American Commonwealths

MINNESOTA

MINNESOTA
TO ACCOMPANY
W. W. FOLWELL’S
MINNESOTA in AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS
Compiled by the author, 1908.

American Commonwealths

MINNESOTA
THE NORTH STAR STATE

BY

WILLIAM WATTS FOLWELL

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT 1908 BY WILLIAM WATTS FOLWELL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October 1908

PREFACE

If this compend of Minnesota history shall be found a desirable addition to those already before the public, it will be due to the good fortune of the writer in reaching original sources of information not accessible to his predecessors.

The most important of them are: the papers of Governor Alexander Ramsey, in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Marion R. Furness; the letter-books and papers of General H. H. Sibley, preserved in the library of the Minnesota Historical Society; some hundreds of letters saved by Colonel John H. Stevens, and deposited by him in the same library; the papers of Ignatius Donnelly, in the hands of his family; the great collection of Green Bay and Prairie du Chien papers belonging to the Wisconsin Historical Society; the remarkable group of early French documents owned by the Chicago Historical Society; and finally, the priceless collection of Minnesota newspapers preserved by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Grateful acknowledgments are offered to many citizens who have given information out of their own knowledge, or have directed the writer to other sources. Among “old Territorians” who have rendered invaluable aid must be named Simeon P. Folsom, John A. Ludden, Joseph W. Wheelock, Benjamin H. Randall, A. L. Larpenteur, A. W. Daniels, John Tapper, and William Pitt Murray. The last named has put me under the heaviest obligation.

W. W. F.

University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, Minn., June 1, 1908.

CONTENTS

MINNESOTA

CHAPTER I
THE FRENCH PERIOD

The word Minnesota was the Dakota name for that considerable tributary of the Mississippi which, issuing from Big Stone Lake, flows southeastward to Mankato, turns there at a right angle, and runs on to Fort Snelling, where it empties into the great river. It is a compound of “mini,” water, and “sota,” gray-blue or sky-colored. The name was given to the territory as established by act of Congress of March 3, 1849, and was retained by the state with her diminished area.

If one should travel in the extension of the jog in the north boundary, west of the Lake of the Woods, due south, he could hardly miss Lake Itasca. If then he should embark and follow the great river to the Iowa line, his course would have divided the state into two portions, not very unequal in extent. The political history of the two parts is sufficiently diverse to warrant a distinction between Minnesota East and Minnesota West. England never owned west of the river, Spain gained no foothold east of it. France, owning on both sides, yielded Minnesota East to England in 1763, and sold Minnesota West to the United States in 1803. Up to the former date, the whole area was part of New France and had no separate history.

Although the French dominion existed for more than two hundred years, it is not important for the present compendious work that an elaborate account be made of their explorations and commerce. They made no permanent settlement on Minnesota soil. No institution, nor monument, nor tradition, even, has survived to determine or affect the life of the commonwealth. It will be sufficient to summarize from an abounding literature the successive stages of the French advance from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, their late and brief efforts to establish trade and missions in the upper valley, and the circumstances which led to their expulsion from the American continent.

It is now well known that in the first decade of the sixteenth century Norman and Breton fishermen were taking cod in Newfoundland waters, and it is reasonably surmised that they had been so engaged before the Cabots, under English colors, had coasted from Labrador towards Cape Cod in 1497. The French authorities, occupied with wars, foreign and domestic, were unable to participate with Spain, England, and Portugal in pioneer explorations beyond seas. It was not till 1534 that Francis I, a brilliant and ambitious monarch, dispatched Jacques Cartier, a daring navigator, to explore lands and waters reported of by French fishermen, and, if possible, to discover the long-sought passage to Cathay. In the summer of that year Cartier made the circuit of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and returned to France disappointed of his main purpose. His neglect to enter the great river flowing into the gulf is unexplained. At two convenient places he went ashore to set up ceremonial crosses and proclaim the dominion of his king. In the following year (1535), on a second expedition he ascended the St. Lawrence River to the Huron village Hochelaga, on or near the site of Montreal. He wintered in a fort built near Quebec, where one fourth of his crew died of scurvy. In May, 1536, after setting up another cross with a Latin inscription declaring the royal possession, he sailed away for home. Five years later (1541) Cartier participated in still another expedition, which, prosecuted into a third year, resulted disastrously. The king had spent much money, but the passage to China had not been found, no mines had been discovered, no colony had been planted, no heathen converted.

Throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century the French kings were too much engrossed in great religious wars, fierce and bloody beyond belief but for existing proofs, to give thought or effort to extending their dominion in the New World. The treaty of Vervins with Spain and the Edict of Nantes, both occurring in 1598, gave France an interval of peace within and without. Henry IV (“Henry of Navarre”) at once turned his eyes to the coasts of America, on which as yet no Europeans had made any permanent settlements. His activity took the form of patronizing a series of trading voyages. On one of these, which sailed in 1603, he sent Samuel Champlain, then about thirty-five years of age, a gallant soldier and an experienced navigator. He had already visited the West Indies and the Isthmus of Darien, and in his journal of the voyage had foreshadowed the Panama Canal. He was now particularly charged with reporting on explorations and discoveries. On this voyage Champlain ascended the St. Lawrence to Montreal and vainly attempted to surmount the Lachine Rapids. On the return of the expedition in September of the same year, Champlain laid before the king a report and map. They gave such satisfaction as to lead to a similar appointment on an expedition sent out the following year. For three years Champlain was occupied in exploring and charting the coasts of Nova Scotia and New England, a thousand miles or thereabout.

In 1608 he went out in the capacity of lieutenant-governor of New France, a post occupied for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life, with the exception of a brief interval. On July 3 he staked out the first plat of Quebec. His trifling official engagements left him ample leisure to prosecute those explorations on which his heart was set; chief of them the road to China.

In 1609, to gain assistance of the Indians in his neighborhood, he joined them in a war-party to the head of the lake to which he then gave his name. A single volley from the muskets of himself and two other Frenchmen put the Iroquois, as yet unprovided with firearms, to headlong rout. Six years later he led a large force of Hurons from their homes in upper Canada between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, across Lake Ontario, to be defeated by the well-fortified Iroquois. The notes of his expedition added the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, the French River, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario to his map. Could Champlain have foreseen the disasters to follow for New France and the Huron nation, he would not have made the Iroquois his and their implacable enemy. He made no further journeys westward in person, but adopted a plan of sending out young men, whom he had put to school among native tribes, to learn their languages and gather their traditions and surmises as to regions yet unvisited. One of them, Etienne Brulé, who had been his interpreter on the second expedition against the Iroquois, and detached before the battle on an embassy to an Indian tribe, did not return till after three years of extensive wanderings. He showed a chunk of copper which he declared he had brought from the shore of a great lake far to the west, nine days’ journey in length, which discharged over a waterfall into Lake Huron.

In 1634 another of Champlain’s apprentices, Jean Nicollet by name, passed through the Straits of Mackinaw and penetrated to the head of Green Bay and possibly farther. He may have been at the Sault Sainte Marie. So confident was he of reaching China that he took with him a gorgeous mandarin’s robe of damask to wear at his court reception. Attired in it he addressed the gaping Winnebagoes, putting a climax on his peroration by firing his pistols. Champlain’s map of 1632 showed his conjectured Lake Michigan north of Lake Huron. Nicollet gave it its proper location.

Champlain’s stormy career closed at Christmas, 1635. The honorable title of “Father of New France” rightly belongs to him, in spite of the fact that in none of his great plans had he achieved success. He had not found the road to the Indies, the savages remained in the power of the devil, and no self-supporting settlement had been planted. Quebec’s population did not exceed two hundred, soldiers, priests, fur-traders and their dependents. There was but one settler cultivating the soil.

Exploration languished after Champlain’s death, and for a generation was only incidentally prosecuted by missionaries and traders. In 1641 two Jesuit fathers, Jogues and Raymbault, traveled to the Sault Sainte Marie, and gave the first reliable account of the great lake.

From the earliest lodgments of white men on the St. Lawrence the fur-trade assumed an importance far greater than the primitive fisheries. In the seventeenth century the fashion of fur-wearing spread widely among the wealthier people of Europe. The beaver hat had superseded the Milan bonnet. No furs were in greater request than those gathered in the Canadian forests. A chief reason for the long delay of cultivation in the French settlements was the profit to be won by ranging for furs. Montreal, founded in 1642 as a mission station, not long after became, by reason of its location at the mouth of the Ottawa, the entrepôt of the western trade. The business took on a simple and effective organization. Responsible merchants provided the outfit, a canoe, guns, powder and lead, hulled corn and tallow for subsistence, and an assortment of cheap and tawdry merchandise. Late in the summer the “coureurs des bois” set out for the wilderness. Those bound for the west traveled by the Ottawa route in large companies, for better defense against skulking Iroquois. On reaching Lake Huron, they broke up, each crew departing to its favorite haunts.

The chances for large profits naturally attracted to this primitive commerce some men of talent and ambition. In 1656 two such came down to Montreal piloting a flotilla of fifty Ottawa canoes deeply laden with precious furs. They had been absent for two years, had traveled five hundred leagues from home, and had heard of various nations, among them the “Nadouesiouek.” The author of the Jesuit Relation for the year speaks of them as “two young Frenchmen, full of courage,” and as the “two young pilgrims,” but suppresses their names. Again, in 1660 two Frenchmen reach Montreal from the upper countries, with three hundred Algonquins in sixty canoes loaded with furs worth $40,000. The journal of the Jesuit fathers gives the name of one of them as of a person of consequence, Des Groseilliers; and says of him, “Des Grosillers wintered with the nation of the Ox ... they are sedentary Nadwesseronons.”

The two Frenchmen of 1660 are now believed to have been Medard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre d’Esprit, Sieur de Radisson, both best known by their titles. The latter was the younger man, and brother to Groseilliers’ second wife. In 1885 the Prince Society of Boston printed 250 copies of the “Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson,” written by him in English. The manuscript had lain in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University for nearly two hundred years. No doubt has been raised as to its authenticity. While the accounts of the different voyages are not free from exaggerations, not to say outright fabrications, the reader will be satisfied that the writer in the main told a true story of the wanderings and transactions of himself and comrade. These two men a few years later went over to the English and became the promoters of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

If Radisson’s story be true, he and Groseilliers were the first white men to tread the soil of Minnesota. As he tells it, the two left Montreal in the month of August, 1658, and after much trouble with the “Iroquoits” along the Ottawa, reached the Sault Sainte Marie, where they “made good cheare” of whitefish. Embarking late in the same season, they went along “the most delightful and wonderous coasts” of Lake Superior, passed the Pictured Rocks, portaged over Keweenaw Point, and made their way to the head of Chequamegon Bay. Here they built a “fort” of stakes in two days, which was much admired by the wild men. Having cached a part of their goods, they proceeded inland to a Huron village on a lake believed to be Lake Courte Oreille, in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, where they were received with great ceremony. At the first snowfall the people departed for their winter hunt, and appointed a rendezvous after two months and a half. Before leaving the village the Frenchmen sent messengers “to all manner of persons and nations,” inviting them to a feast at which presents would be distributed. The best guess locates this rendezvous on or near Knife Lake, in Kanabec County, Minnesota. That was then Sioux country, and the people thereabout were long after known as Isantis or Knife Sioux, probably because they got their first steel knives from these Frenchmen. While at their rendezvous eight “ambassadors from the nation of the Beefe” (i. e. Buffalo, of course) came to give notice that a great number of their people would assemble for the coming feast. They brought a calumet “of red stone as big as a fist and as long as a hand.” Each ambassador was attended by two wives carrying wild rice and Indian corn as a present. For the feast a great concourse of Algonquin tribes gathered and prepared a “fort” six hundred paces square, obviously a mere corral of poles and brush. A “foreguard” of thirty young Sioux, “all proper men,” heralded the coming of the elders of their village, who arrived next day “with incredible pomp.” Grand councils were held, followed by feasting, dancing, mimic battles, and games of many sorts, including the greased pole. As described, this was no casual assemblage, but a great and extraordinary convocation. It lasted a fortnight.

The two Frenchmen now made seven small journeys “to return the visit of the Sioux, and found themselves in a town of great cabins covered with skins and mats, in a country without wood and where corn was grown.” The account of this six weeks’ trip is brief and indefinite. The conjecture that Groseilliers and Radisson traveled a hundred and fifty miles, more or less, into the prairie region west of the Mississippi, either by way of the Minnesota or the Crow Wing rivers, has slight support. The account may have been invented from information obtained of the Sioux at the convocation.

In the early spring of 1660 the two adventurers returned to Chequamegon Bay, whence they continued to Montreal without notable incident. In his narrative Radisson injects after the return from the nation of the Beefe a story of an excursion to Hudson’s Bay, occupying a year, which is probably fictitious. The time occupied by the whole journey is well known and could not have included a trip to the “Bay of the North.” Still, it is reasonably certain that Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty years before Duluth.

The reader will have already inquired whether the two young Frenchmen of 1654-56, unnamed, might not have been the same with these of 1658-60. This inquiry was frequently made before the discovery of Radisson’s narrative. The question was settled by that document. Radisson gives a separate and circumstantial account of a three years’ journey of trade and exploration to the west taken by himself and his brother-in-law in 1654. Leaving Montreal in the summer of that year, Groseilliers and Radisson, as the story runs, taking the usual Ottawa River route, reached the Straits of Mackinaw in the early fall. They passed the winter about Green Bay, Wisconsin. The following summer they coasted Lake Michigan and proceeded southward through a country “incomparable, though mighty hot,” to the shores of a great sea. They found “a barril broken, as they use in Spaine.” They passed the summer on “the shore of the Great sea.” Returning to the north, they spent a winter with the Ottawas on the upper Michigan peninsula. As the excursion to Hudson’s Bay already mentioned was a fiction, so is this to the Gulf of Mexico. The traders could not have been absent from the French settlement more than two years. It is in the early spring of 1655, therefore, that we find them setting out from their winter quarters to countries more remote. The essence of Radisson’s text is as follows: “We ... thwarted a land of allmost fifty leagues.... We arrived, some 150 of us men and women, to a river-side, where we stayed 3 weeks making boats.... We went up ye river 8 days till we came to a nation called ... the Scratchers. There we gott some Indian meale and corne ... which lasted us till we came to the first landing Isle. There we weare well received againe.”

Upon this indefinite passage has been put the following interpretation. The land journey of fifty leagues (about one hundred and forty miles) took the traders to the east bank of the Mississippi near the southeast corner of Minnesota, where they built boats; the nation who furnished provisions resided about the site of Winona, and the “first landing Isle” was Prairie Island, between Red Wing and Hastings. If this interpretation shall at length be confirmed, Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty-four years before Duluth. Subsequent passages of the narrative lend it some support.

These able and enterprising characters deserve, however, not the least degree of credit as explorers. If they saw the Mississippi and in the later voyage penetrated beyond the Big Woods, they studiously concealed their knowledge. They left no maps, and for no assignable reason suppressed a discovery which would have given them a world-wide fame.

When Cardinal Mazarin died, in 1661, Louis XIV, then twenty-two years of age, stepped on to the stage, “every inch a king.” He willingly listened to the suggestion of Colbert, his new minister, that it was time for France to follow English example and establish a colonial system for profit and glory. The Company of New France, promoted by Richelieu, which for nearly forty years had governed Canada, were quite content to surrender their franchises. In 1663 the colony was made a royal province. Associated with the governor a so-called “intendant of justice and finance” was provided in the new administration. The first incumbent was Jean Baptiste Talon, a man of brains, energy, and ambition. He was no sooner on the ground than he began to conceive great projects for extending the French dominion, expanding commerce, and fostering settlements. Colbert, although he sympathized, was obliged to restrain him and suggest that “the King would never depopulate France to people Canada.”

Rumors were multiplying of great openings for trade and missions along and beyond the great lakes. Talon was keen to follow up and verify them. In 1665 the Jesuit father Claude Allouez established a mission at La Pointe on Chequamegon Bay. Upon an excursion to the head of the lake (Superior) he saw some of the Nadouessiouek (Sioux) Indians, dwellers toward the great River Mississippi, in a country of prairies. They gave him some “marsh rye,” as he called their wild rice.

Four years later Father Jacques Marquette succeeded Allouez in that mission. He also heard stories of a great river flowing to a sea, on which canoes with wings might be seen. The Jesuit Relation of 1670-71 gives reports from Indians of a great river which “for more than three hundred leagues from its mouth is wider than the St. Lawrence at Quebec;” and people dwelling near its mouth “have houses on the water and cut down trees with large knives.” In the summer of 1669, Louis Joliet, whom Talon had sent to Lake Superior to search for copper, returned; and it was then, probably on his suggestion, that Talon resolved that it was time for the French to plant a military station at the Sault Sainte Marie, a point of notable strategic importance. He determined also to make an impression of French power on the Indians of the West. In the following year he dispatched Nicholas Perrot, of whom we are to hear later, to summon the Pottawattamies, the Winnebagoes, and other accessible nations to a grand convocation at the Sault Sainte Marie in the spring of 1671. To represent the government, Simon François Daumont, Sieur de St. Lusson, was commissioned and took his journey in October, 1670.

On the 14th of June, 1671, the appointed day, the council was held. Fourteen Indian nations were represented. Among the French present were Joliet, Father Allouez, and Perrot. The central act was the proclamation by St. Lusson of King Louis’s dominion over “lakes Huron and Superior, ... all countries, rivers, lakes and streams, contiguous and adjacent thereto, with those that have been discovered, and those which may be discovered hereafter, ... bounded by the seas of the north, west, and south.” This modest claim covered perhaps nine tenths of North America. As usual, a big wooden cross was erected and blest. A metallic plate bearing the king’s arms was nailed up, and a “procès-verbal” drawn and signed. In that day such a proclamation gave title to barbarian lands until annulled in battle by land or sea. Father Allouez made a speech, which has been preserved, describing the power and glory of the French king in extravagant terms.

Talon could not rest. He was on fire to unlock the secret of the great river and extend the French dominion to the unknown sea into which it might empty. In 1672, with the approval of Colbert, he planned an expedition to penetrate the region in which it was supposed to flow. Joliet was chosen to lead, and at the end of the year he was at Mackinaw. It was probably no accident that Père Marquette had just been transferred from La Pointe to that station. But the enthusiastic intendant was to close his Canadian career. In the very same year Count Frontenac, the greatest figure in Canadian history, came over to be governor. He was already past fifty, had seen many campaigns, and had wasted his fortune at court. He, too, had ideas, and an ambition to do great things for Canada and France. There was not room enough in the province for two such men as Talon and he. The intendant obtained his recall, and disappeared from the scene.

Frontenac at once adopted Talon’s scheme, and gave Joliet leave to go. Accompanied by Marquette he struck the great river at Prairie du Chien, June 17, 1673, and then followed its flow far enough to satisfy himself that it ran to the Mexican gulf. Joliet’s great map has a truly modern aspect. The importance of this discovery of the Mississippi for the present purpose is, that it was by way of the great river that the French, with a notable exception, pushed their way into Minnesota.

