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.
There was no legislative session in 1850. The statutes of 1851 embrace but few of notable importance. After a long and bitter struggle the capital, temporarily placed by the organic act at St. Paul, was permanently located in that town. To secure the majority vote it was necessary to concede to Stillwater the state prison and to St. Anthony the university. The evidence of a formal “tripartite agreement” to this arrangement is lacking, but it is probable that an understanding or expectation influenced the voting. The diligence with which a body composed largely of fur-traders and lumbermen overhauled a revision of the territorial laws, prepared by a committee of lawyers, bears testimony to a zeal for duty. The result was the well-known “Code of 1851.” It embodied substantially the New York code of procedure. The general incorporation law did not include railroad corporations. An act of 1852 prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors was submitted to a vote of the electors and ratified by a vote of 853 to 662. Before the year was out the supreme court of the territory, on an appeal from below, ruled the act to be unconstitutional on the ground that the organic law having vested all legislative power in the legislative bodies, the referendum was inoperative. In 1853 equity procedure was conformed to that of civil actions.