At Grand Portage, where La Vérendrye’s route to the West left Lake Superior, a great fur trade depot developed in the French period and continued to prosper after the arrival of the British in 1763. The British were forced to abandon Grand Portage after 1816, but the white occupation of the site has continued to the present. Among exploring traders who entered the Minnesota country during the British period were Jonathan Carver, Peter Pond, and David Thompson.
In southern Minnesota the earliest permanent white settlement grew up in the American period near the mouth of the Minnesota River on a tract that was acquired from the Indians by Lieutenant Pike in 1805. There in 1819 Fort St. Anthony, later called Fort Snelling, was established. To manufacture lumber for the fort, a government sawmill was built at the Falls of St. Anthony in 1821-22. The first steamboat pushed up the Mississippi to the Minnesota fort in 1823. Other white settlements developed in the vicinity—Mendota across the Minnesota River from the fort, St. Paul some miles down the Mississippi, and St. Anthony and Minneapolis on the same stream above the fort at the Falls of St. Anthony. Exploration continued in the American period. After Schoolcraft discovered Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi, in 1832, it became possible to determine definitely the northwestern boundary of what had been the Northwest Territory. The upper valley of the Father of Waters was explored also by Pike, Cass, Beltrami, and Nicollet.
In 1805 the United States acquired from the Indians tracts of land at the mouths of the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers, and in 1837, the area between the lower St. Croix and the Mississippi. Settlements began soon afterward at Dakota (Stillwater), Marine, and St. Croix Falls, and it was due in large part to the efforts of these settlements that what is now eastern Minnesota was not included in Wisconsin. In 1848 a land boom started at St. Paul and immigration to the region increased materially. In 1849 the area of eastern Minnesota, which had been successively a portion of the Northwest, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin territories, became a part of the new Minnesota Territory, which was admitted to the Union as a state in 1858. Indian title to lands in the region was extinguished by treaties in 1854 and 1866.
Thus, eighty-one years after the first cession to the United States of Indian lands in the Northwest Territory, territorial acquisition was complete.
It is not fair to leave consideration of growth of settlements without some mention of its religious aspect, particularly in view of the portentous clauses of the ordinance, “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government” and “no person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship.” It is impossible even to estimate the influence of the French-Catholic missionaries upon the Indians and later white settlers. Nor can we evaluate the effect of the early Moravian effort to christianize the Indians in Ohio.
As soon as the Ohio Company settlers built their cabins, they provided educational opportunities for their children. Aside from the Moravian mission school for Indians at Schoenbrunn in 1773, the first school in Ohio was opened for the small children at Belpre in the summer of 1789. On the hill above Farmers’ Castle lived Colonel Israel Putnam, who brought to Belpre many books that had belonged to his father, General Israel Putnam. With these books as a nucleus, the Belpre residents formed a library owned by a joint stock company with shares at ten dollars each. It was variously called the Putnam Library, the Belpre Library, and the Belpre Farmers’ Library. It was the first American circulating library in the Northwest Territory.
A school was conducted at Marietta during the winter of 1788 by Tupper in the northwest blockhouse of Campus Martius. Teachers were employed regularly every year thereafter in Campus Martius and “The Point.” On July 16, 1790, the Ohio Company made its first appropriation of $150.00 for the support of schools. According to the contract of the Ohio Company with Congress, two townships near the center of the purchase were to be given by the national government for a university. Under this provision Ohio University was established at Athens in 1808 as the first state university in the world under democratic government.