A company of Canadian merchants resolved to attempt an opening of trade about and beyond the head of Lake Superior, and selected as their agent Daniel Greyloson, the Sieur Duluth, a man of ability and enterprise. He evidently received some kind of public character from Frontenac, whose enemies insinuated that he was to be a sharer in profits. In the spring of 1679 Duluth penetrated to the shores of Mille Lacs, and in a great Sioux village which he understood to be called “Kathio,” on July 2 he planted the king’s arms and took possession in the royal name. Duluth, therefore, was the first white man in Minnesota not ashamed to report and record the fact. In the same season he retraced his steps to the head of the lake, and passed down the north shore to Pigeon River, which forms part of the Canadian boundary. There, on the left bank of that river, he built a trading post, on the site afterwards occupied by Fort William.

The next dash into the territory of the North Star State was directed by one who has been called the most picturesque figure in American history, Réné Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle. At the age of twenty-three he broke away from the Jesuits with whom he was in training, and set sail for Canada with four hundred francs in his pocket, in the year 1663. When Frontenac came, nine years later, he found in young La Salle a man after his own heart, and sent him to France in 1674 to secure royal support for further explorations. Such support, then withheld, was vouchsafed four years later, when La Salle was again in Paris on the same errand. By a royal patent signed May 12, 1678, La Salle was authorized to extend the scope of Joliet’s exploration to the Gulf of Mexico and to pay his expenses by trade, provided he kept off the preserves of the Montreal traders.

With the king’s patent in hand, it was easy to attract capital and enlist volunteers. Early in the fall of the same year, La Salle was back in Canada with his men and outfit, and soon set out for the west. After battling with a series of delays and discouragements which need not be narrated, the undaunted leader established himself in a fort built on the east bank of the Illinois River, near Peoria, Illinois, in the winter of 1680. There is no record that La Salle had been authorized to explore the upper Mississippi, but he was not the man to lose a good opportunity for lack of technical instructions. To lead an exploring party up that stream he chose Michael Accault, an experienced voyageur, “prudent, brave, and cool,” and gave him two associates: Antoine Auguelle, called the Picard du Gay, was one; the other was the now famous Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan friar of the Recollet branch, who came over in the same ship with La Salle in 1678. He had wandered in many lands, knew some Indian dialects, and shared La Salle’s passion for adventure.

In a bark canoe laden with their arms, personal belongings, and some packs of merchandise which served for money between whites and Indians, the little party set out, after priestly benediction, on February 28, 1680. They dropped down the Illinois to its mouth, and took their toilsome way against the current of the Mississippi. On April 11, when near the southern line of Minnesota, they encountered a fleet of thirty-three canoes carrying a war-party intent on mischief to certain Illinois tribes. The savages frightened but did not harm the Frenchmen. Accault was able to inform them that the Illinois Indians had crossed the river to hunt. They therefore turned homewards, taking the explorers with them. At the end of the month the flotilla rounded up, as is believed, at the mouth of Phalen’s Creek, at St. Paul. Here they abandoned their canoes and set out overland by a trail which would naturally follow the divide between the waters of the Mississippi and the St. Croix, for their villages on Mille Lacs. On May 5 they arrived, and the Frenchmen, compelled to sell their effects to their captors, were sent to separate villages. The friar lost his portable altar and brocade vestments; otherwise they were not unkindly treated. Some weeks passed, when Hennepin and Auguelle were allowed to take a canoe and start for the mouth of the Wisconsin, where La Salle promised to send supplies. Accault preferred to join a great hunting party that was about setting out. Hennepin and his comrade left the hunters at the mouth of Rum River, and paddling with the current soon found themselves at the falls called by the Dakotas Mi-ni-i-ha-ha, the rushing water, then first seen by white men, to which he gave the name of his patron saint, Anthony of Padua. His description of the cataract and surroundings is reasonably accurate, although he greatly exaggerated its height. No rival has claimed the credit of their discovery. Passing on down the river, they met an Indian who informed them that the hunting party was not far away, on some tributary. They abandoned their lonesome journey and joined the hunters, who, the hunt over, were about returning to their villages.

We left Duluth in his fort at the mouth of Pigeon River in the fall of 1679. He wintered there, and, as he relates, dissatisfied with his discoveries of the previous summer, resolved on a new adventure. When the season of 1680 opened he set out with four Frenchmen and two Indian guides, ascended the Bois Brulé River, portaged over to the head of the St. Croix, and followed that down to Point Douglass, where he doubtless recognized the great river. Here he learned that but a short time before two Frenchmen had passed down in a canoe. He instantly followed, and after forty-eight hours of lively paddling met the Sioux hunters and with them Accault, Auguelle, and Hennepin. All the French now traveled with the Indians to their villages on Mille Lacs, this time up the Mississippi and Rum rivers. The season was now far advanced and Duluth was obliged to give up his project of a journey to “the ocean of the west,” which he believed to be not more than twenty days’ march distant. Furnished with a rude but truthful map sketched by one of the Sioux chiefs, and promising the Indians to return to trade, the eight white men took their departure for home by Prairie du Chien and Green Bay. Hennepin returned to France and in 1682 published his “Description of Louisiana.” He knew how to tell an interesting story, and stuck as close to the truth as most annalists of his day. He assumed to have been the leader of the exploring party. Fifteen years later there was published in Holland a book under the title of “A New Discovery of a Great Country.” It contained all the matter of Hennepin’s “Description,” and some one hundred and fifty pages more. These interpolated into the original story a journey of more than three thousand miles in thirty days, from the mouth of the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico and back, before ascending the Mississippi. If Hennepin himself wrote the injected pages, he was the shameless liar which he has been frequently declared to be. There is room, however, for the suggestion that the added pages were the work of some literary hack employed by dishonest publishers to give the book the appearance of a new one; but a good degree of charity is necessary to entertain this theory, as there is no record of any disavowal by Hennepin. Granting Hennepin to have been the leader, it must be remembered he was an agent of La Salle. La Salle’s foresight and enterprise sent him to the land of the Dakotas and to the Falls of St. Anthony.

It was not till the winter of 1682 that La Salle was able to embark from his fort at Peoria. Sixty days of easy canoe navigation brought him to one of the islands at the mouth of the Mississippi. There in the month of April, under his royal patent, he set up a cross and proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis le Grand over the whole valley of the great river and all its tributaries. On the “procès-verbal” of that transaction rests every land title in Minnesota.

Duluth and La Salle by means of Accault’s reports revealed to Count Frontenac the magnificence of the upper Mississippi region, and Father Hennepin’s book, dedicated to the king, seems to have inspired Louis XIV with a desire to occupy and possess that goodly land. In 1686 the able and experienced Nicholas Perrot, who had been appointed commandant of the west with orders to make an establishment there, built a fort on the east bank of Lake Pepin, and called it Fort St. Antoine. The site has been clearly identified about two miles below the “Burlington” railroad station of Stockholm, Pepin County, Wisconsin. Summoned the following year to lead a contingent of voyageurs and savages in the campaign against the Iroquois in the Genesee valley of western New York, he did not return to Fort St. Antoine till late in 1688. To satisfy any lingering doubts about the legitimate sovereignty of those parts, he made formal proclamation of his king’s lordship over all the countries and rivers he had seen and would see. Perrot was too useful a man to be left in the wilderness, and was presently ordered on other service and his fort left empty.

Another attempt at settlement on the upper Mississippi was made by a Canadian, Pierre Le Sueur, an associate of Perrot, who in 1694 established a trading post on Prairie Island in the Mississippi, about nine miles below Hastings, the same on which Groseilliers and Radisson are imagined to have camped in 1655. Le Sueur stayed over one winter in the west, and returned to Montreal to discover to Frontenac a new project. He had located a copper mine. He hastened to Paris to obtain the king’s license, then necessary for mining operations. After a struggle of two years he got his permit and started for Canada. The English caught him and held him a prisoner for some months. Returning to France, he found his license canceled, because of a resolution of the government to abandon all trade west of Mackinaw. At length Le Sueur was excepted from the rule and his license renewed. In 1699 he sailed with the expedition of D’Iberville, which was to make and did make the first settlement out of which New Orleans grew.

In the midsummer following he made his way with a sailboat and two canoes up the Mississippi, reaching Fort Snelling September 19. He doubtless knew where he was going, for without delay he turned into the Minnesota River, which he followed to the mouth of the Mah-ka-to or Blue Earth. A short distance above, the latter stream receives the Le Sueur. At their junction he built a fort to which he gave the name of a treasury official of Paris who had supported him, “Fort L’Huillier.” The spot has been identified by a local archæologist. He was obliged to pacify with presents the Sioux who were displeased because he did not build at the mouth of the Minnesota. His company passed a comfortable winter, but before it was over they had to come down to buffalo beef without salt. Some of them could put away six pounds along with four bowls of broth daily. In the spring Le Sueur departed for Biloxi, with his shallop loaded with bluish green earth taken from a bluff near his fort. He never saw Minnesota again, and no later explorer has rediscovered his mine. The state geologist has not found the least trace of copper in the region.

The last decade of the seventeenth century was one of discouragement for old France and new. Louis XIV, decrepit and bankrupt, dominated by Madame Maintenon and a group of ecclesiastics, had, by revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685, driven three hundred thousand and more of the most industrious and skillful artisans and tradesmen of France into exile. The dragonades, countenanced even by such men as Fénelon and Bossuet, had spread ruin throughout whole provinces. Foreign wars along with domestic convulsions had almost beggared the kingdom.

Frontenac had died in office in 1698, and Canadian affairs, fallen into less capable hands, were languishing. There was lack of men and money to protect the northwest trade. It needed protection. The English, holding the Iroquois in alliance, had pushed their trade into the Ohio valley and the lower peninsula of Michigan. The Sacs and Foxes of the Illinois country, old allies of the French, had broken away, and closed all the roads from the lakes to the Mississippi unless that of the St. Croix. For these reasons the Canadian government had in 1699 withdrawn the garrison from Mackinaw, abandoned all posts farther west, and ordered the concentration of Indian trade at Montreal. It was not till after the war of the Spanish Succession was closed by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, that any thought could be taken for the revival of trade and missions in the Mississippi valley. England might at that time have stripped France of all her transatlantic holdings, but contented herself with Newfoundland and the posts on Hudson’s Bay.

In 1714 the French garrison was reëstablished at Mackinaw, which remained the headquarters of trade with the Algonquins of the northwest till far into the nineteenth century. Three years later Duluth’s old fort on Pigeon River was reoccupied, to become a great entrepôt of trade with the inland natives; a year later still La Pointe received a small garrison.

Ten years passed before the effort to plant French trade and missions was renewed on the upper Mississippi. Charlevoix, the historian of New France, was over in 1720 and traveled by way of Mackinaw and Green Bay to New Orleans. By his advice the French government resolved to plant an establishment in the country of the Sioux, as a centre of trade and mission work, and as a point of departure for expeditions to gain the shores of the western sea. The hostile Sacs and Foxes having been placated, an expedition was planned with all the care which long experience could suggest. For leader was chosen Réné Boucher, Sieur de la Perrière, the same who in 1708 had headed the raiding party which descended on Haverhill, thirty-two miles north of Boston, where his Indians butchered thirty or forty of the English. Two Jesuit fathers, Guinas and De Gonor, attached themselves to the expedition, and asked for a supply of astronomical instruments. In June, 1727, the expedition set out from Montreal and took the then main traveled road by way of Mackinaw and Green Bay. A letter of De Gonor, which has been preserved, gives an interesting account of the journey.

On September 17, 1727, at noon, La Perrière beached his canoes on a low point of land on the west shore of Lake Pepin, near the steamboat landing at Frontenac. Putting his men to work with axes, he had them all comfortably housed by the end of October. There were three log buildings, each 16 feet wide; one 30, a second 38, and the third 25 feet long. Surrounding them was a stockade of tree-trunks 12 feet out of ground, 100 feet square, “with two good bastions.” The fort was named “Beauharnois” after the governor-general of Canada. To the first mission on Minnesota soil the priests gave the title, “Mission of St. Michael the Archangel.” On November 4 the company celebrated the birthday of the governor, but were obliged by the state of the weather to postpone to the night of the 14th the crowning event of their programme. They then set off “some very fine rockets.” When the visiting Indians saw the stars falling from heaven, the women and children took to the woods, while the men begged for an end of such marvelous medicine. The Sioux were not disposed to be hospitable, and the good behavior of the Sacs and Foxes could not be counted on. In the following season La Perrière departed with the Jesuits and eight other Frenchmen for Montreal. The post was held, and occupied off and on for twenty years or more. No settlement was made about it, no permanent mission work was established, and no expedition towards the Pacific was undertaken. The Indians were unreliable, the French had other interests to attend to, and, contrary to expectation, game was scarce in the region.

One of the successors of La Perrière in command of Fort Beauharnois was Captain Legardeur Saint Pierre, the same officer who in 1753 at his post on French Creek, not far from Pittsburg, was waited on by young Mr. Washington, bearing Governor Dinwiddie’s invitation to the French to get out of Virginian territory.

Another French adventure, although of slight import to Minnesota, deserves mention. The Sieur de la Verendrye, commanding the French post on Lake Nipigon, fell in with the Jesuit Guinas, who went out with La Perrière in 1727, and was inflamed by him with a desire to find the western ocean. At his own post he had found an Indian, Ochaga by name, who sketched for him an almost continuous water route thither; another offered to be his guide. He hastened to Montreal, secured the assent of the governor-general, Beauharnois, and in 1731 dispatched his advance party. It reached the foot of Rainy Lake that year, and there built a fort on the Canadian side. The next year the expedition made its way to the southwest margin of the Lake of the Woods and there built Fort Charles, giving it the Christian name of the governor-general. Whether this fort was on Minnesota soil is undecided.

So ardent was Verendrye’s passion for the glory of discovering the way to the western sea that, encouraged by the Canadian authorities, he kept up the quest for more than ten years longer. On January 12, 1743, the Chevalier Verendrye, as related, climbed one of the foothills of the Shining or Rocky Mountains, and gave it over. Sixty years later Lewis and Clark passed that barrier and won their way to the Pacific.

CHAPTER II
THE ENGLISH DOMINION

If the French failed to establish any permanent settlement in Minnesota, it was not wholly because their passion for trade discouraged home-building and cultivation; they had interests elsewhere in America more important than those of the northwest. La Salle’s proclamation of 1682 asserted dominion of the whole region drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. For a time the Ohio was regarded as the main river and the upper Mississippi as an affluent. Before the close of the seventeenth century both French and English were awake to the beauty and richness of the Ohio valley and the Illinois country. The building of a fort by Cadillac at Detroit in 1701 revealed the firm purpose of the French to maintain their claim of sovereignty. In the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, the English, with a long look ahead, secured the concession that the Iroquois were the “subjects” of England. In a series of negotiations culminating in a treaty at Lancaster, Pa., the Iroquois ceded to the English all their lands west of the Alleghanies and south of the great lakes. On this cession the English put the liberal construction that the Iroquois were owners of all territory over which they had extended their victorious forays, and these they had good right to convey. In 1748 the Ohio Company, formed in Virginia, sent Christopher Gist to explore the Ohio valley. The next year a governor of Canada sent an expedition down the Ohio to conciliate the Indians and to bury leaden plates at chosen points, asserting the dominion of France. A line of fortified posts was stretched by the French from Quebec to Fort Charles below St. Louis, on the Mississippi.

When in 1754 a French battalion drove off the party of English backwoodsmen who had begun the erection of a fort at the forks of the Ohio, and proceeded to build Fort Duquesne, the French and Indian War began. The course of this struggle, exceeding by far in point of magnitude the war of the Revolution, cannot here be followed. At the close of the campaign of 1757 the French seemed triumphant. In the year following they lost Fort Duquesne, in 1759 Quebec, and in 1760 Montreal. The power of the French in North America was broken. Historians of Canada still name the epoch that of “the Conquest.”

The diplomatic settlement of this contest awaited the outcome of a great war raging in Europe, the so-called Seven Years’ War of Frederick the Great against Austria, Russia, and France. England was early drawn into the support of the Prussian monarch, and supplied his military chest and sent an army to the continent. France presumptuously aspired to wrest the empire of the seas from Britain, with the result that her navies were sunk or battered to useless wrecks. In a separate treaty signed at Paris, February 10, 1763, France surrendered to England all her possessions and claims east of the Mississippi except the city of New Orleans and the island embracing it. The British government, however, was none too desirous to accept this cession. It was a matter of lively debate in the ministry whether it would not be the better policy to leave Canada to the French and strip her of her West Indian possessions. That course might have been adopted, but for the influence exerted by Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Canada Pamphlet,” which is still “interesting reading.” Franklin was in England while the question was pending, and published his views in answer to “Remarks” ascribed to Edmund Burke.

It may be well to note here that in the year preceding the treaty of Paris (1762) France had taken the precaution to assign to Spain, by a secret treaty, all her North American possessions west of the Mississippi, in order to put them out of the reach of England.

It was the 8th of September, 1760, when the capitulation of Montreal was signed, turning all Canada over to the British. Five days later Amherst, the victorious commander, dispatched Major Robert Hayes with two hundred rangers to take possession of the western posts. Expected opposition at Detroit was not offered, and that important strategic point was occupied on November 29. The season was then too late for further movements, and more than a year passed before garrisons were established at Mackinaw and Green Bay. The British were none too welcome among the savages, long accustomed to French dealings and alliances. But French influence was not what it had formerly been. During the long struggle for the mastery of the continent the Indian trade had languished, and in remoter regions the savages had reverted to their ancient ways and standards of living. The trade revived, however, under British rule, which brought peace and protection. In 1762 the British commandant gave a permit to a Frenchman named Pinchon to trade on the Minnesota River, then in Spanish territory. Four years later the old post on Pigeon River was revived and trade was reopened in northern Minnesota. Prairie du Chien became in the course of a decade a village of some three hundred families, mostly French half-breeds, and remained a supply station for the Indian trade of southern and central Minnesota till far into the nineteenth century.

The British authorities in Canada indulged no romantic passion to discover the south or western sea, and were indifferent for a time to the development and protection of trade in the northwest. This fact lends brilliance to the adventures of a single American born subject who in 1766 set out alone for the wilderness, resolved to cross the Rocky Mountains, descend to the western ocean, and cross the Straits of Anion to Cathay. Such was the bold enterprise of Jonathan Carver of Canterbury, Connecticut, at thirty-four years of age. He was not unlettered, for he had studied medicine; and he was not inexperienced, for he had served with some distinction as a line officer in a colonial regiment in the French and Indian War. Departing from Boston in June (1766), he traveled the usual way by the lakes to Mackinaw, where he found that versatile Irish gentleman, Major Robert Rogers, his comrade in arms, in command. There is a tradition, needing confirmation, that this officer “grub-staked” Carver for trade with the Sioux and possible operations in land. However, he left Mackinaw in September supplied with credits on traders for the goods serving for money with Indians, and taking the Fox-Wisconsin route, found himself at the Falls of St. Anthony on the 17th of November. Although he estimated the descent of the cataract at thirty feet, it impressed him only as the striking feature of a beautiful landscape. “On the whole,” says he, “when the Falls are included, ... a more pleasing and picturesque view, I believe, cannot be found throughout the universe.” After a short excursion above the falls, Carver took his way up the Minnesota, as he estimated, two hundred miles. He passed the winter with a band of Sioux Indians which he fails to name, and in a place he does not describe, and in the spring came down to St. Paul with a party of three hundred, bringing the remains of their dead to be deposited in the well-known “Indian mounds” on Dayton’s Bluff. The cave in the white sand rock entered by him on his upward journey, and which bore his name till obliterated by railroad cuttings, was nearly beneath the Indian mounds. His report of a funeral oration delivered here by one of the chiefs so impressed the German poet Schiller that he wrote his “Song of the Nadowessee Chief,” which Goethe praised as one of his best. Two very distinguished Englishmen, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton and Sir John Herschel, made metrical translations of this poem in the fashion of their time.

