The Sioux chiefs were so much excited with the money elements of their treaties of 1851 that they probably did not know what they were about when, in the summer of 1852, they assented to that amendment proposed by the Senate canceling the reservation of homes for the tribes on the upper Minnesota and authorizing the President to remove them from the ceded territory. It was, however, deemed best to move the people on to the designated areas, and they were so moved in the season of 1853. It soon came to their knowledge that they were only temporarily encamped there, and must presently move on to some unknown country. Their sorrow and exasperation were intense, and did not abate until they were assured in the following summer that the Great Father, as authorized by Congress, would permit them to remain where they were. They did remain in the sense of maintaining their principal villages on the reserve, but they constantly wandered in bands either toward their old homes or out on the prairies to the west, where buffalo still fed in countless herds. Their agents were much occupied in recalling these vagrants and in chasing the white whiskey sellers who infested the boundaries of the reserve. In 1857 Joseph R. Brown, that notable character whose career intersects the line of our narrative at many points, was appointed Sioux agent. As he was the father of many children born of his Sisseton wife, and had lived and traded among the Sioux for many years, he possessed an influence and a knowledge of Indian character equaled by few. He had no belief that the Indian could be transformed by religion or education in the twinkling of an eye into a fully civilized man, but he knew that he could be induced to take on the beginnings of civilization. His simple plan was to get the savages to live in houses, adopt white man’s dress, and do a little planting. In two years he had two hundred men, mostly heads of families, located on eighty-acre farms. They had disused the blanket, put on white man’s clothes, and, most notable of all, had had their hair cut short. His “farmer Indians” numbered seven hundred. This was not a large proportion of the seven thousand “annuity Sioux,” but the northern superintendent of Indian affairs prophesied that in three years the “farmer Indians” would outnumber the “blanket Indians.” The farmers, he reported, had given up their feasts and dances and were living as a “law-abiding, quiet, and sober people.” In this reform Agent Brown was assisted by the missionaries, under the leadership of Drs. Williamson and Riggs, who had followed the Sioux to their reservations. The former had organized a society of ambitious young Sioux, under the title of the “Hazlewood republic,” the object of which was to encourage respect for law and to teach the art of government. On the accession of the Republicans to power at the seat of government in 1861, Agent Brown’s place was needed to reward a laborer in the Republican vineyard, utterly inexperienced in the duties. It is perfectly safe to say that had Brown been left alone there would have been no “Sioux outbreak.” When the treaties of cession were negotiated in 1851, the proposed reservations seemed very far away and very ample. The Sioux had hardly got settled before the white man appeared with his whiskey jug and began taking up preëmptions on the neighboring lands. It did not take these adventurers long to discover that the Indians had more land than they needed. Moved by their representations the Minnesota legislature of 1858 adopted a joint resolution instructing her delegation in Congress to secure the reduction of the reservation and the opening of the excluded areas to settlement. In the summer of that year delegations of chiefs of the upper and lower tribes were taken to Washington, where they were induced to consent, in separate treaties, to the sale to the government of all their lands (some eight hundred thousand acres) on the left (northeast) side of the Minnesota River.
At the close of the state campaign of 1859 Alexander Ramsey came to his own. He was elected governor by a majority which no one could question. At the same time the office of lieutenant-governor fell to Ignatius Donnelly, who for forty years was to be a conspicuous figure in Minnesota politics. This young gentleman had come to Minnesota from his home in Philadelphia in 1856, at the age of twenty-four. He had won no little applause in his native city by some public addresses, a volume of juvenile poems not without promise, and a number of published essays. Breaking out of the Democratic fold along with very many young men of the day, he threw himself heart and soul into the Republican cause. There was no man of his time, certainly not in Minnesota, who could more completely enchain an audience of citizens than Ignatius Donnelly. A speech in the Republican convention of 1859 won him an unexpected nomination, and his election followed. The inaugural message of Governor Ramsey to the Republican legislature which came in with him is a notable document. The persistence of hard times moved him to cut his own salary from $2500 to $1500 and to recommend corresponding reductions in those of state officials. By these and other retrenchments adopted by the legislature, the expenses of the state government were reduced by 49.3 per cent. Reminding the houses of the fact that the general government had already bestowed twelve millions of acres of public land and more (an area equal to that of Holland or Belgium), he exhorted them to the greatest diligence and fidelity in execution of their trust. In particular he urged that the school lands be safeguarded against premature sale, and that all purchase-money coming in from these should be paid into the state treasury to form a perpetual endowment. While his particular scheme was not adopted in detail, his principle was. A surviving contemporary opposed to him in politics has declared that had not Governor Ramsey stood like a rock against multifarious schemes for dissipating the school lands, Minnesota would not have a dollar of school fund to-day. That fund now amounts to nearly $20,000,000 and will be greatly increased in the future. For this great service the name of Alexander Ramsey should be remembered in Minnesota as long as the state survives.
