legislature that day elected, consisting of nine councilors and eighteen representatives, met at St. Paul, September 4. The organic act having provided that the laws in force in the late Territory of Wisconsin should remain in operation until altered or repealed by the Minnesota territorial legislature, this inexperienced body was not heavily burdened. The most notable enactment was that for the establishment of a system of free schools for all children and youth of the territory, introduced by Martin McLeod, but probably drawn up by the Rev. Edward Duffield Neill, the well-known historian of Minnesota. A bill passed October 20, incorporating the Minnesota Historical Society, was doubtless from the same hand. Governor Ramsey’s message of 1849 was much extended by an account of the Indian tribes of the territory, prepared for him by Dr. Thomas Foster.