This journey was but a preliminary one to find and explore the Minnesota valley and acquaint Carver with the tribes dwelling there and their languages. He had conceived that a short march from the head of that river would take him to the Missouri. This he would ascend to its sources in the mountains, and crossing over these he would float down the Oregon to the ocean. Major Rogers, as he relates, had engaged to send him supplies to the Falls of St. Anthony. Receiving none, Carver hastened down to Prairie du Chien, to be again disappointed.

Resolved on prosecuting his great adventure, he decided to apply to the traders at Pigeon River for the necessary merchandise. Paddling back up the Mississippi, he took the St. Croix route to Lake Superior, and coasted along the north shore to that post, only to find, after many hundred miles of laborious travel, that the traders had no goods to spare him. He could do nothing but return to his home. In 1768 he went to England, hoping to interest the government in his project, and in the following year published his book of travels. It is now known that little if any of it was his own composition. His account of the customs of the Indians was pieced together from Charlevoix and Lahontan. But the work of his editor, a certain Dr. Littsom, was so well done that “Carver’s Travels” have been more widely read than the original works drawn upon.

There is very doubtful testimony to the effect that in 1774 the king made Carver a present of £1373 13s. 8d., and ordered the dispatch of a public vessel to carry him and a party of one hundred and fifty men by way of New Orleans to the upper Mississippi, to take possession of certain lands. The Revolutionary War breaking out, the expedition was abandoned.

Carver died in poverty in England in 1780, and might be dismissed but for a sequel which lingers in Minnesota to the present time. After his death there was brought to day a deed purporting to have been signed by two Indian chiefs, “at the great cave,” May 1, 1767, conveying to their “good brother Jonathan” a tract of land lying on the east side of the Mississippi one hundred miles wide, running from the Falls of St. Anthony down to the mouth of the Chippeway, embracing nearly two million acres. A married daughter, by his English wife, and her husband bargained their alleged interest to a London company for ten per cent. of the realized profits, but that company soon abandoned their venture. Carver left behind him an American family, a widow, two sons, and five daughters. In 1806 one Samuel Peters, an Episcopal clergyman of Vermont, represented in a petition to Congress that he had acquired the rights of these heirs to the Carver purchase, and prayed to have it confirmed to him. This Peters claim was kept before Congress for seventeen years. In 1822 the Mississippi Land Company was organized in New York to prosecute it. They seem to have been taken seriously, for in the next year a Senate committee, in a report of January 23, advised the rejection of the claim as utterly without merit. But it has been repeatedly renewed, and doubtless at the present time there are worthy people dreaming of pleasures and palaces when they come into their rights.

For the first three years following the Conquest all Canada remained under military rule. In 1763 George III by proclamation established four provinces with separate governments, but the great northwest region was included in none of these. That remained as crown land, reserved for the use of the Indians under royal protection. All squatters were ordered to depart and all persons were forbidden to attempt purchases of land from the Indians. This prohibition alone was fatal to Carver’s claim. The United States could not possibly confirm a purchase impossible under English law. It was the express design of the British government to prevent the thirteen colonies from gaining ground to the west, and “leave the savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet.”

In 1774, about the time when Parliament was extending its novel sway over the American colonies, the “Quebec act” was passed. This act extended the Province of Quebec to the Mississippi and gave to Minnesota East its first written constitution. This provided for a government by a governor and an appointed legislative council, but it was never actually effective west of Lake Michigan.

Under the definitive treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, the dominion of the former over Minnesota East ceased, but that of the United States government did not immediately supervene. Virginia under her charter of 1609 had claimed the whole Northwest, and her army, commanded by General George Rogers Clark, had in 1779 established her power in the Illinois country. Three years later the county of Illinois was created and an executive appointed by Governor Patrick Henry. The act of Congress of March 1, 1784, accepting the cession of her northwestern lands, amounting to a concession of colorable title, ended Virginia’s technical government in Minnesota East. From that date to the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 (July 13) this region remained unorganized Indian country. This great ordinance made it part of “the Northwest Territory” and gave it a written constitution. But this was nugatory for the reason that although Great Britain had in form surrendered the territory in the treaty of 1783, she continued her occupation for thirteen years longer. Her pretext for maintaining her garrisons at Detroit, Mackinaw, Green Bay, and elsewhere was the failure of the United States to prevent the states from confiscating the estates of loyalists and hindering English creditors from collecting their debts in full sterling value, as provided in the treaty. The actual reason was an expectation, or hope, that affairs would take such a turn that the whole or the greater part of the Ohio-Illinois country might revert to England. A new British fort was built on the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio in 1794. The surrender of this to General Anthony Wayne after the battle of Fallen Timbers, in August of that year, has been regarded as the last act in the war of the Revolution. By the Jay treaty it was agreed that the western posts should be given up to the United States, and on or about the 12th of July, 1796, the British commanders hauled down their flags and marched out their garrisons.

There was a powerful interest which had encouraged the British authorities to hold their grip on the Northwest. The revival of the fur-trade after the Conquest was tardy, but soon after Carver’s time a notable development took place. Another Connecticut Yankee, Peter Pond by name, in 1774 established a trading post at Traverse des Sioux on the Minnesota. On a map left by him it is marked “Fort Pond.” The trade west of the lakes, however, early fell into the hands of adventurous Scotchmen of Montreal, among whom competition became so sharp as to lead to what would have been called, a hundred years later, a “trust” or “combine.” An informal agreement between the principal traders at Montreal ripened, in 1787, into “The Northwest Company,” with headquarters in that city. This company promptly and effectually organized the northwestern fur-trade. It established a hierarchy of posts and stations, and introduced a quasi-military administration of the employees. It wisely took into its service the old French and half-breed “engagés and voyageurs,” and rewarded them so liberally as to win them from illicit traffic. For forty years the Northwest Company was the ruling power west of the lakes, although it had not, as had the Hudson’s Bay Company, its model, any authorized political functions. Its policy and discipline served in place of laws and police.

The greater distributing and collecting ports were Detroit, Mackinaw, and Fort William; and next in importance were such places as La Pointe, Fond du Lac, and Prairie du Chien, from which the trade of the upper Mississippi was managed. Fond du Lac, near the mouth of the St. Louis River, at the head of Lake Superior, was the gateway to an immense region abounding in the finest peltries and occupied by a large Chippeway population, eager to buy the white man’s guns and ammunition, knives, kettles, tobacco, and, most dearly prized of all, his deadly fire-water. From Fond du Lac there was a canoe route to the lakes which are the proximate sources of the great river. It led up the St. Louis River to the mouth of the East Savanna near the Floodwood railroad station. From the head of the East Savanna a short portage led to the West Savanna, an affluent of Prairie River which empties into Sandy Lake, near the southwest corner of Aitkin County. That water covers near half a township and discharges by a short outlet into the Mississippi, some twenty-five miles above the village and railroad station of Aitkin. Here in 1794 the Sandy Lake post of the Northwest Company was built. There was a stockade one hundred feet square, of hewn logs one foot square, and thirteen feet out of ground. Within were the necessary buildings, and without, fenced in, a considerable garden. From Sandy Lake radiated numerous “jackknife posts,” where the bushrangers wintered and swapped gewgaws for pelts. For many years Sandy Lake was the most important point in Minnesota, the chief factor there the big man of the Chippeway country.

CHAPTER III
MINNESOTA WEST ANNEXED

The reader is asked to recall the cession by France, in 1762, of her American territory west of the Mississippi to Spain. The French population of Louisiana, resenting this arbitrary transfer, drove out the Spanish governor who came in 1766, and organized for a free state under French protection. In 1769 a Spanish fleet of twenty-four sail, bringing an army of twenty-six hundred men and fifty cannon, under the command of a forceful captain-general, securely established the power of Spain. The laws of Castile, derived from the civil code of Rome, were put in force, and they continue in force to the present day. By a line about on the latitude of Memphis a province of Upper Louisiana was set apart and placed under the control of a lieutenant-governor residing at St. Louis. Minnesota West was of course a part of this jurisdiction.

In the last years of the eighteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte was absolute in France, although not yet crowned emperor. Among the schemes with which his imagination was busied was one to establish another new France on the western continent. Louisiana had been a costly dependency for Spain, and it was only by a reluctant but timely concession of the right of navigation and deposit that an armed descent of Americans from the Ohio valley on New Orleans had been averted. That would have put an end to Spanish rule. Spain willingly retroceded to France for a nominal consideration, by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso, March 13, 1801. Already Napoleon had formed a definite plan and begun preparations to send 25,000 veteran soldiers to Louisiana, under convoy of a powerful fleet. His secret could not be kept, and England made ready to attack the expedition at sea. Napoleon had reason to expect that she would descend on New Orleans herself, and take possession of the province. While he was in this frame of mind the American minister, under instructions, expressed the desire of his government to buy the city and island of New Orleans and thus make the Mississippi the international boundary to its mouth. To his surprise Napoleon offered to sell the whole province, spite of his agreement with Spain never to cede to any other power. The Louisiana purchase was consummated by treaty April 30, 1803. Meantime the province had remained in the possession of Spain, and it was not till November 30 that she turned New Orleans over to the French. Twenty days later the United States came into possession. The upper province of Louisiana was held but one day by a French commissary, who on March 10, 1804, at St. Louis, conveyed it to the United States. The cost to the government was three and six tenths cents per acre.

The actual surrender of Upper Louisiana in 1804 added geographically Minnesota West, included in that province, to Minnesota East, then part of Crawford County, Indiana. The whole region was still occupied by aborigines, and a generation was to pass before any of it became white man’s country. Two great nations divided the territory: the Chippeways, of Algonquin stock, occupying the north and east; the Sioux or Dakotas the south and west. Both were immigrant from early eastern habitats, the Chippeways moving north of the lakes (Lake Superior split the stream), the Sioux south of the same. When first seen by white men, the latter held the country about the sources of the Mississippi, the head of Lake Superior, and to the St. Croix. The Chippeways were first to obtain guns from the white man, and began at once to push the Sioux before them. In Hennepin’s time (1680) the principal villages of the Sioux were in the Mille Lacs region. By the close of the Revolutionary War the Chippeways had driven them south of the Crow Wing and west of the Mississippi, leaving them only a precarious hold on the margin of their old hunting grounds. From their earliest encounters the two nations had been unremitting foes. But for occasional truces they were always at war; and this perennial feud did not cease till the government in 1863 moved the Sioux beyond the Missouri, out of the reach of the Chippeways. The two nations possessed in common the well-known characteristics of the red man, physical, mental, and social, but a difference of environment had established marked peculiarities. The Chippeways were men of the forest and stream; their women gathered wild rice, excellent for food. The Sioux, men of the prairie, were the taller and more agile, but the Chippeways outmatched them for strength and endurance.

Both peoples had already been profoundly affected by contact with white men. If the missionary had not broken the power of the medicine-man and converted them to the true faith, the trader had revolutionized their whole manner of life. He had given the Indian the gun for his bow and arrows, axes and knives of steel for those of stone, and the iron kettle for the earthen pot. The Mackinaw blanket and the trader’s strouds had replaced garments made from skins, and ornaments of shell and feathers had given way to those of metal and glass.

Before the trader the Indian had hunted for subsistence, content when he had supplied his family and dependents with food and clothing. The trader made him a pot-hunter, killing mostly for the skins alone. Game animals became scarce about the villages, and hunting expeditions had to be made to distant grounds, where the enemies’ parties would be met and fought. The Indian had become a vassal to the trader, who outfitted him for the hunt, and at its end took his furs in payment at rates little understood by the man who did not know that the white metal was worth more than the red. If anything remained from the Indian’s pack it was very likely to be forthwith spent for the highly diluted whiskey of the trader. The Indian’s fondness for spirits and their effects was at least equal to the white man’s, and he had not become immune from immemorial indulgence. The resulting crime and misery are beyond description,—conception, almost. And the trader’s excuse was that the Indians would not trade if whiskey was not furnished, and that it was absurd for one to refuse it when all the rest were selling. Along with the white man came his epidemic diseases. Smallpox and measles depopulated villages and almost extinguished tribes. A nameless contagion was only less deadly. Unbridled commerce with the women multiplied half-breeds, possessing frequently all of the vices and few of the virtues of both races. The half-breed was always a misfit, because he could assume by turns the character of white or red, according to convenience and profit.

All the Minnesota Indians were clients of the Northwest Company, unless where along the northern border the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company were drawing off the trade by abundant whiskey. This competition at length brought the two companies to open war.

Long before he became president, Jefferson was curious to unlock the secret of the unknown west and learn the road to the Pacific. It was not till the early winter of 1803, however, that he was able to persuade Congress to make a small appropriation for a military expedition of discovery, and then under color of “extending the external commerce of the United States.” And more than a year passed before the expedition of Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis May 4, 1804.

A similar expedition on a smaller scale left St. Louis in August, 1805, to discover the source of the Mississippi. It was led by First Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike of the First Infantry, a native of New Jersey, then twenty-six years of age. “He was five feet eight inches tall; eyes blue; hair light; abstemious, temperate, and unremitting in duty.” If there could have been doubt of his fitness for the enterprise, the sequel fully justified his selection. His instructions were carefully drawn to keep him and his errand within constitutional limits. The first entry of his journal reads, “Sailed from my encampment, near St. Louis, at 4 o’clock, P. M., on Friday the 9th of August, 1805: with one sergeant, two corporals, and seventeen privates, in a keel boat, 70 feet long, provisioned for four months.” On the 21st of September Pike reached the mouth of the Minnesota, and “encamped on the northeast point of the big island,” which still bears his name. The next day Little Crow, grandfather of the chief of the same name who led the outbreak of 1862, came with his band of one hundred and fifty warriors. On the third day a council was held under the shelter of the sails, on the beach. In his speech Pike let the Indians know that their Great Father no longer lived beyond the great salt water, and that the Canadian traders who tried to keep them in ignorance of American independence were “bad birds”; that traders were forbidden to sell rum, and the Indians ought to coöperate in preventing them; and that the Sioux and Chippeways ought to live in peace together. In particular he asked that they allow the United States to select two tracts of land, one at the mouth of the St. Croix, the other above the mouth of the Minnesota. On these the Great Father would establish military posts, and public trading factories, where Indians could get goods cheaper than from the traders.

The well-advised officer had already crossed the hands of the two head chiefs. He closed his speech with a reference to their “father’s tobacco and some other trifling things” as evidence of good will, and promised some liquor “to clear their throats.” The chiefs saw no need of their signing any paper, but did it to please the generous orator. The “treaty” is a curiosity in diplomacy. The first article grants, what the United States already possessed, “full sovereignty and power” over two tracts of land: one of nine miles square at the mouth of the St. Croix; the other “from below the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Peter’s (Minnesota) up the Mississippi to include the Falls of St. Anthony, extending nine miles on each side of the river.” Pike estimated the area of the latter grant to be about one hundred thousand acres and the value to be $200,000. The second article provides that “the United States shall pay ... dollars.” The final article permits the Sioux to retain the only right they could legally convey, that of occupancy for hunting and their other accustomed uses.

Five days were passed at the Falls of St. Anthony, partly because of the sickness of some of the men. Pike took measurements and made a map. He found the depth of the fall to be sixteen and a half feet. The portage on the east bank was two hundred and sixty rods. The navigation of the river above proved so difficult that it was not till the 16th of October that the party reached the mouth of the Swan River. It was the expectation of his general and of Pike himself that the march to the source of the Mississippi and back would certainly be finished before the close of the season. By the time he was ready to leave the falls, September 30, it was evident that the journey could not be accomplished in any such period. Resolved to prosecute it, and not go back defeated, he formed the plan to push on to the mouth of the Crow Wing, put his stores and part of his men under cover, and go forward on foot to his destination. On the way up river he had a foretaste of the hardships which awaited him. As he says, he “literally performed the duties of astronomer, surveyor, commanding officer, clerk, spy, and guide.” Finding it impossible to force his boats through the rapids below Little Falls, he selected a favorable site below the junction of the Swan with the Mississippi (the spot has been clearly identified), where he built, in the course of a week, two blockhouses, and in them bestowed his baggage and provisions. Here he remained till December 10, occupied with hunting, chopping out “peroques,” and building bob-sleds. It took thirty-four days to reach Sandy Lake, where the party met with generous hospitality at the post of the Northwest Company. A week was passed here in which the men replaced their sleds with the traineaux de glace, or toboggans, used by the voyageurs. On February 1 the leader, marching in advance, reached the establishment of the Northwest Company on the western margin of Leech Lake, and highly relished a “good dish of coffee, biscuit, butter, and cheese for supper.” Pike had now accomplished his voyage by reaching the main source of the Mississippi. Seventeen days were passed here, including three devoted to an excursion on snowshoes to Cass Lake, then known as Upper Red Cedar Lake. He now believed himself to have reached the “upper source of the Mississippi,” but wasted not a word of rhetoric on the achievement. While resting at Leech Lake Lieutenant Pike wrote out for the eye of Mr. Hugh McGillis, director of the Fond du Lac department of the Northwest Company, there present, a formal demand that he should smuggle no more British goods into the country, haul down the British flag at all his posts, give no more flags or medals to Indians, and hold no political intercourse with them. Mr. McGillis in a communication equally formal promised to do all those things. Pike estimated that the government was losing some $26,000 a year of unpaid customs. The two functionaries parted with mutual expressions of regard, and the genial lieutenant started off home with a cariole and dog team worth $200 presented by the gracious factor. Before his departure, however, he had his riflemen shoot down the English jack flying over the post. The return journey, ending April 30, 1806, cannot be followed. On the 10th of the month the expedition passed around the Falls of St. Anthony, and the journal records, “The appearance of the Falls was much more tremendous than when we ascended.” The ice was floating all day. The leader congratulated himself on having accomplished every wish, without the loss of a man. “Ours was the first canoe,” he says, “that ever crossed this portage.” In that belief he was content. Pike’s journal was not published till 1810, and it included his account of an expedition to the sources of the Arkansas, and an enforced tour in New Spain. It had but slight effect on the authorities at Washington, and still less on the public. The War of 1812 was brewing and there was little concern about this remote wilderness. The effect of Pike’s dramatic incursion, and his fine speeches to the Sioux and Chippeways soon wore off, the British flag went up over the old trading posts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the Northwest Company resumed its accustomed control over the Indians. It is not likely that many of their goods paid the duties at Mackinaw. When the war broke out the British-American authorities used all needful means in the way of presents and promises to hold the attachment of the nations. Some of the principal agents of the Northwest Company were actually commissioned in the British service and collected considerable bodies of Indians and half-breeds for the western operations. The news of the end of the war was slow in reaching these allies, and it was not till May 24, 1815, that the British captain commanding at Prairie du Chien, having received his orders, hauled down his flag and marched away with his garrison for Green Bay and Montreal. The treaty of Ghent had been concluded eight months and some days before. A serious proposition made by the British plenipotentiaries for negotiating that treaty proves that the British had cherished the hope that they might retain the great Northwest under their virtual dominion. The proposition was that the two powers should agree that the territory north and west of the “Greenville line of 1795,” roughly a zigzag from Cleveland to Cincinnati, should remain as a permanent barrier between their boundaries. Both parties were to be prohibited from buying land of the Indians, who were thus to be left in actual occupation. The British would continue to control their trade and hold their accustomed allegiance. The American commissioners refused of course to entertain the proposal.