The incoming legislature had for its most exciting duty that of electing a United States senator in the room of General James Shields, who had two years before drawn the short term. The choice fell on Morton S. Wilkinson of Stillwater, the pioneer attorney of that place. He had coöperated in organizing Republicanism in the territory and had attracted the attention of leaders outside, among them Seward and Lincoln.
This election disposed of, the houses addressed themselves to railroad matters. The state had turned out $2,275,000 of her “special” bonds, and had for them not a mile of railroad, but only some two hundred and forty miles of rather slovenly graded road-bed. Governor Ramsey, with the strong common sense which never failed him, urged the legislature to settle the business at once. Though he had a favorite plan, his concern was not for his own plan, but for any kind of a settlement. He warned the legislature that if the vexed question were not settled it would confuse politics and invite corruption. The bonds would be bought up for a song by speculators who would subsidize newspapers, shout repudiation, and pound on the doors of the legislature till that body would be forced by their sheer importunity to satisfy them. But that legislature had come from an exasperated people who believed in their hearts that the railroad companies, and politicians in league with them, had deceived and cheated them. They had never promised, in fact, to pay those bonds, and the takers of them knew that, and were estopped from demanding redemption out of the pockets of the people. The houses appointed a joint committee of sixteen on railroad grants and bonds. Six different reports came in from detachments of this committee. One member, Senator Mackubin of St. Paul, alone proposed the full payment of the bonds. The legislative bodies were as much divided as were their committeemen. All they could agree to after days of discussion was to hang the whole proceeding up by means of two constitutional amendments to be submitted to the electors. One of these was to expunge from the state constitution the amendment of April 15, 1858, authorizing the “five million loan”; the other, providing for a referendum to the electors of any law for paying off the outstanding special railroad bonds. The vote on the expunging amendment, on November 6, 1860, was: Yes, 19,308; no, 710. The vote on the other amendment differed but little. The ostrich had buried his head and eyes in the sand.
The land grant companies having completely defaulted in all their engagements, there remained for the governor to proceed as required by law to recover to the state the public lands conditionally made over to them. Foreclosure proceedings culminated in the sale to the state of all the franchises, rights of way, property, and privileges of each company for the sum of one thousand dollars. As the electors had by a constitutional amendment declared that the special railroad bonds were no obligations of the state, she was apparently the gainer by the rights of way and the grading done by the companies, but in fact the state was never more than a trustee of the lands. The loss of their properties did not, of course, work a dissolution of the railroad charters, and the companies, or their ghosts, still existed. When the legislature of 1861 was in session they had sufficient influence to persuade that body to give them another lease of life. They had gone down in the common ruin after brave efforts to execute their contracts. By separate acts passed March 4, the state released and restored to the four companies severally all their forfeited properties and assets, free from all claims and liens by the state,—this on certain conditions which did not seem hard. Each company was obligated to deposit a guarantee fund of ten thousand dollars, to begin building immediately, and to have ten miles of road in full operation by the end of the calendar year, and certain stipulated mileages in years following. In these Kalends of March there was no expectation that before the grass should be green on the Minnesota prairies a war cloud would have settled over them. It was no time to build railroads on borrowed money. One of the companies, the Minnesota and Pacific (germ of the Great Northern Railway), made its cash deposit and began work. Late in the season it ran the single locomotive, the William Crooks, which it had purchased, over the fourteen hundred feet of track laid from the St. Paul levee to a storage shed. Its ten thousand dollars were forfeit. All the companies having defaulted, the lands, rights of way, and properties reverted to the state.
The desire of the people for railroads did not and could not abate, and there were still adventurous persons willing to risk money for the great prizes lying in the land grants. In the winter of 1862 four new companies were organized, and to them the legislature turned over the grants and rights of way on liberal conditions. The St. Paul and Pacific Company succeeding to the Minnesota and Pacific, built from St. Paul to St. Anthony, and on October 14 advertised for regular business. In 1863 two companies built forty-six and one half miles, and in 1864 three built forty-three and one half miles. Meantime the special railroad bonds remained in the limbo to which the constitutional amendments of 1860 had relegated them.
Other acts of the legislature of 1860 of less importance, but still notable, were: One changing the existing system of county government by boards of supervisors, elected from the towns, to one of county commissioners, to be elected from districts; another providing for the registration of voters in all precincts; a third replacing the elective board of twelve regents created by territorial law with one of eight, five to be appointed by the governor and three ex officiis. The new board succeeded to a melancholy task.