CHAPTER IV
FORT SNELLING ESTABLISHED

Readers of Irving’s “Astoria” know how a young German, coming to America in the last year of the Revolution, by accident learned of the possible profits to be won in the fur-trade, and how he presently embarked in it. In the course of twenty-five years he made a million dollars, a colossal private fortune for that day. In 1809 he obtained from the New York legislature a charter, and organized the American Fur Company. The war suspended the development of its plans. In 1816 Mr. John Jacob Astor had little difficulty in securing an act of Congress restricting Indian trade to American citizens. This patriotic statute was intended to put the Northwest Company out of business on American territory. It did, and that company sold out to Mr. Astor all its posts and outfits south of the Canadian boundary at prices satisfactory to the purchaser. In 1821 the Northwest Company was merged into the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The American Fur Company adopted the policy of filling its leading positions with young Americans of good education and enterprise, and taking over the old engagés and voyageurs, inured to the service and useless for any other. These old campaigners easily won over the Indians to the new company and taught them to look to a Great Father at Washington. The chief western stations for the trade of the upper Mississippi were Mackinaw and Prairie du Chien. There was now an “interest” which desired the development of the upper country; and it lost no time in moving on the government. In the year last mentioned (1816) four companies of United States infantry were sent to Prairie du Chien, where they at once built Fort Crawford. In the next year, Pike’s reports having apparently been forgotten, Major Stephen H. Long of the Engineers traveled to Fort Snelling and in his report gave a conditional approval to Pike’s selection of a site for a fort; but it was not till the winter of 1819 that the government was moved to establish a military post at the junction of the St. Peter’s with the Mississippi. Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Leavenworth was ordered February 10 to proceed from Detroit, Michigan, to that point with a detachment of the Fifth Infantry.

Taking the Fox-Wisconsin route, his party of eighty-two persons reached Prairie du Chien July 1. “Scarcely an hour” after his arrival this number was increased by the birth of Charlotte Ouisconsin (Clarke) Van Cleve, long known to all Minnesotians, whose life was not ended till 1907.

The command arrived at Mendota August 24 and was at once put to building the log houses of a cantonment. The site was near the present ferry and the hamlet of Mendota, where a sharp eye may still note traces of foundations. In September a reinforcement of one hundred and twenty arrived. In the spring of 1820 the companies were put into camp above the fort, near the great spring known to all early settlers. It was named Camp Coldwater. In July the command passed to Colonel Joseph Snelling, who held it till near the time of his death in 1828. A daughter born in his family a short time after their arrival was the first white child born in Minnesota.

Colonel Snelling at once began the erection of a fort, which, however, was not ready for occupation till October, 1822. It was a wooden construction, for which the logs were cut on the Rum River. In 1821 a rude sawmill was built at “the Falls” which converted the logs into lumber. This was of course the first sawmill in Minnesota. Two years later a “run of buhrs” was put in, and a first flour mill established. Colonel Snelling named his work “Fort Saint Anthony,” but in 1824, upon recommendation of Major-General Winfield Scott, after a visit to the place, that name was changed to “Fort Snelling,” in recognition of the enterprise and efficiency of its builder.

The reader must not be allowed to fear that the government was trespassing on Indian ground when building Fort Snelling. Pike had bargained for the site in 1805, but the government for fourteen years neither took possession nor tendered payment. The Senate on ratifying the treaty filled the blank in article II by inserting $2000, and Congress in 1819 made an appropriation of that amount. In anticipation of the dispatch of a detachment of troops, Major Forsyth was ordered to transport $2000 worth of goods to the Sioux country and deliver them in payment for the lands ceded to Pike. It chanced that his boats arrived at Prairie du Chien in time to make the further ascent of the river in company with the command of Colonel Leavenworth. The payment was happily managed. On his way up river Major Forsyth called at the villages of Wabashaw, Red Wing, and Little Crow, and gave each of those chiefs a present of blankets, tobacco, powder, or other goods. On arrival at destination similar presents were made to five other chiefs, whose villages were not distant. In each case the major records that he had to give a little whiskey. The United States could afford such generosity.

A period of thirty years intervened between the arrival of Colonel Leavenworth’s battalion at Fort Snelling in 1819, and the establishment of the Territory of Minnesota. The events of the period are too slightly related to the subsequent history of the state to call for minute narration in the way of annals, and may preferably be grouped under a few heads for compendious treatment.

When Colonel Leavenworth was starting from Detroit, Michigan, he was intrusted by the governor of the Territory of Michigan with blank commissions for appointive county officers for Crawford County, included in that territory. This duty was performed at Prairie du Chien, and justice was established in Minnesota East. That region had previously been successively within the jurisdiction of the Northwest, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois territories. Minnesota West at the same time was part of Missouri Territory, and previous to 1812 had been in the Territory of Louisiana. There was, however, slight occasion for the exercise of civil or judicial functions in the upper Mississippi country.

The American Fur Company had succeeded not merely to the business of the “old Northwest Company,” but to its quasi-political control. The chief factor at Mendota, and his subordinate traders at the more important trading places, exercised a control over the Indians and half-breeds which government officials, civil and military, vainly endeavored to win from them. The few whites in the region, aside from the garrison of the fort, were at the first traders’ employees; later a handful of missionaries acceded, and still later an advance guard of settlers, mostly lumbermen and Selkirk refugees. The dominance of the fur company and its principal agents was in great part due, as already suggested, to a policy inherited from the Northwest Company of retaining in service the old French and half-breed voyageurs, and filling the clerical and managing places with young Americans of ability and enterprise. Such men would have been leaders anywhere. The chief factor at Mendota was the great man of the Sioux country; his colleague at Fond du Lac held a like relation in the country of the Chippeways. They furnished their licensed traders with their outfits, assigned them their respective districts, served as their bankers, and exercised over them an interested supervision. The fidelity of these subordinates was such as to form them into an effective combination, which after a few futile attempts at competition gave the American Fur Company a complete monopoly.

The one name to be brought forward as representative of the American Fur Company, and what was good in it, is that of Henry Hastings Sibley, who came to Mendota in November, 1834, as partner and chief factor. He had been preceded by other traders of inferior rank and consideration. Although but twenty-three years of age, he had already served an apprenticeship of five years at Mackinaw, the western headquarters of the Fur Company. He was born in Detroit, Michigan, where his parents, having removed from Sutton, Massachusetts, had settled before the close of the eighteenth century. The father, Judge Solomon Sibley, was a notable character in Michigan for a long lifetime. The boy received a good “academy” education, had two years of classical language study under private tuition, and pursued the study of law. This early training equipped him with a correct and graceful English style of expression, which in later life he was fond of practicing in manuscript of singular beauty. The boy’s heart was in the wilderness and on the wave. Tall, handsome of face, and lithe of limb, he early became expert with the rifle, the bridle, and the oar. So fleet and tireless was he on foot that the Sioux named him Wa-zi-o-ma-ni, Walker-in-the-pines. His grave and ceremonious manner was well calculated to gain the respect of the Indians, fond as they were of etiquette. Within two years after his arrival at his post he built and occupied a large stone house at Mendota, in which, especially after his marriage a few years later, he maintained a generous and elegant hospitality. The building still stands in a dilapidated condition. For many years Mr. Sibley, as justice of the peace, exercised jurisdiction over a territory of imperial extent, and was believed by his simple-minded clients, the voyageurs, to hold the power of life and death. As the trusted adviser of the Indian agent and the military commander, he steered them past many a difficult emergency.

With the extension of the Indian trade under the protection of a military garrison, it was to be expected that an Indian agency would be established at a point so prominent and convenient as Fort Snelling. As the first agent, Lieutenant Lawrence Taliaferro, of the Third United States Infantry, was personally selected by President Monroe. He was a member of a well-known Virginia family of Italian extraction, and had given evidence in the service of capacity and enterprise. His appointment was dated March 27, 1819. His age was twenty-five. For twenty years he held his position, at times against powerful opposition, ever a true friend of the Indian, a terror to illicit whiskey sellers, and never the tool of the American Fur Company.

It was the desire of the government to put an end to the ancient warfare between the two great tribes of Minnesota Indians. Pike in 1806 had induced some of their chiefs to smoke the calumet. In 1820 Governor Cass repeated the operation with the result of burning much good tobacco. Agent Taliaferro conceived a plan for keeping the peace between the Sioux and the Chippeways, which was to survey and stake out a partition line between their countries. In 1824, by permission of President Monroe, he took a delegation of Sioux, Chippeways, and Menominees to Washington, where an arrangement was made for a “grand convocation” of all the northwestern nations, to be held in the summer of 1825 at Prairie du Chien. That convocation was held, with many spectacular incidents, and a variety of adjustments were consummated. In particular it was agreed between the Sioux and Chippeway nations that their lands should be separated by a line to be drawn and marked by the white man’s science. That line, when tardily staked out ten years later, started from a point in the Red River of the North near Georgetown, passed east of Fergus Falls and west of Alexandria, crossed the Mississippi between St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids, and went on in a general southeast direction to the St. Croix, which it struck not far from Marine. The savages paid little respect to this air line, but went on with their accustomed raids. Within a year there was a bloody encounter in sight of the agent’s office. A single example of these savage frays may be given to illustrate their recurrence in series.

In April, 1838, a party of Sioux hunting in the valley of the Chippeway River (of Minnesota) left a party of three lodges in camp near Benson, Swift County. Hole-in-the-day, the Chippeway chief from Gull River, with nine followers, came upon this camp, and professing himself peaceable was hospitably treated. In the night following he and his men rose silently, and upon a given signal shot eleven of the Sioux to death. One woman and a wounded boy escaped.

In August of the same year Hole-in-the-day, with a small party, was at Fort Snelling. His arrival becoming known to neighboring Sioux, two or three relatives of the victims of the April slaughter waylaid him near the Baker trading-house, and opened fire. Hole-in-the-day escaped, but the warrior with whom he had changed clothes was killed.

In June of the following year a large party of Chippeways from the upper Mississippi, from Mille Lacs and the St. Croix valley, assembled at Fort Snelling. For some days they were feasted and entertained by the resident Sioux, and agent Taliaferro got them started homewards. Two Chippeway warriors, related to the tribesmen killed by the Sioux the previous summer, remained behind, and went into hiding near the large Sioux village on Lake Calhoun. At daybreak, Nika (the badger), a warrior much respected, was shot in his tracks as he was going out to hunt, and the assassins made their escape. As the Sioux could easily surmise that they belonged to Hole-in-the-day’s band, they decided not to retaliate on it, because they would be watched for. Two war-parties were immediately formed, the one to follow the Mille Lacs band, the other that from the St. Croix. It was lawful to retaliate on any Chippeways. The Mille Lacs Indians were overtaken in their bivouacs on the Rum River at daylight on July 4. Waiting until the hunters had gone forward, the Sioux fired on the women, children, and old men, and harvested some seventy scalps, but they lost more warriors in the action than the Chippeways. The war-dance of the exulting Sioux went on for a month on the site of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. Little Crow and his Kaposia band gave their attention to the St. Croix Chippeways, who returned, as they had come, by canoe down the Mississippi and up the St. Croix. Little Crow marched overland and got into position at Stillwater, where he lay in ambush for the retreating foe, who he knew would bivouac on the low ground near the site of the Minnesota state prison. A daybreak assault killed twenty-five of the Chippeways, but they made so good a defense that the Sioux were glad to retire. The mortality in the so-called “battles” of Rum River and Stillwater was exceptionally great.

In the middle of the period now in view, a new influence, not heartily welcomed by the traders, came over the Minnesota Indians,—that of the missionaries, mostly Protestant. The first efforts at evangelization were made for the Chippeways and probably at the instance of Robert Stuart, the principal agent of the American Fur Company at Mackinaw, an ardent Scotch Presbyterian. In 1823 a boarding-school was opened at that place and flourished for some years. In 1830 a mission was opened at La Pointe, Wisconsin, on the spot occupied by the Jesuit fathers one hundred and fifty years before. From this place as a centre mission work was extended into Minnesota. In 1833 the Rev. W. T. Boutwell proceeded to Leech Lake, built a log cabin, and began work. The Rev. Frederick Ayer opened a school at Yellow Lake, on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix, and the Rev. E. E. Ely began teaching at Sandy Lake. Three years later all of these were removed for more concentrated, coöperative effort to Lake Pokegama in Pine County. This mission was carried on with much promise for five years, when it was interrupted by a descent of a large war-party of Sioux led by Little Crow. Among the killed were two young girls, pupils of the mission school. The Chippeways abandoned the place for homes farther from the danger line, and this mission came to an end. The Chippeways had their revenge a year later (1842), when they came down to the near neighborhood of St. Paul and got in the so-called battle of Kaposia the scalps of thirteen Sioux warriors, two women, and a child.

The missions to the Sioux were begun in the spring of 1834 by two young laymen from Connecticut, who appeared at Fort Snelling without credentials from any synod or conference, but with abundant faith and zeal. They were brothers, Samuel William and Godwin Hollister Pond, then twenty-six and twenty-four years of age respectively. Although they had entered the Indian country without leave or license, they secured at once the confidence of Agent Taliaferro and Major Bliss, commander of Fort Snelling. With their own hands they built a log cabin on the east shore of Lake Calhoun, on the edge of Cloudman’s village. That chief selected the site. Established in this “comfortable home,” they devoted themselves to learning the Dakota language. Within a few weeks they adapted the Roman letters to that language with such skill that the “Pond alphabet” has with slight modification been ever since used in writing and printing it. A Dakota child can begin to read as soon as it has “learned its letters.” The zealous brothers made the first collections for the dictionary, later enlarged by others, prepared a spelling-book, and formulated a rude grammar. Mr. Sibley, who came in the fall of the same year, became a warm friend of the Ponds.

The next missionary effort was by appointees of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, best known by the short title “American Board.” These were the Rev. Thomas S. Williamson, missionary and physician; the Rev. Jedediah D. Stevens, missionary; Alexander Huggins, farmer; their wives, and two lady teachers. These arrived at Fort Snelling in May, 1835. Mr. Stevens, who had made a tour of exploration in the country six years before, at once established himself on the northwest margin of Lake Harriet, now in the city of Minneapolis. He built two considerable log houses near the site of the street railroad station, in one of which he opened a school. The nucleus was a number of half-breed daughters of traders and military men, some of whom became highly respected Minnesota women. This school, however, was not the first in Minnesota, if the collection of Indian boys and men gathered by Major Taliaferro on the east bank of Lake Calhoun in 1829, and put to learning the art and mystery of agriculture, may be called a school. Philander Prescott was the teacher, and his pupils numbered twelve; the next year he had one hundred and twenty-five “different scholars.” Within a few days after the arrival of these missionaries a Presbyterian church was organized at Fort Snelling, June 11, the first in Minnesota, with the Rev. Mr. Stevens in charge.

The American Fur Company had an important stockaded post on Lac qui Parle in Chippeway County. The trader there was Joseph Renville, who had been captain in the British frontier service in the War of 1812. He had married a woman of the Sioux by Christian rite, and had a large family growing up. Although Catholic by birth and education, he invited Dr. Williamson to come and establish his mission near him, so that his children might be taught. The mission at Lac qui Parle was thus promptly opened. Dr. Williamson has recorded that this school, begun in his house in July, was the first in Minnesota outside of Fort Snelling. It was continued for many years by his sister, Miss Jane Williamson, who perhaps rendered more lasting service than any of the noble band to which she belonged. After some two years’ study of the Dakota language Dr. Williamson set about what became his life work, the translation of the Holy Scriptures into that tongue. The Rev. Stephen Return Riggs joined the Lac qui Parle mission in 1837, after having studied the Dakota under Samuel Pond. He soon became expert, prepared text-books for the schools, and later edited the Dakota dictionary and grammar, to which all the Sioux missionaries contributed. Mission work begun in 1837 at Kaposia (now South St. Paul) by Methodist preachers, and at Red Wing in 1839 by Swiss Presbyterian evangelists, however praiseworthy for intention, was too early abandoned to have permanent results. Equally transient was the ministration of the Catholic father Ravoux, at Lac qui Parle and Chaska, in 1842. The missions of the American Board to the Minnesota Sioux were maintained until that nation was removed to the Missouri in 1863. The results were sufficient to encourage persistence, in hope of future success, but the great body of the Indians was not affected. For a time this was due to suspicion on the part of the Indians of the sincerity of the missionaries. They could understand the soldier and the trader, but the missionary was a puzzle. He had nothing to sell, he asked no pay for teaching the children, caring for the sick, or preaching the word. Why he should teach a religion of brotherhood, and still keep to himself his household stuff, his little store of food, and his domestic animals, was beyond the comprehension of savages accustomed to communistic life. A greater obstacle lay in the fact that the missionary had first to break down faith in an ancient religion, and the dominance of a body of medicine-men who maintained their cult by a ceremonial interwoven with the whole life and habits of the people. Not less obstructive was the example of most white men known to the Indians,—greedy, dissolute, and licentious.

CHAPTER V
EXPLORATIONS AND SETTLEMENTS

To discover the true source of any of the great rivers of the world, that is, that one of all sources which measured along the axis of its channel is farthest from its mouth, has ever been an alluring problem to the exploring geographer. David Thompson, geographer of the Northwest Company, in the course of a journey of exploration lasting a year and extending to the Missouri River, on April 23, 1798, reached Turtle Lake, four miles north of Lake Bemidji, and believed himself the discoverer of the true source of the Mississippi. Lieutenant Pike was confident that when on the 12th day of February, 1806, he reached the upper Red Cedar (Cass) Lake he was at the “upper source of the Mississippi.” These claims were either not known or not trusted, and a series of expeditions to reach the “true source” of the Mississippi was begun, soon after the military occupation in 1819. Lewis Cass, known best in American history by his national employments as senator, cabinet officer, and foreign minister, had cut such a figure as colonel of an Ohio regiment and brigadier-general in the War of 1812 that the President made him governor of the Territory of Michigan; an office which he held for seventeen years. That territory in 1819 was extended to the Mississippi River. Its governor was naturally curious to see something of this immense addition to his jurisdiction and the great river forming its western bound. He sought and obtained leave to conduct an expedition. An engineer officer, Captain Douglass, was ordered to join it, and Governor Cass employed Henry R. Schoolcraft, of whom we are to hear later, as mineralogist at one dollar and a half a day. Leaving Detroit late in May, 1820, with ten Indians and seven soldiers, in three birch-bark canoes, Cass was at the American Fur Company’s post at Fond du Lac (of Superior) on the 6th of July. He ascended the St. Louis River and took the Savanna portage to Sandy Lake. With a reduced party he pushed up stream through Lake Winnebigoshish to that upper Red Cedar Lake which Pike had seen fourteen years before. Assured that this was the true source of the Mississippi, he ended his journey. Mr. Schoolcraft doubted, but he was too polite to differ openly with his chief. Captain Douglass on his map gave the lake the name “Cassina,” which, shorn of two superfluous syllables, has remained in use. Mr. Schoolcraft wrote a narrative of the expedition which is very pleasant reading. The return journey, beginning July 22, was down the Mississippi to Prairie du Chien and thence to Green Bay by the Fox-Wisconsin portage. At Fort Snelling the party were feasted with fresh vegetables from the post garden. At the Sioux agency, then on the Mendota side of the Minnesota, some chiefs of the Sioux and Chippeways were got together in council and a reluctant consent was obtained to cease from troubling one another. The high contracting parties were content to gratify the white man, but they understood the farcical nature of the convention. Governor Cass reported the cost of the expedition at $6156.40¼.

It seems proper to interpolate here some account of the expedition conducted by Major Stephen H. Long of the topographical engineers of the army, in 1823, to the valleys of the Minnesota and Red rivers. Six years before, that officer had made an uneventful journey to St. Anthony’s Falls, of which he left a graphic and appreciative description. His party, escorted by a detail of soldiers, left Fort Snelling on July 9 with Joseph Renville as interpreter and guide. At Traverse des Sioux, Long abandoned his canoes and set out overland by the well-worn trail for Lake Traverse, where he was welcomed at the headquarters of the Columbia Fur Company. On August 2 Long reached Pembina, where he established a monument to mark a point astronomically determined in the international boundary. His instructions had been to strike east from Pembina and trace the boundary to the Lake of the Woods. This he found to be impracticable. Putting his people into bark canoes, he descended the Red River past Fort Garry to Lake Winnipeg, traversed the south arm of that water, and ascended the Winnipeg River to Rat Portage on the Lake of the Woods.

The homeward journey by the old Dawson route to Lake Superior, along the north shore to the Sault Sainte Marie and thence by the lower lakes and the Erie Canal, was rapidly made without notable incident. Professor William H. Keating of the University of Pennsylvania, who was geologist of the expedition, published a narrative abounding in varied and interesting knowledge. It will ever remain indispensable to the historian of the period and region.

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.

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.

The dominating feature of Governor Ramsey’s territorial governorship was the extinguishment of the Indian title of occupancy to all the lands of the Sioux in Minnesota, except the small reservations. No time was lost by interested parties in impressing on Mr. Ramsey the importance of increasing the area of settlement in his territory. Land speculators and lumbermen desired an enlargement of their spheres of operation. The Indian traders, who in previous years would have opposed a treaty of cession, were at this time, under changed circumstances, eager. The hunting of wild animals for their pelts had greatly reduced their numbers, so that the trade had dwindled. The prospect of profits in land speculation appeared likely to exceed those of Indian trading. The traders also were of opinion that it was about time for a substantial liquidation of Indian debts due them. The half-breeds and squaw men had, as we shall see, a strong desire for a treaty. Moved by what seemed a general demand, Governor Ramsey recommended to the first territorial legislature that they memorialize Congress to provide for a treaty of cession with the Sioux. That body promptly complied. The commissioner of Indian affairs had meantime been interested to such a degree that he arranged for a treaty, and to pay the expenses out of funds already at his disposal. He appointed as commissioners to conduct the negotiation Governor Ramsey, being already superintendent ex-officio of Indian affairs in his territory, and the Hon. John Chambers of Iowa, and furnished them a body of instructions, which served more than the immediate purpose. He restricted their expenditure for presents to $6000. The Sioux were summoned by runners to come in to council in October. The commissioner of Indian affairs was precipitate. The traders were not quite ready, and there were prominent citizens in St. Paul who feared that a big cession of Indian lands west of the river might give Mendota a dangerous precedence. But few of the Sioux came in, and they were unwilling to treat. The effort aborted. Its success might have secured for Governor Ramsey political rewards for which he had to wait. The Indian appropriation bill of 1850, carrying $15,000 for the expenses of treating, was not approved till September 30. The season was too late for the assemblage of the Indians, widely scattered on their fall hunts. Then ensued a contention, lasting many months, over the appointment of a colleague to Governor Ramsey for the negotiation of the treaty. At one time it appeared that a trading interest adverse to the American Fur Company had virtually succeeded in securing the appointment of a gentleman from Indiana, on whom it could depend. To dispose of this and other aspirants, an amendment was tacked on to the proper paragraph of the Indian appropriation bill of the session, providing that commissioners making Indian treaties should thereafter be selected from officials of the Indian Bureau, to serve without extra compensation. The contemplated treaty with the Sioux involving a cession of many millions of acres and large disbursements for a long time, the commissioner of Indian affairs, the Hon. Luke Lea of Mississippi, resolved to act in person.

The Minnesota Sioux comprised four of the seven tribes of the nation, and were themselves geographically divided into “upper” and “lower” Sioux. The two upper tribes were the Sissetons and Wahpétons. The former had their villages on lakes Big Stone and Traverse, the latter on the upper reaches of the Minnesota River, with some sandwiching of bands. The lower Sioux were the Medawakantons and the Wah-pé-ku-tes: the villages of the former were strung along the west bank of the Mississippi from Winona to Fort Snelling and on up the Minnesota to Belle Plaine. The Wah-pé-ku-tes dwelt on the headwaters of the Cannon River, in what Nicollet called his “Undine region.” As they were averse, like all barbarians, to having their numbers counted, the Indian Bureau up to the time when all became “annuity Indians” could only guess at the population. Eight thousand was the general estimate at the middle of the century. Each tribe was subdivided into bands of unequal numbers, each under its own chief. The bands of each tribe recognized one of the older and most capable chiefs as their head chief. Wabashaw was head chief of the Medawakantons. The instructions of 1849, already mentioned, charged the commissioners to make but one treaty, advised them to promise no money payments, and forbade them to provide for debts due by Indians to the traders. The reader can surmise why no Indians came to treat.

The new commissioner of Indian affairs did not of course have to instruct himself, and he appears to have relaxed the conditions imposed by his predecessor. At any rate, he soon found out that if he wished to make a treaty it would be necessary for him to pay some money, and to arrange for the payment of traders’ claims. Because of a diversity of these claims against the upper and the lower Sioux it was desired that separate treaties be made. This was conceded. Because the upper tribes were thought to be less opposed to a treaty and a cession, it was decided to begin with them; and those Indians were summoned to council on July 1 at Traverse des Sioux. The commissioners and their party found on their arrival none but those there resident. It was not till the 18th that enough of the upper bands had come in to warrant negotiation. Meantime the disinclination of the Indians had been mitigated by the rations of pork, beef, and flour dispensed by the commissary, and presents to reluctant chiefs. On July 23 the treaty was signed in duplicate. As the chiefs left the table they were “pulled by the blanket” and steered to another, where they touched the pen to a third document, which later became notorious under the name of “the traders’ paper.” The upper Sioux by this treaty sold to the United States all their lands in Minnesota for $1,665,000, except a reservation twenty miles wide straddling the Minnesota River, from Lake Traverse down to the Yellow Medicine River. The principal consideration was an annual payment of $68,000 for fifty years, of which $40,000 was to be cash. The United States also engaged to expend $30,000 for schools, mills, blacksmith shops, and like beneficial purposes, to remove the Indians to their new homes, and to provide them with subsistence for one year. A residue of $210,000 was to be paid to the chiefs in such manner as they should thereafter in open council request, to enable them “to settle their affairs and comply with their present engagements”; in plain English, to pay the claims of the traders. The traders’ paper amounted to an assignment in blank of this whole sum. The schedule of claims was not attached to the paper till the next day. On the question whether the chiefs who signed knew what they were doing, the evidence is conflicting. On August 5 a second treaty, ceding the same lands, was signed at Mendota. The reservation for the lower bands was also on the Minnesota River, extending from the upper reserve down to the neighborhood of New Ulm. Each of the two tribes agreed to pay traders’ claims to the amount of $90,000. The lower Sioux were encouraged to conclude the bargain by a promise that $30,000 out of a $50,000 “education” fund provided for in the treaty of 1837 and never paid, but allowed to accumulate, should be distributed, so soon as the treaty should be signed. The money was paid, and within a week it was in the hands of St. Paul merchants and whiskey sellers; $10,000 or thereabout went for horses. The commissioners congratulated themselves and the country on this magnificent purchase of a region larger than New York, at a cost of the “sum paid in hand.” The annual payments promised would, they figured, be equaled by the interest from the lands.

The treaties awaited the action of the Senate. Before that body convened in the December following, representations were made to the authorities at Washington that a “stupendous fraud” had been practiced on the Sioux. The upper Sioux, inspired by a trader attached to an interest adverse to the American Fur Company, which had not obtained recognition for its claims, were much excited. In December twenty-one chiefs resorted to St. Paul, where they represented to Agent McLean and Governor Ramsey that their signatures to the traders’ paper were obtained by fraud and deceit. They declared that their bands owed no such sums of money, but were willing to pay what sums a fair examination of the claims might prove to be just. The agent promised to report their protest and demands to his superiors, which he did. Governor Ramsey had only to assure the chiefs that as treaty commissioner he had nothing to do with traders’ claims. The money would be paid to their chiefs and braves, and it was for them to dispose of it as they thought proper. When the treaties were laid before the Senate in February, 1852, opposition to ratification at once sprang up, and long delay ensued. It was not any allegations of fraud and deceit which formed the ground of this opposition. It came from Southern senators not willing to extend the area of settlement to the north, on which to build another free state. It was not till June 28 that ratification was voted by a slender majority, and that not till after amendments were made, which opponents believed the Sioux would never agree to. In particular the senators cut out the paragraphs providing for the two reservations, and substituted a provision that the President should select new homes for the Minnesota Sioux outside the ceded territory.

In August Governor Ramsey was authorized to obtain the consent of the Indians to the amendments. This was effected through persons influential among them and without calling general councils of the tribes. The consent of the upper Sioux, however, was not secured till after the execution of a power of attorney to Governor Ramsey, which they were allowed to believe “broke” all former papers, that of the traders in particular. The money appropriated for the immediate payments became available so soon as the Sioux chiefs had signed their ratifications, and Governor Ramsey was designated as disbursing agent and given a credit on the treasury for $593,000. The payments did not begin till November, and then with the lower Sioux. The Wah-pé-ku-te chiefs gave no trouble, but signed their joint receipt for $90,000 of “hand money,” and a power of attorney to Mr. Sibley to receive the money and distribute it to their licensed traders. The seven Medawakanton chiefs would not sign receipts till after they had been encouraged by the distribution of $20,000 in equal sums, deducted from the amount of traders’ claims. Some minor enticements contributed. At “The Traverse,” a fortnight later, “a very evil and turbulent spirit” was manifest. The chiefs demanded the money “for settling their affairs” to be paid to them. They would then decide “in open council” how it should be distributed. Mr. Ramsey was firm, and held them to the terms of the traders’ paper, which he considered an irrevocable contract. The local Sissetons were so riotous that a company of troops had to be summoned from Fort Snelling to keep them in order. After much delay and no little effort he was able to obtain twelve signatures to a receipt for the money to go to traders, but only two of the names were those of old and well-recognized chiefs, and only one that of a signer of the treaty of 1851. The moneys thus secured to the traders, and some moderate gratifications to the half-breeds, were, with the exception of the $90,000 paid the Wah-pé-ku-tes, delivered by Governor Ramsey to one Hugh Tyler, a citizen of Pennsylvania holding powers of attorney. This gentleman distributed according to the schedules of the traders’ papers, retaining by their consent the sum of $55,250, about thirteen and one half per cent., as compensation for his services in securing the ratification of the treaties and for other purposes.

Political enemies of Governor Ramsey, and parties dissatisfied with the distribution of moneys under the treaties, laid formal charges and specifications against him before the Senate at the next session, in 1853. Upon the request of that body the President undertook an investigation and appointed two Democratic commissioners. Their report, covering, with testimony and exhibits, 431 octavo pages, was submitted to the Senate in 1854. It was on the whole moderate and even charitable in tone, but conveyed a censure for allowing the Indians to deceive themselves, for not paying strictly in accordance with the terms of the treaties, for use of oppressive measures in securing the receipts of the chiefs, and for allowing Hugh Tyler a percentage not “necessary for any reasonable or legitimate purpose.” The testimony disclosed that some amount of this money had been used as a “secret service fund” to expedite the business. As to the use of money to influence officials, the principal witness for the defense declared that none had gone or would go into the hands of Governor Ramsey, but that as to other officers, he declined to answer. The labored argument of his lawyers served only to darken counsel, when compared with Governor Ramsey’s clear and frank explanation, filed before the investigation was begun.

The report went to the Senate committee on Indian affairs, a Democratic committee of a Democratic Senate. On February 24, 1854, they reported that after a careful examination of all the testimony the conduct of Governor Ramsey was not only free from blame, but highly commendable and meritorious. Thereupon the committee was discharged from further consideration.

The gist of the matter is, that a treaty of cession was much desired by the people of the territory, and intensely by politicians and speculators. It could not have been long delayed. No treaty could be made with these Indians without the active aid and intervention of the traders and half-breeds. Such aid could be had only by paying for it. The device of allowing Indians to stipulate in treaties for the payment to traders of debts due them from individual Indians, as if they were tribal obligations, had long been practiced. But for the machinations of disgruntled parties desirous of being taken into the happy circle of beneficiaries, the scheme might have been worked as quietly and comfortably as usual. An old interpreter says of these treaties that “they were fair as any Indian treaties.” Having undertaken to see that the traders and half-breeds should not go unrewarded for their indispensable services, Governor Ramsey stood by them to the end. The sums paid them were no robbery of the Indians. But for the fact that the treaties of 1851 were the beginning of troubles to be later treated of, they need not have taken so much of the reader’s time.

A few days after Governor Ramsey took up his residence in St. Paul, another citizen established himself in that city of promise. His ambition was not confined to sharing in the unearned increment of a rapidly growing capital city; he wished also to take a part in public affairs. Henry M. Rice, born in 1816 in Vermont, emigrated to Michigan at the age of nineteen, equipped with an academy education and two years of law studies. He came on to Minnesota in 1839, and was employed presently by the Chouteaus of St. Louis, who took over the business of the American Fur Company, to manage their Winnebago and Chippeway trade from Prairie du Chien. In 1847 he became a partner in the business and removed to Mendota, a place much too strait for two such men as himself and Mr. Sibley. Established in St. Paul, Mr. Rice threw himself into every movement and enterprise projected for the development of the town. He generously shared his gains with the public. His personal qualities were such that he could not help desiring public employment and obtaining great success in it. His manners were so gracious and yet not patronizing, that he made friends with all sorts and conditions of men. He divined with an unerring instinct the motives of men and parties, and knew when and how by appropriate suggestion to let them apparently move themselves towards his desired ends. An early example of Mr. Rice’s influence and success may be found in a contract which he obtained in 1850 for collecting vagrant Winnebagoes and returning them to their reservations. The Winnebagoes were a powerful Wisconsin tribe when the white man came, and long after. The government persuaded them to vacate first their mineral lands and later all their lands in Wisconsin, and move to the so-called “neutral ground” in Iowa. This was a strip of territory some twenty miles wide, starting from the northeast corner of Iowa and running south of west to the Des Moines River. The generous presents and annuities required to effect the sale and removal were the ruin of the Winnebagoes. They became idle, dissolute, mischievous. The white settlers could not endure them, and the Indians themselves tired of their confinement to a narrow area. Accordingly in 1846 a treaty was effected for the exchange of the neutral ground for a reservation of eight hundred thousand acres in Northern Minnesota. A tract lying between the Watab and Long Prairie rivers, west of the Mississippi, was obtained from the Chippeways for this purpose.

In the summer of 1848, with the help of traders and the military, the Winnebagoes, by this time sick of their bargain, were put on the road for their new home. Some did not start, others fell out by the way, but a majority of the twenty-five hundred souls were landed at Long Prairie. They liked the new home even less than they expected, and soon began to desert and scatter; some to encamp along the upper Mississippi, some to the neutral ground, others to their ancient country in Wisconsin; and a few are said to have wandered off to the Missouri. Wherever they went they were unwelcome, and the Indian office was flooded with complaints of their depredations and trespasses. Mr. Rice had traded with the Winnebagoes and had so attached them to himself that they had made him their sole commissioner to choose their new Minnesota home. His aid had been called in to persuade them to move. To him now the Whig commissioner of Indian affairs resorted to round up the vagrant Indians and corral them on their proper reservation. He agreed to pay Mr. Rice seventy dollars per head for the service. Meantime Governor Ramsey and Agent Fletcher were occupied with collecting the Indians below, and preparing to transport or march them northward without material expense to the government. Delegate Sibley was supposed to be the proper territorial organ at the seat of government. The feelings of these gentlemen may be imagined when they learned that the “infamous Rice contract,” of which they had not had the least knowledge or suspicion, had been concluded, and Mr. Rice’s agents were on the road. In vain did Governor Ramsey inform the commissioner that he had several hundred ready to march; in vain was Delegate Sibley’s “official protest” against a secret, unconscionable, insulting proceeding. A House committee of investigation exonerated the commissioner, but he took early occasion to resign his office. The point of interest to the Minnesota citizen was not the alleged excessive cost to the government, or the comfort of the Winnebagoes. He was concerned to know who had the greatest pull at Washington, and it appeared to him at the close that a certain private citizen of St. Paul, a Democrat, and not the Whig governor nor the Democratic delegate, was the man to “swing things” there.

In the fall of the same year (1850) came the regular election for delegate to succeed Mr. Sibley upon the expiration of his term. Mr. Rice, who had contested Mr. Sibley’s election in 1848 as delegate from Wisconsin,—with little vigor, however,—was too prudent to come out against one who had brought home the organic act, and made no opposition to Mr. Sibley’s unanimous election as delegate to the Thirty-first Congress, although he organized the democracy of the territory as if for a candidacy. Nor did he personally aspire to the office when Mr. Sibley’s first term was to expire. To defeat that gentleman he virtually dictated the Whig nominee, who had been useful in securing the Winnebago contract, and persuaded the regular Democratic nominee to retire on the eve of election in favor of the Whig candidate.

Mr. Sibley, although a Jeffersonian Democrat dyed in the wool, ran as a people’s candidate. The total vote was 1208; a transfer of 46 votes would have elected the Whig candidate. The accounts of historians, surviving citizens, and the newspapers of the day concur in pronouncing this political campaign the bitterest and most intensely personal ever known in Minnesota. Mr. Sibley’s opponents attacked him as the representative and tool of the American Fur Company, an ancient, shameless, intolerable monopoly. Party lines broke down, and the issue became “Fur versus Anti-Fur.”

Mr. Sibley served through the Thirty-first and Thirty-second Congresses with admirable efficiency. At one time objection was made against his active participation in general legislation, and the suggestion made that a delegate should confine himself to matters concerning his territory. Mr. Sibley replied that Minnesota was part of the United States, and that whatever concerned them concerned her, and claimed for her delegate the right to be heard, and all the more because he had no vote. The matter was dropped. He had little difficulty in obtaining for Minnesota the needful appropriations for her government expenses, roads, and public buildings, and the reservation in 1851 of two sections in each township for common schools, and of two townships of land for the endowment of a university. His most conspicuous act, in the highest degree creditable to him, although barren of results, was his effort to secure the passage of his bill to extend the laws of the land over the Indians. His speech of August 2, 1850, in which he denounced the rascality of the white man’s dealings with the natives, the absurdity of treating with them as separate nations, and their need of the protection of the law, is a splendid testimony to the intelligence and wisdom of the man who doubtless knew more about Indian affairs than any other man on the floor. He spoke to deaf ears. The government went on sowing to the wind, to reap the whirlwind.

Mr. Sibley was permitted to return to private life at the close of his second term and devote himself to closing up his relations with the American Fur Company, of which he had remained the head. Mr. Rice was selected to succeed him by a three fourths majority vote over Alexander Wilkin, his Whig opponent.

CHAPTER VII
TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT

The triumph of the Democratic party in the elections of 1852 was notice to all the appointive territorial officers of Minnesota that their days were numbered. On May 15, 1853, Governor Ramsey gave place to the Hon. Willis A. Gorman, and the Whig judges were succeeded by Messrs. William H. Welch, Andrew G. Chatfield, and Moses G. Sherburne.

The appointment of governor was a disappointment to the friends of Mr. Sibley, who felt that he had good right to aspire to the office. His connection with the now discredited fur company, and his failure to ally himself with the Democratic machine in Minnesota, left the President free to bestow the appointment on some one who had done loyal service in the late campaign. In this regard few were more deserving than Colonel Gorman of Indiana. Born in 1816, he was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty, and three years later became a member of the legislature. At the outbreak of the Mexican War he raised and commanded a battalion of riflemen and later a regiment of infantry. After that war he served two years in Congress, and deserved well of his party. His power upon the stump was enhanced by a graceful personality and a voice of great melody and strength. The affairs of the territory had already been organized and had fallen into an orderly routine, so that Governor Gorman’s administration of four years was not marked by notable executive acts. His messages abound in eloquent passages, generally commendatory of worthy enterprises and objects. The exigencies of politics and business presently put him and Mr. Sibley into the same bed, and affiliated Mr. Ramsey to some degree with Mr. Rice.

Legislative action was devoted mainly to provisions for the needs of a rapidly swelling population and expanding settlements. New counties were organized from year to year, and towns, cities, and villages were incorporated in astonishing numbers. College and university charters were distributed with liberal hand to aspiring municipalities. The disposition of the government appropriation for territorial roads occupied much time of the houses. The commissioners and surveyors employed in laying out the roads, and the contractors who undertook the construction, saw to it that no idle surpluses were left over. Plank-road charters were numerous, but none were ever built. Railroad incorporations occupy great space in the journals and statutes, perhaps because they had been excepted out of the general law of 1851 for the creation of corporations. Ferry privileges were much sought for.

The same conditions governed the activity of Mr. Rice, who took his seat as delegate in Congress in December, 1853. Industrious, persuasive, and soon influential, he promoted in many ways the interests of the territory and his constituents, and by so doing obtained a popularity hardly equaled in Minnesota history. He was diligent in laboring for the extension of the land surveys and the establishment of land offices. He secured the opening of post-offices in the new villages. His influence contributed to the extension of the preëmption system to unsurveyed lands, a change which virtually opened all lands not Indian to settlement. Mr. Rice’s own personal qualities were such as to give him wide acquaintance and influence, and these were extended in no small degree by those of the charming Virginian lady whom he had taken to wife. Standing for reëlection in the fall of 1855, he won by a handsome plurality over his Republican opponent, William R. Marshall, and another Democratic candidate, David Olmstead, supported by the friends of Mr. Sibley.

As the administration of Mr. Ramsey had been signalized by the opening of many millions of acres of Indian lands to white men’s occupation in southern Minnesota, so in Governor Gorman’s day great areas were opened in the Chippeway country of northern Minnesota. It is probable that Mr. Rice, more familiar with the Chippeways than any other public man, was most influential of all in procuring the cessions.

The earliest explorers to the shores of Lake Superior had brought away specimens of native copper and Indian reports of hidden metallic treasure. In 1826 Governor Lewis Cass obtained, by a treaty made at Fond du Lac with the Chippeways, the right of the whites to search for metals and minerals in any part of their vast country. Although no mining development took place, the belief persisted that there was great metallic wealth in the upper lake region. The first cession in the northwest was that of the Chippeways of Lake Superior in September, 1854, of the “triangle” north of the lake, extending westward to the line of the St. Louis and Vermilion rivers, embracing nearly three million acres. This great cession was followed by another still greater, early in 1855. Nearly four hundred townships in the north central part of the state were freed from Indian incumbrance. The two cessions cover nearly one half of the area of the state. It was the lumber interest which desired the acquisition of 1855. On the area liberated stood large bodies of the finest pine forests of America. The current belief was that they could never be exhausted. Of Chippeway country there remained a trapezoidal block in the extreme northwest corner of the state, which was not acquired by treaty until 1863.

In 1851, immediately after the conclusion of the Sioux treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, Governor Ramsey made the long journey from St. Paul to Pembina, and there made a treaty with the local Chippeways for the cession of a great tract. This treaty went in with the Sioux treaties for confirmation and had to be “sacrificed” to secure favorable action by the Senate on them. What “interest” desired the extinction of Indian titles upon such a remote and disconnected area is not well known. Mr. Norman W. Kittson had operated there since 1843, for the American Fur Company. The ratified treaties mentioned left the Chippeways, some ten thousand in number, concentrated on reservations of moderate extent set apart in the ceded territory. These they still occupy, generally in peace, depending largely on their annuities for subsistence. Their progress in civilization and Christianity has been sufficient to keep the missionaries and teachers from giving up in despair. No body of ecclesiastics ever had a more complete rule over a people than the medicine-men of the Chippeway Indians.

An incident of the Chippeway treaty of 1854 must here have mention, at the risk of tedium. As was usual, the half-breeds had to be conciliated by a benefaction to prevent them from dissuading the Indians. It was given them in the shape of an eighty-acre tract in fee simple to each head of a family or single person over twenty-one years of age, of the mixed bloods. This distribution was made and all beneficiaries, three hundred and twelve in number, were satisfied, within two years. Ten years after the negotiation of the treaty an accommodating commissioner of Indian affairs, upon application through Delegate Rice, issued two certificates for eighty-acre tracts to two members of a prominent Minnesota family, mixed bloods of the Chippeways of Lake Superior, who had never lived with those Indians. He also ruled that the grant extended to Chippeway mixed bloods of any tribe wherever resident. To prevent the oversight of any worthy beneficiaries under these rulings, industrious gentlemen at once employed themselves in searching them out and revealing their unsuspected good fortune. “Factories” were established at La Pointe, Wisconsin, Washington, D. C., St. Paul, and in the Red River country, and nearly twelve hundred were discovered. Later examinations of the lists showed that in some cases both man and wife had been reckoned as heads of families; and that the names of some minors, of some Chippeway families with too little white blood to fairly count as “breeds,” and of a few deceased persons had been enrolled. The motive for this extraordinary diligence lay in the fact that the certificates or “scrip” could be used for the location of pine on unsurveyed lands, giving the holder the opportunity of ranging the woods and selecting the most valuable. These certificates the half-breeds were commonly willing to alienate for a small consideration. That they were on their face absolutely unassignable, and so good only in the hands of the beneficiary himself, was no serious obstacle to the ingenious operators. Two powers of attorney, one to locate, the other to sell, served as a virtual conveyance to the speculating lumberman.

James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior in Lincoln’s second administration, put a stop to this pretty game. But his successor, O. H. Browning, yielded to the persuasions of interested parties, and on July 11, 1868, reopened the doors to them. Within a few weeks a prominent citizen filed 315 applications and received 310 pieces of scrip. An investigating committee expressed the opinion that “probably not one of these was valid.” They were good for 24,800 acres of pine. The liberal secretary ruled that they might be located on any lands ceded by the Chippeways by any treaty, and need not be selected on those ceded at La Pointe in 1854. Applications continued to come in. In the following year, 1869, Colonel Ely F. Parker, by birth a Seneca Indian, was made commissioner of Indian affairs. Taking up the applications, he rejected them all and gave notice that no more scrip would issue under the treaty of 1854. Holders of certificates obtained in the manner described were discouraged, but not cast down. They prevailed on the Secretary of the Interior in 1870 to appoint a gentleman of Minnesota a special agent to examine claims. Reporting progress in March, 1871, that agent had found 135 persons entitled to scrip.

Columbus Delano was Secretary of the Interior in the year last mentioned. Assured that the subject of Chippeway half-breed scrip would bear scrutinizing, he appointed the Neal commission. The report of that commission brought the facts above related to the surface. Of the 135 claims reported valid by the late special agent they found two legitimate. They approved eleven out of 495 others presented. The commission also examined 116 “personal applications,” filed in the St. Cloud land office, and these without exception were fraudulent. That number of persons, belonging to a Red River train bivouacked at St. Cloud, had been taken into the land office and steered through the motions of applying for scrip. For this accommodating service they were paid from fifteen to forty dollars apiece. The commission recommended that no more Chippeway half-breed scrip under the treaty of 1854 should be issued, unless by order of Congress, and that the persons who had been guilty of subornation of perjury, forgery, and embezzlement should be prosecuted.

This did not conclude the long drawn out matter. Pieces of scrip accompanied with powers of attorney in blank had been freely bought and sold for use in locating pine. These vouchers fell into the hands of bankers, and represented considerable investments. It seemed a hardship that these holders should suffer loss. On June 8, 1872, Congress passed a bill with the innocent title “An act to quiet certain land titles.” It provided that “innocent parties” holding Chippeway half-breed scrip in good faith, for value, might purchase the corresponding lands at a price to be fixed by the Secretary of the Interior, not less than one dollar and a quarter an acre.

The Jones commission, appointed to ascertain the innocent holders, reported thirteen individuals and firms entitled to the benefits of the act, and approved 216 entries conveying 17,280 acres of the best pine in Minnesota, worth eight to ten dollars an acre. As to the price to be paid, the commissioners advised the department that it would be useless to ask more than two dollars and a half an acre, for if put up at auction, combinations of bidders would hold bids to that figure. The commission vindicated the claimants from any participation in the original frauds, but found that they had been much too careless in their investments, and so had become victims of persons who had “got up a scheme with wonderful prudence and caution.” These victims, thus resorting to Congress for relief, were the sharpest pine land operators ever known in Minnesota.

This recital may teach how and why liberal gratifications were always desired for mixed bloods, when Indian treaties were negotiated.

A contemporaneous operation, similar in its results, took place with the half-breeds of the Sioux nation. Account has already been made of a gift of land which the Sioux were permitted to bestow on their half-breeds in the treaty at Prairie du Chien in 1830. The tract designated, roughly rectangular, long known as the “Wabashaw reservation,” lay on the Mississippi, running down river from Red Wing thirty-two miles, and back into the country fifteen miles. The treaty provided that the President might in his discretion grant title to parcels of one section in fee simple to individual breeds; and it was the expectation of the able men who were working the scheme that they would soon be in possession of extensive properties at slight outlay. Agent Taliaferro, the incorruptible Sioux agent, revealed the plan in so forceful a way that neither President Jackson nor any successor would grant title to individuals. Failure to get possession of land was followed by efforts to get money. The half-breeds had no desire to settle on the reservation. In 1841 the unratified “Doty treaty” with the Sioux included a sum of $200,000 to be paid the breeds for the reservation, which they were to surrender. Again in 1849, when Commissioners Ramsey and Chambers attempted to obtain a treaty of cession of the Sioux, they only succeeded in securing an agreement of the half-breeds to accept some such sum. The Senate refused to ratify. A similar article was injected into the treaties of 1851, and this was rejected by the Senate, to the disappointment of patient waiters.

The matter awaited the intervention of Delegate Rice, whose knowledge and skill in Indian affairs had obtained him influence in Congress. On July 17, 1854, a bill which had been introduced by him, providing for the survey of the Wabashaw reservation in Minnesota, “and for other purposes,” was approved. The “other purpose” was to give the President authority to issue certificates or scrip to individual Sioux half-breeds, under a pro rata division of the tract. These certificates might be located on any lands of the United States, not reserved, unsurveyed lands included. In express terms the law forbade the transfer or conveyance of the scrip. The tract was surveyed, and in the course of two years 640 individual breeds were assigned 480 acres each. Later 37 persons obtained each 360 acres; in all 320,880 acres were disposed of. Very few of the beneficiaries settled on the reservation. In many cases the scrip went to pay traders’ debts, and in many others the beneficiaries got “dogs and cats” for it. White men who had taken half-breed wives profited most. The size of some families is remarkable.

The provision of law that no scrip could be transferred was evaded by the same means as those employed in handling Chippeway half-breed scrip. Two powers of attorney with the necessary affidavits worked a transfer, which the courts sustained. Sioux half-breed scrip which could be located on unsurveyed lands was soon in request, and served the purposes of the well-informed. A batch of it went to California to be located on forest and mineral lands. A moiety was used for the acquisition of town sites in Minnesota in advance of surveys. Another use involving some elasticity of conscience was the acquisition of pine timber without the inconvenience of taking the lands with it. A plan of “floating” scrip was worked out and prosecuted so habitually by men of good report that no dishonor attached to it. The holder of scrip under power of attorney would locate a piece, cut off the pine, and then discover that he had not dealt wisely for his half-breed principal. He would then obtain a cancellation of his location, place his scrip on another piece, and repeat the process until the surveys were made. As late as 1872 the commissioner of public lands issued a circular condemning this practice in vigorous terms.

Soon after the unexampled development of the iron mines in the “triangle” in the middle of the eighties, Sioux half-breed scrip was used to obtain title to lands still unsurveyed in that region, likely to be found iron-bearing. Mr. Vilas, Secretary of the Interior, and his successor decided, in cases referred to them, that this scrip could not pass title, the powers of attorney being but a means to evade the law declaring the scrip to be non-transferable. A long series of litigations followed, concluded by the Supreme Court decision of 1902 (183 U. S. 619), holding those powers of attorney to work a valid conveyance. The title to many millions worth of mining property was thus quieted.

It may here be noted that in 1855 the Winnebagoes, discontented with their homes in the Long Prairie reservation, were glad to exchange it for one of eighteen miles square, south and east of Mankato, whither they removed in the same year. The new reservation being less than one fourth the area of the old, a large addition was made to white man’s country.

Of all the developments in the time of Governor Gorman none equaled in importance the phenomenal increase of population. The census of 1850 showed a total of 6077 souls in the nine counties of the territory, 4577 of them in three counties. Pending the negotiation, amendment, and ratification of the Sioux treaties of 1851 the accessions were small.

It was late in the season of 1853 when the bands of the upper and lower Sioux were established on their reservations on the upper Minnesota. Some adventurous prospectors had not waited for them to abandon their villages on the Mississippi, but had staked out claims in their corn and bean patches. There may have been 10,000 whites when the Indians had departed.

In the early summer of 1854 the Rock Island and Pacific Railroad was built through to the Mississippi. The event was celebrated by a grand excursion from Chicago to St. Paul and Fort Snelling. Five steamers carried the party from Rock Island up the river. Among the guests were statesmen, divines, college professors, and eminent men of affairs. At the reception in St. Paul addresses were made by ex-President Fillmore and George Bancroft the historian. This excursion, widely heralded, gave notice that Minnesota was in steam communication for half the year. That year saw the arrival of the advance guard of the host to follow. The season of 1855 saw 50,000 people in the territory; that number was doubled in 1856. The sales of public lands, which in 1854 had been but 314,715 acres, rose to 1,132,672 in the next year, and to 2,334,000 in 1856. These figures indicate that the people came to stay and cultivate the soil. The Middle States sent the largest contingent, next the Northwestern States, and then New England. The prairie lands, if broken early, would yield a crop of sod corn the same year, and in any case returned a bounteous harvest in the second year.

In a time incredibly short these pioneers, rudely housed and their animals sheltered, were surrounded by all solid comforts. They lost no time in starting their schools, churches, and other associations. Minnesota was hardly ever missionary ground for white people.

The establishment of steam communication for the summer season made the “territorians” of Minnesota feel the more keenly the isolation in the long winters. Governor Gorman in his first message (January 11, 1854) said: “To get out from here during the winter ... is far above and beyond any other consideration to the people of Minnesota. To accomplish this you must concentrate all the energies of the people on one or two roads, and NO MORE for the present. I have but little doubt that Congress will grant us land sufficient to unlock our ice-bound home, if we confine our request to one point.” This wise counsel had its effect on the legislature. On February 20 Joseph R. Brown introduced into the council a bill to incorporate the “Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad Company,” which was presently passed by that body, but by no large majority. In the house lively opposition sprung up, and dilatory proceedings delayed passage till the last night of the session (March 3). Governor Gorman gave it a reluctant approval because he had been allowed but sixty-five minutes before the expiration of the session to examine its provisions. It is quite remarkable that a bill of such importance, the talk of the town, had escaped his notice. The act authorized the chartered company to build and operate a railroad from the head of Lake Superior via St. Paul to Dubuque, Iowa, within a specified term of years. The franchise was to be void unless the first board of directors should be organized on or before the first day of July following.

The real ground of opposition in the legislature, and of Governor Gorman’s reluctance, lay in a provision, “that any lands granted to the said territory to aid in the construction of said railroad shall be and the same are hereby granted in fee simple, absolute, without further act or deed,” to said company. There was ambiguity in the paragraph relating to the northern terminus, leaving it in doubt whether that might not be located outside of Minnesota. It was suspected that the intention was to place it at Bayfield, Wisconsin, where influential persons had made purchases of real estate. It remained to secure from Congress the much needed and hoped for land grant. A bill to grant even number sections of public lands for six sections in width on both sides of the proposed railroad line, so drawn as to allow the grant to pass to the company chartered by the Minnesota territorial legislature, was introduced in the House on March 7. The Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, warmly recommended its passage because of the service the road would render in transporting troops, munitions of war, and mail.

The proposition to grant a million acres and more to so remote and thinly settled a territory at once aroused inquiry and opposition. The policy of granting public lands for building railroads was still novel; there were but three precedents, that of the Illinois Central grant of 1850 being the oldest. The measure, however, had its friends, and the opponents were driven to the device of killing the bill by amendments. And they succeeded. Presently came a revulsion. Members from the South and West regretted that the railroad land grant policy had received so rude a backset. There was no little sympathy for Minnesota, struggling for an open road and a market. Another effort was resolved upon. Mr. Sibley, then in Washington, drew a new bill identical in the main with that which had been put to sleep, but so changed as to vest the grant in the territory and leave its disposition to the next or a later legislature. This bill was passed and approved on June 29.

The incorporators named in the Minnesota act creating the Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad Company met in New York on July 1, on one day’s notice, and “organized” by the election of a board of directors. The board immediately elected the necessary officers and took the proper resolutions for beginning their enterprise. On the 24th of July it was charged on the floor of the House of Representatives at Washington that the “Minnesota bill” had been mutilated after its passage by the House, so that the Senate had really passed a differing bill. The effect of the change (simply the word “and” written over an erasure of the word “or”) had the effect to vest the lands granted in the Minnesota corporation; just what Congress had intended not to do. An abortive investigation followed, and the mutilated bill was repealed by a section added to a private bill to increase a certain pension, pending in the Senate, and awaiting third reading. This action was of course disappointing to the railroad company and those friendly to it. Delegate Rice was of opinion that the alteration of “or” to “and” was purely verbal and immaterial, and eminent attorneys advised the company that a grant having been made for sufficient considerations, it had become an irrevocable contract. The pretended repeal, therefore, was void. To test this question a case entitled The United States vs. The Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad Company was brought before the district court of Goodhue County, asking the award of damages for certain oak trees felled on land belonging to the government. The defense contended that no damages were done, because it had cut the trees on land granted by Congress by the act of June 24, 1854. The issue was, of course, the constitutionality of the repealing act. The court held the act void, and the Supreme Court of the territory sustained that judgment before the end of the year. This was very encouraging to the company, but their joy was presently changed to sorrow. When the Attorney-General of the United States learned from the newspapers of this litigation, and of a suit brought in behalf of the United States without his knowledge or authority, he removed the accommodating district attorney from office (December 30, 1854), and later discontinued the suit.

When the legislature of 1855 convened, on January 3, the company, sustained by the Supreme Court of the territory, was in a position to approach that body with confidence. Its affairs now entered more fully than ever into territorial politics, and it is only on this account that further notice of them is taken. Mr. Rice, supported by Mr. Ramsey, a director of the company, championed the railroad cause. Governor Gorman and Mr. Sibley led the opposition forces. The former in his message denounced the “or” and “and” jugglery, and the latter, as chairman of the judiciary committee of the lower house, framed a damaging report which called for a memorial to Congress to annul the charter of the company granted by the Minnesota legislature March 3, 1857. The memorial was not voted, but the national House of Representatives by resolution of January 29 decided, for its part, to annul. The Senate did not concur, and Delegate Rice was comforted. When the news reached St. Paul on March 24 the whole town was illuminated.

The charter of the company provided that unless fifty miles of road should be completed within one year the franchise should be forfeited. An extension of time and certain modifications were necessary. A bill granting these was passed by sufficient majorities. Governor Gorman vetoed it in a message of great sharpness, closing with an insinuation that the “money-king” had had more than his share of influence. The houses by exact two thirds votes passed the bill over the executive veto. Mr. Sibley and his friends had to content themselves with a personal memorial to Congress, which his biographer declares to be unequaled “for fearless and burning exposure of wrong and perfidy, in the annals of any territory or state.” The company had been let to live, but it was obliged to apply to the next legislature (1856) for a further lease of life. This was accorded by good majorities in both houses. Again Governor Gorman interposed his objections, declaring it futile to extend the life of the corporation. A new bill, drawn in such manner as to obviate the executive criticisms, was passed by a close vote at the end of the session. The bill received the reluctant approval of the governor. Three successive legislatures having sustained the company’s charters, he acquiesced, with slight confidence, however, in its professions.

The company now made a second resort to the courts to establish its claim to the grant of June 29, 1854. One of its directors, having bought of the United States a piece of land in Dakota County, brought suit against the railroad company for trespass. The district and supreme courts of the territory gave judgment for the defendant company, holding that it had good title to the land grant and therefore was not guilty of the alleged trespass. Before entry of judgment, however, in the latter court, the case was removed to the United States District Court; and this tribunal also found for the defendant. The Supreme Court of the United States, on writ of error from below, in December, 1861, disposed of the case by deciding (two justices dissenting) that the act of Congress of June 29, 1854, vested in the Territory of Minnesota no more than a naked trust or power, which could be and was revoked by the repealing act. The territorial legislature had exceeded its power in attempting to vest title in fee simple in the railroad company.

It was in the period now in view that Minneapolis, which has become the largest Minnesota city, had its beginning. The military reservation of Fort Snelling as delimited by Major Plympton in 1839 comprised, as was guessed, about 50,000 acres. The surveys made in later times show nearly 35,000 acres. So soon as it became known that a treaty of cession would be exacted from the Sioux, it was believed by the neighboring residents that Fort Snelling would be abandoned and the reservation opened for settlement. In 1849, when the first attempt was made on the Sioux, Robert Smith of Alton, Illinois, a member of Congress, having a “pull” at Washington, got leave of the War Department to lease the government mill at the Falls of St. Anthony on the west side. Later this concession ripened into a purchase of a quarter section abutting on the cataract. In the next year John H. Stevens, acting for himself and another, had similar leave granted to occupy the river front above the Smith claim, on condition of operating a ferry, free to government, at the falls. In the next year, 1851, a number of citizens of St. Anthony, already a thriving village of some six hundred people, thought it would be well to establish inchoate claims on some of the beautiful terraces which lay in view from their homes, beyond the river. They accordingly crossed over, staked out quarter sections as well as possible in the absence of surveys, built claim shanties, and had some plowing done. Still another year later, 1852, when in midsummer the Sioux treaties and amendments had been ratified and it was evident that the Sioux must soon move towards the sunset, and that the military reservation would be given up and opened to settlement, there took place a wild rush of St. Anthony men across the stream to seize on the coveted lands. It was not long till the whole terrain of Minneapolis was covered with claims. The action of Congress ordering a survey of the reserve expedited these irregular preëmptions.

The expectations of the squatters were so far met that on August 26, 1852, Congress authorized the “reduction” of the reserve, and the survey and sale of the excluded area. Two years passed before the surveys were completed and the lands advertised for sale. It was not desired that haste be made. On the completion of the surveyor’s work, the squatters formed a so-called “Equal Rights and Impartial Protection Claim Association of Hennepin County, M. T.,” the prime object of which was to adjust the numerous tracts of claimants to the lines of survey. This was effected by the action of an executive committee allowed to use discretion and guaranteed support. There was a second use for this organization. There was a considerable area east of the Mississippi left outside the boundary of the reduced reserve. This had been offered for sale in the usual subdivisions in September, 1854, at public auction. There was but one bidder, and he was surrounded by interested citizens who would have made it uncomfortable for any other person who might thoughtlessly inject a superfluous bid and mar the harmony of the occasion. The government got $1.25, the minimum price for wild lands, for property worth easily ten times that sum, and nobody’s conscience was strained. In anticipation of a public sale of the main portion of the reserved lands on which Minneapolis has been built, the claim association mentioned was prepared, by similar proceedings, to prevent any speculators (others than themselves) from depriving them of their rights by offering to pay value for the lands. But the plats were by some unknown influence held back in Washington and the sale was postponed. When Congress assembled in December, 1854, a strong delegation of claimants appeared in Washington and secured further postponement of the public sale. Delegate Rice took up their cause with vigor and presently obtained the passage of an act granting preëmption right to all who might comply with preëmption conditions. In the spring of 1855 the fortunate claimants proved up, and the government received $24,688.37 for 19,733.87 acres of land worth more than $200,000. There is a tradition, lacking support by particular facts, that military officers in the neighborhood profited by arrangements with squatters, who agreed to divide spoils in consideration of being left undisturbed on their claims. Citizens not having such arrangements were discouraged, and in some cases driven off by force.

The nucleus of Minneapolis was well crystallized in 1855. The United States land office was established, the first bridge over the Mississippi in all its length was built, the first town plat surveyed, and one hundred houses built. (In 1854 there were but twelve scattered claim shanties.) Seventeen stores and artisans’ shops in many lines sprang up. There was a hotel, a newspaper, and four organized churches. Minneapolis existed under town government till 1867, and in 1872 was united with St. Anthony, the latter city losing its historic name. The name Minneapolis is a variant on Min-ne-ha-polis, proposed by Charles Hoag. After this “reduction” of the Snelling reservation, its area covered 7916 acres, as shown by later surveys.

The story of the clandestine sale of the whole by Buchanan’s secretary of war in the spring of 1857, while abounding in incident, was too slight in its results to call for complete narration. It is probably not true that this sale was part of a scheme attributed to Floyd, to squander the military resources of the North in anticipation of a rebellion of the South. H. M. Rice interested himself in getting the necessary legislation and orders for the sale. The whole tract was sold for $90,000, of which one third was paid down. The purchaser defaulted on the remainder, and the government resumed possession at the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1872 the claims of the purchaser for his equity and rentals were adjusted by a board of military officers, which awarded him 6,394.80 acres, the government retaining 1,521.20 acres. It has been found necessary to repurchase some of the alienated land for the uses of the garrison.

In the winter of 1857 a bill to move the capital to St. Peter was passed in both houses of the legislature. Joseph Rolette of Pembina, chairman of the council committee on enrollment, absented himself with the bill till after the close of the session. The speaker signed a substituted copy, but the president of the council refused. Governor Gorman approved, but the Supreme Court held that no law had been passed.

CHAPTER VIII
TRANSITION TO STATEHOOD

In his message of January, 1853, Governor Ramsey had prophesied a population of more than half a million in ten years. Governor Gorman, in a message three years later, figuring on an increase of 114 per cent. in the previous year, advised the legislature that they might expect a population of 343,000 in two years, and 750,000 one year later.

In the course of that year the newspapers began to discuss the question of statehood, and when the legislature of 1857 assembled, Governor Gorman’s proposition to call a convention without awaiting the initiative of Congress received early consideration. A bill to provide for a census and a constitutional convention was passed by large majorities in both houses, but seems to have been lost by the enrolling committee of the council, and was not presented for executive approval. Pending action on this bill the houses passed a memorial to Congress praying for an enabling act. Delegate Rice, much too enterprising a politician to neglect his duty to constituents desirous of statehood, early in the session of 1857 had introduced a bill to enable the people of Minnesota to organize as a state and come into the Union. Besides a little pleasantry about the formation of a sixth state in part out of the old Northwest Territory, while the ordinance of 1787 had provided for five only, there was no opposition to the bill in the House. It found, however, a hard road to travel in the Senate. The ostensible ground of opposition was that the bill allowed white inhabitants of the territory, aliens and all, to vote for delegates to the convention. An amendment to confine the suffrage to citizens of the United States prevailed by a close vote on a late day in February. In this amendment it was known the House would not concur, and the opposition were content. A reconsideration was obtained, however, by the friends of the bill, and a long debate followed, in the course of which the actual ground of opposition was revealed. The “equilibrium of the Senate” was threatened, and might be destroyed by the senators the new state should elect. Regret was expressed that Iowa and Wisconsin had been admitted as states, and one senator revived a letter of Gouverneur Morris in which that statesman denied the right of Congress to admit new states on territory acquired after the adoption of the constitution.

The alien suffrage amendment, however, was rescinded, and the bill as it came from the House passed by a vote of 31 to 22; every negative vote came from south of Mason and Dixon’s line. It may be conjectured that the object of the Minnesota legislature in nursing along its bill to form a state government without an enabling act of Congress was to let Congress know that its action was not indispensable.

The enabling act as passed February 26, 1857, was in the form which had become traditional, and embodied the usual grants of public lands for schools, a university, and public buildings. The boundaries of the proposed state were those of the territory except that on the west, which was drawn in from the Missouri River to the line of the Red, thus reducing the area about one half. Revised computations give Minnesota 84,287 square miles, or about 54,000,000 acres.

The act provided for an election of delegates to a convention on the first Monday in June, under the existing election laws of the territory. An ambiguous clause authorizing the election of “two delegates for each representative,” according to the apportionment for representatives to the territorial legislature, ignoring councilors as such, became the occasion of trouble. The Minnesota legislature, in an act of May 23, appropriating $30,000 for the expenses of the convention, provided that each council district should have two delegates, and each representative district also two. The number of delegates was thus fixed at 108, instead of 68.

Governor Gorman on April 27 called a special session of the legislature to take any necessary action regarding the coming convention, and to dispose of a railroad land grant which Congress had made. This will engage attention later. Governor Gorman, however, did not officially survive to coöperate in the making of the state constitution. Mr. Rice, warmly attached to President Buchanan, who had come into office in March, would, it was well known, secure Governor Gorman’s early retirement to private life. They had not been of much comfort to one another in railroad and other matters. Governor Gorman resigned, and was succeeded by the Hon. Samuel Medary of Ohio, who had done good party service through his newspaper and otherwise. He was a gentleman of excellent character, but remained in Minnesota too short a time to identify or even acquaint himself with her people and interests.

The Whigs had never been strong in the territory, nor well organized. The “Moccasin Democracy” had become habituated to control, and expected indefinite enjoyment of official emoluments. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill by Congress on May 26, 1854, rudely disturbed this pleasant dream. A new party of protest against the introduction and maintenance of African slavery in the territories, under active national protection, sprang into being. A Republican convention met in St. Paul, July 28, 1855, adopted a platform, and nominated candidates for territorial offices. It also nominated the leader of the movement, William R. Marshall, to succeed Mr. Rice as delegate to Congress. Mr. Rice had too many electors personally attached to himself to be beaten. It has been thought, however, that Marshall might have won but for a “prohibition” plank in the platform, which lost him the German vote. At the election of 1856 the Republicans obtained a working majority in the lower house of the legislature to meet in the following winter. As the day drew on for the election of delegates to the convention both parties were anxious about the result. The Democrats held on to the hope of recovering control; the Republicans were none too confident that they could hold their slight balance of power. The issue was declared by the leading Democratic newspaper to be “White Supremacy versus Nigger Equality.” The vote was unexpectedly light, and the results were not clearly decisive. In a few districts “councilor” delegates had been distinguished on the ballots from “representative” delegates; in most cases they had not. In the St. Anthony district the canvassing officer gave certificates of election to Republican candidates who had received fewer votes than the Democratic, on the ground that the Democratic ballots had not distinguished the nominees for councilor and representative delegates.

The control of the convention would, it was maintained, depend on the action of the committee on credentials to be appointed by the presiding officer. To capture the “organization” became the object of each of the nearly balanced parties. It chanced that the enabling act had not specified the hour for the assemblage of the convention. The excited and suspicious leaders were unable to agree informally. To make sure of being on hand the Republican delegates repaired to the capitol late on the Sunday night preceding the first Monday in June, and remained there, as one of them phrased it, “to watch and pray for the Democratic brethren.” These did not appear till a few moments before twelve o’clock noon of the appointed day. Immediately upon their entrance in a body into the representatives’ hall Charles L. Chase, secretary of the territory and a delegate, proceeded to the speaker’s desk and called to order. At the same moment John W. North, a Republican delegate, designated by his colleagues, called to order. A motion to adjourn was made by Colonel Gorman, and the question was taken by Chase, who declared it carried. The Democrats left the hall to the Republicans, who proceeded to organize the convention. Fifty-six delegates presented credentials in proper form and took their oaths to support the constitution of the United States.

At noon of Tuesday the Democratic delegates assembled about the door of the hall, and, finding it occupied by citizens who refused to give them place, met in the adjacent council chamber and proceeded to organize the convention. Henry H. Sibley was made chairman, on motion of Joseph R. Brown, and later became president of the body. From that day till the close of their labors, August 28, the two conventions sat apart. St. Anthony was represented by six delegates in each, so that the whole number participating was one hundred and fourteen. Their proceedings, published in separate volumes, show a commendable diligence in business. An undue amount of time was given to oratory in defense of the legitimacy of the respective moieties.

As the delegates had for examples the constitutions of all the states carved out of the Northwest Territory, and in particular of the very recent ones of Wisconsin and Iowa, the task of framing the various articles was not burdensome. Most of them were adopted, with little or no debate, as reported from the standing committees. The Republicans refused by a two-thirds vote to tolerate negro suffrage. A proposition to submit to Congress the division of the existing territory by an east and west line on the latitude of 45° 15′, or 45° 30′, was much discussed in both bodies. It was so much favored by the Republicans that a change of three votes would have given it a majority. The Democrats, attached to St. Paul and strong in the northern counties, gave the scheme slight support.

The absurdity of the situation was apparent, but pride restrained both bodies from taking a first move towards coalescence. At length on the 8th of August Judge Sherburne, a member of the Democratic convention, highly respected by Republicans as well, proposed the appointment of conferees to report a plan of union. The venerable jurist saw his resolution indefinitely postponed, after a debate abounding in heroic rhetoric. Two days after, the Republicans passed a preamble and resolutions in the exact terms of those of Judge Sherburne and sent them to President Sibley. A select committee, headed by Gorman, advised that no communication could be entertained which questioned the legal status of the Democratic body. The report was unanimously adopted.

By this time the Republican delegates had found themselves at a certain disadvantage, from which relief was to many very desirable. The Democratic treasurer of the territory had refused to honor their pay accounts, and they were serving the public at their own expense. Doubtless from extraneous overtures made by them, the two bodies on the morning of August 18 adopted resolutions to appoint conferees. These were immediately named and began their duties. By this time all the necessary articles had been drafted, and as both bodies had drawn from the same sources the conference committee had an easy task. Those wrought out by the Democratic delegates, who were the older and more experienced men, were chiefly adopted. When Judge Sherburne on August 27 laid before the Democratic convention the report of the conferees, with the comforting assurance that it was composed of the Democratic material “almost altogether,” the chair was obliged to exercise no little firmness to restrain a turbulent opposition. A test vote showed a majority of more than three fourths for adoption. The final vote went over.

The next morning, August 28, both bodies agreed to the report without amendment. There was some resistance in the Republican end, but it gave way when a leader assured the dissentients that they had a dose to swallow, and they might as well shut their eyes and open their mouths and take it. Two copies were made of the one constitution thus agreed to, one of which was signed by the officers and members of each body respectively. The Republican manuscript remains in the state archives. Joseph R. Brown expressed the opinion that the split into two bodies had been economical. Had the convention met in one body, the orators by their revilings and vituperations would have prolonged the session till the end of the year and the expenses would have been doubled. Spite of the generous endeavor of this delegate, the Democrats refused to agree that the Republicans should draw their pay. A subsequent legislature provided for them. Both parties were quite content with the constitution; the Democrats for what they had conserved, the Republicans for germs of future development.

The boom period which culminated in 1857 was nowhere more exuberant than in Minnesota. The swelling tide of population of the previous two years had brought in a body of speculators who presently gorged themselves with the unearned increments of land and town lot values. The whole population caught the fever and bought for the expected rise. The country people found ready sale for produce in the growing towns, and the merchants profited by their prosperity. The resulting elation and extravagance were at no time more abounding than in the closing days of the constitutional convention.

It was the 24th of August when the failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of New York precipitated the liquidation of incredibly multiplied credits in the East. A week later the tardy mails brought the news to St. Paul, and nowhere in the country did the panic strike with greater violence. The little money, real and promissory, sank out of sight. Deposits ceasing, the banks suspended. Eastern exchange rose to ten per cent. Assignments, foreclosures, attachments, and executions made law practice the only profitable pursuit. The horde of speculators who had infested the towns and villages abandoned their holdings and made their escape. According to J. Fletcher Williams, the lamented historian of St. Paul, that city lost fifty per cent. of its population. From the crest of a high wave of fancied opulence, the new state was thus suddenly plunged into a deep trough of adversity and despondence; and it was a long day before she rose to the level of normal prosperity.

The keenest of all disappointments was the postponement of railroad building. A score or more of chartered companies could not borrow enough ready cash to pay for their surveys. A generous congressional act of 1857, engineered by Delegate Rice, had made the Minnesotians of all classes joyous. That act bestowed on the territory and expectant state a grant of public lands equal to nearly a ninth of its whole area, to aid in the building of railroads. It is probable that this benefaction was all the more willingly bestowed because the territory had three years before been deprived of a noble grant by no fault of her own. The act did not convey the lands to the state, but made the state a trustee for four different railroad “interests” each aspiring to build its portion of a system of roads coextensive with the state.

The legislature of 1857, in the extra session already mentioned, accepted the trust created by the congressional grant, recognized the four companies to construct each its part of the system, and pledged to each its allotted lands as they should be earned by the completion of successive twenty-mile stretches of road. With a bird in the bush the Minnesota people were childishly happy. They saw a thousand miles of railway as good as built, spreading population far and wide and carrying the produce of an empire to waiting markets.

It was a good fortune for the territory that the organic law gave it no power to run in debt. It was equally unfortunate that a corporation created by it could and did run in debt. In the same February of 1851 in which Delegate Sibley secured from Congress the reservation of the two townships of land to endow a university, the Minnesota legislature created the University of Minnesota, to be located at or near St. Anthony’s Falls. The act provided for a board of twelve regents to be elected by the legislature in joint session, in classes for six-year terms. The gentlemen immediately elected, among them Sibley, Ramsey, Rice, North, and Marshall, commanded, as they deserved, the confidence of the people. The board organized on the last day of May, 1851, and resolved to open a preparatory department as soon as possible. One of their number, Franklin Steele, gave a bunch of lots in St. Anthony’s Falls near the site of the well-known Winslow Hotel, later occupied by the Northwestern Industrial Exposition building; others subscribed money; and a few books were thrown in to be the nucleus of the library. In a wooden building 30 by 50 feet, two stories and a basement, the preparatory school was opened on November 26. It continued a useful existence till the close of 1854. By this time the regents, among whom there had been changes of personnel, became desirous to open the “university proper.” In that year they had located through competent experts several thousand acres of the lands reserved by Congress on the best pine in the Stillwater district. The lands they could not sell, but they did despoil them by selling the “stumpage,” and used the money as collected for university purposes. They bought the heart of the present campus, twenty-five acres, more or less, for $6000, paying cash $1000 and giving their notes for the remainder. The stumpage receipts were too small and came in too slowly to warrant large expenditures for development. On February 28, 1856, the legislature authorized the regents to borrow $15,000 on twelve per cent. bonds secured by mortgage on the campus; $5000 to pay the balance due on the campus, $10,000 for a building. In August of the same year the board, much deteriorated by a late election, voted by a majority of one to close a contract for a building to cost $49,000, to be completed within eighteen months. When a year later, almost to a day, the panic struck, the building was nearly complete and large sums were due the contractors. The sales of pine stopped and collections for previous sales ceased. The concern was bankrupt and so remained for nearly a decade. A paragraph of the state constitution, retained against no slight opposition, confirmed the location of the university and devolved all university lands and endowments then existing or to be thereafter granted on the “University of Minnesota.”

The closing year of Minnesota’s territorial existence was diversified by an Indian butchery, horrible indeed in its immediate incidents, but especially noteworthy for its contribution to later atrocities. For many years a renegade band of the Wah-pé-ku-te tribe of the Sioux had wandered in the Missouri valley under the leading of one Inkpaduta (Scarlet Point). In the spring of 1857 these Indians were hunting in northwestern Iowa, and on March 6 or 7 fell upon the little settlement of Spirit Lake in Henderson County, murdered some forty persons, as estimated, and carried four women into captivity. Marching on the little hamlet of Springfield, some fifteen miles to the north, in Martin County, Minnesota, they found but few victims, because a refugee from Spirit Lake had arrived before them. The news of these outrages did not reach Agent Flandrau at the Lower Sioux agency till the 18th. Upon his requisition, Captain Alexander Bee, commanding the little garrison at Fort Ridgely, with his company of infantry, led a lively but fruitless pursuit of Inkpaduta, who had gone off to the Missouri. It was well understood that so long as the miscreant held the four women, no punishment could be inflicted on him. In May two young annuity Sioux, who had been hunting westward, brought one of the women (Mrs. Markle) into the agency. They had bought her with their horses and guns, and asked $500 each as reward, which Agent Flandrau and Missionary Riggs paid, half in cash and half in a promissory bond of extraordinary character which the traders cashed. This generosity had its intended effect to call out volunteers for the rescue of the other captives. Two capable Christian Sioux were selected, furnished with transportation and plenty of Indian goods and sent out. After six days’ march they came upon the dead body of one of the women, and presently learned that another had been put to death. In a camp of Yanktons they found the fourth, Miss Gardiner, and bought her for two horses, seven blankets, two kegs of powder, a box of tobacco, and some trinkets. Only one half of the $10,000 appropriated by the Minnesota legislature was needed to cover the cost of these rescues.

The Indian authorities, local and national, now resolved to visit Inkpaduta with just punishment, and decided upon the plan of enlisting volunteers among the annuity Sioux to pursue and capture the scoundrel and his band. Few or none offered themselves. Summer came on and 5000 Indians had gathered about the agencies for the annual payment. A number of councils were held, in the course of which the agent threatened to withhold the payments until Inkpaduta had been brought in. This threat had some effect, but presents of blankets and provisions had more. At length, on the 22d of July, an expedition of 106 Indians and four half-breeds was started for the James River country. It returned August 3, bringing two women and a child as prisoners, but no Inkpaduta. In vain did Major Cullen, superintendent of Indian affairs for the territory, who had come to the Sioux agencies, insist that Inkpaduta should be brought in, and by the Indians themselves, and declare that there would be no payment of money, goods, or provisions till the murderers should be in his hands. The Sioux, although by this time on the verge of starvation, would not stir. They were sullen and defiant. A special agent sent from Washington advised the superintendent to make believe that the Indians had done all they could, and might therefore be paid off. It was late in September when the Indians got their money and goods and marched off to their fall hunts. They had had their way with the agents of the Great Father, and suspected that he was not so powerful as they had been told he was. He had not been able to run down Inkpaduta and his little band. What could he do against the great Sioux nation of many thousands?

The new constitution of Minnesota closed with a supplementary “schedule” of provisions temporary in nature. All territorial rights, actions, laws, prosecutions, and judgments were to remain in force until proper action under state authority. All territorial officers were to continue their duties until superseded by state authority. A referendum of the constitution was ordered for October 13 (1857), at which time all the officers designated by the constitution were to be elected under the existing territorial election law. Every free white male inhabitant of full age, who should have resided in the state for ten days before the election, was authorized to vote. Section four of the enabling act required the United States marshal, so soon as the convention should have decided in favor of statehood and admission, to take a census of the population. This was not completed during the life (forty-two days) of the convention. It being, therefore, impracticable to divide the state into congressional districts, it was made a single district. In the belief that the population must be near 250,000, provision was made for electing three representatives in Congress. The completed census yielded the disappointingly small total of 150,037. Governor Medary and two delegates were made a canvassing board.

While the constitution was acceptable to all, the two parties put forth all possible effort to capture the offices. The canvass showed the vote on the ratification of the constitution to be: Yeas, 36,240; nays, 700. The Democrats obtained a majority of the legislators and nearly all the state and national officers. The candidates for the governorship were Sibley and Ramsey, the former winning by the slender majority of 240 in a total of 35,340. The claim was made that this majority was obtained by irregularities in making the returns, but there was no contest.

The schedule had fixed the early date of December 3 for the assemblage of the legislature, in the expectation shared by all that within a few days thereafter Congress would admit the new state to the Union, and her senators and representatives elect to their seats. A half year, however, was to run by during which Minnesota, as described by Governor Sibley, hung like the coffin of the prophet of Islam between the heavens and the earth. The legislature met, December 2, 1857, and in joint convention, by the close vote of 59 to 49, decided to recognize Mr. Medary as “governor.” In his message he recognized the body as a state legislature. Still there was doubt about the legal status of the houses, and there was little desire to undertake business which might turn out to be illegitimate. The Republican members entered formal protests against any legislation. There was, however, one bit of business which the Democratic majority felt could not be postponed; and that was the election of two United States senators. That was virtually settled in caucus. Henry M. Rice, as everybody expected, was nominated without opposition. The second place, for the short term, went, after several ballotings, to General James Shields, who was a newcomer and little known in Minnesota. He had served with distinction in the Mexican War, filled many offices in his former state of Illinois, and served a term in the Senate of the United States. It was a bitter pill for such Democratic wheel-horses as Sibley, Brown, and Gorman to swallow. Franklin Steele never forgave Rice for failing, as he claimed, to throw the election to him. Shields was everybody’s second choice, and the expectation was that his personal influence in Washington would procure many good things for the state.

President Buchanan, for reasons not apparent, did not transmit the Minnesota constitution—the Democratic version—to the Senate till near the middle of January, 1858. A fortnight later the bill to admit was reported from the committee on territories. The same kind of opposition now broke out as had impeded the progress of the Minnesota enabling act a twelvemonth before. Southern senators were loath to see a new Northern state come in, even with a Democratic delegation awaiting admission to both houses. They were also technical and persistent about holding to the traditional custom of admitting states alternately slave and free. It was the turn for a slave state to come in, and Kansas with her infamous “Lecompton” slave constitution was knocking at the door. To give the right of way to the “English bill” admitting Kansas, dilatory measures were successfully resorted to. A debate covering twenty-three pages of the “Congressional Globe” took place on the question whether the Senate would consider the Minnesota bill. That having been agreed to on the 24th of March, days of tedious wrangling followed upon objections raised by opponents. The election, it was argued, was void for frauds committed; aliens had been allowed to vote; the still incompleted census was farcical; some assistant marshals had destroyed the returns they should have given in; in some instances there was not one tenth as many people found in precincts as had voted. The right of the state to three, two, or even any representative in Congress was questioned. Minnesota was still a territory, and territories had no right to representation in the Senate or in the House, except by a delegate having no vote. There had been no legal convention, it was said, and no legitimate constitution had been adopted by the people. The debate went on till April 8, when, the English bill admitting Kansas having been put through the Senate, the opposition ceased and the Minnesota bill passed with but three dissenting votes, out of fifty-two. The palaver occupies nearly one hundred pages of the “Globe.” The bill now went to the House, and there the English bill stood in its way till the 4th of May. The pro-slavery opposition at once showed itself under cover of the same objections which had been so tediously debated in the Senate. There had been no proper convention, the election was void for frauds, the territorial legislature in session was presuming to act as a state legislature, and the like. In the course of a wrangle on the matter of alien voting, a Missouri member in a heated moment revealed the actual ground of the opposition. He said, “I warn gentlemen of the South of the consequences.... The whole territories of the Union are rapidly filling up with foreigners. The great body of them are opposed to slavery. Mark my words; if you do it, another slave state will never be formed out of the territories of this Union.” There was also an attack on the bill from an unexpected quarter. John Sherman of Ohio introduced a substitute, annulling all proceedings so far had, and providing for a new convention in Minnesota. In his speech he declared there had been no convention, but only two mobs. The number of delegates had been unlawfully raised from 68 to 108. All proceedings under the enabling act, including the election of October 13, were void. A printed letter was circulated among Republican senators and representatives from which Mr. Sherman had evidently derived his allegations. This document came from a Minnesota Republican source and evidenced the desire for an entire new deal. There was ground for hope that in new elections the Republican party might overcome the slight Democratic pluralities. This move on the political chessboard had the effect to rally Democratic support to the pending bill for admission of Minnesota with her waiting delegation. A new election might change its complexion. On May 11 the bill was passed by the vote of 157 to 38. The next day it received the presidential approval, and Messrs. Rice and Shields, who had been living since December at their own charges, were sworn as senators.

The Senate bill, concurred in by the House, allowed Minnesota but two representatives. Three had been elected and had been waiting for five months to be seated. To eliminate one of these, lots were drawn, and George L. Becker, the best man of the three, was thrown out. The two who had drawn the long straws filed their credentials, and the House committee on elections informed the House that they had no knowledge of a third representative-elect from Minnesota. Two days of ineffective contention over the legitimacy of the elections of the lucky two, Messrs. William W. Phelps and James M. Cavanaugh, followed. The vote to admit stood 127 to 63. The records of debates and proceedings cover 225 columns of the “Globe,” of 1000 words each or thereabout.

During the months the Minnesota representatives had been on the anxious bench, the delegate, W. W. Kingsbury, who had been elected on Mr. Rice’s promotion to the Senate, had been comfortably occupying his seat in the House. When Messrs. Phelps and Cavanaugh were sworn in, Mr. Kingsbury did not vacate his seat, but claimed the right to represent that part of the Territory of Minnesota west of the Red River line excluded from the state. The Democratic majority of the committee on elections strongly recommended that the claim be allowed, the Republicans dissenting. The House decided that the portion of Minnesota excluded from the state was a district without government, and not entitled to representation in Congress. The admission of Minnesota wrought the dissolution of the territory, a decision exactly in the teeth of that by which Mr. Sibley had been recognized as a delegate from the rump of Wisconsin Territory in 1848.

So soon as Governor Medary had approved the bill for the election of senators he took his departure and devolved the executive upon Charles L. Chase, the secretary of the territory. Till the middle of winter the legislative bodies of 1857-58 were so uncertain about their legal status that they were chary of multiplying statutes. Then there was a change of opinion, and the members were encouraged to believe themselves true state legislators. Their confidence so stiffened that on the 1st of March they voted to submit to the electors an amendment to the constitution authorizing the state officers-elect to qualify on May 1, whether Congress should have admitted the state or not; and appointed April 15 proximo as the day for the election. It is probably true that railroad interests had to do with this change of heart. As already related, the four companies to which the great congressional land grant had been made over by the previous legislature had not been able to borrow a dollar by hypothecation of their inchoate properties. There were examples of state assistance in railroad building under like circumstances, by way of lending state credit. The Minnesota companies now asked the legislature for like aid. That body was willing enough, but there stood in the constitution adopted, but yet awaiting approval by Congress, a section forbidding in terms the loan of the credit of the state in aid of any individual, association, or corporation. But the constitution was still in the green tree; why not amend it for so worthy a purpose? Accordingly, the accommodating houses presently submitted a second amendment to the electors, to be voted on at the same time as the former. This amendment added to the section forbidding the loan of the state’s credit an exception, allowing such loan for the purpose of facilitating railroad construction, to the amount of five million dollars. Such was the beginning of the “five million loan” transaction, which was not closed till near the end of the century, and then in a manner not clearly honorable to the state. The two amendments were passed upon by the electors on the day appointed (April 15). That authorizing the state officers elect to enter upon their duties on May 1 received an “imposing majority,” the figures of which have not been found. The officers elect, however, wisely took no advantage of this provision, but awaited the admission of the state. The “five million loan” amendment was carried by the overwhelming majority of 25,023 to 6733. It was only, as alleged, a “loan of credit.” In no conceivable event, the people were assured, could they be taxed to pay in cash the debt nominated in the bonds to be issued.

On May 13 the mail or a private hand brought from La Crosse, Wisconsin, the telegraphic news of the admission of the state to the Union on the previous day. The documentary evidence came some days later, and on the 24th the state officers elected in October, 1857, took their oaths and proceeded to their duties. It lacked one week of nine years since Governor Ramsey proclaimed the beginning of the territorial government.

Three days after the state officers took up their duties there took place within an easy day’s drive of the capital the last serious encounter of the Sioux and Chippeways on Minnesota soil. The lower Sioux, who late in 1853 reluctantly retired to their reservations on the upper Minnesota, were wont to return in summer weather in straggling companies to their old homes. They were generally harmless, and the merchants got a little profit on their trade. Shakopee and his band of one hundred and fifty had early in the summer of 1858 come down and gone into camp near the town which bears his name. One of his braves, fishing in the river (the Minnesota) at an early hour, was fired upon. Shakopee’s men instantly recognized the sound as coming from a Chippeway gun. They gathered at Murphy’s Ferry and, presuming that the hostile shot came from one of some very small party, they let their women put thirty or forty of them across. They did not suspect that back on the timbered bluff a mile distant there lay in hiding one hundred and fifty or more Chippeway warriors who had sneaked down from Mille Lacs through the big woods east of Minnetonka. They were wary, however, and placed themselves in ambush in a narrow space between two lakelets. The Chippeways, out for scalps, with a boldness unusual among Indians, charged down from the bluff twice or more, without dislodging the Sioux. The day was not old when they gave up the effort and departed in haste for their homes, carrying their wounded and perhaps some dead. Four of their corpses were left to the cruel mercies of the Sioux, who scalped, beheaded, and otherwise mutilated them. Such was the so-called “Battle of Shakopee,” May 27, 1858.

CHAPTER IX
THE STRUGGLE FOR RAILROADS

On the 2d of June, 1858, the legislature, which had adjourned March 25, reassembled and listened to Governor Sibley’s inaugural address. He challenged investigation into the legality of his election, declaring that he would scorn to hold the position for a single hour if not legally chosen. He commended the schools and the university to the special care of the legislature, exhorting them to regard the donations of public lands to them as sacred. He advised the organization of the militia to the end that the state might protect herself from possible Indian outrages like that of Inkpaduta the year before. He warned the legislature to be careful in their action in regard to banks, which he declared to be a “necessary evil.” He deprecated the undue extension of federal interference in the affairs of the states, and, as might be expected from a friend and admirer of Mr. Douglas, pronounced in favor of squatter sovereignty in the territories. He took occasion to record his objection to frequent and trivial amendments to the state constitution, which should “ever remain beyond the reach of temporary and feverish excitement.” In no doubtful terms did the new executive give notice to the land grant railroad companies that he should hold them to a strict but reasonable conformity with their obligations. In this adjourned session the legislative bodies had no doubt about their true character as state organs. The senate had its constitutional president in the lieutenant-governor, William Holcombe, and there was a state governor to approve the acts of the houses. In the session, which lasted till August 12, a large body of statutes were enacted, many of them amendatory of territorial laws to suit new conditions. This legislature deserves praise for its diligence and appreciation of the needs of a growing state. Responding to the counsel of Governor Sibley, an elaborate militia law was passed. A provision for the organization of volunteer companies proved three years later to have been wisely planned. The cautions of the executive led the legislature to replace a banking act of many sections, passed by the same body in the previous March, by another more carefully drawn. Educational objects were not neglected. An agricultural college was established at Glencoe, a normal school at Winona, and the unlucky board of regents of the university were authorized to borrow $40,000 on twelve per cent. bonds. As if distrusting either the good faith or the ability of the four land grant railroad companies, the legislature placed on the statute book a stringent act instructing the governor how to proceed in case of default by any of them. The hopes of the people of Minnesota in this summer were centred on these land grant railroads. The panic of the previous year had impoverished many of the well-to-do, and left laborers and artisans without employment. Fortunately there was no lack of bread and meat at low prices, because they could not be got to outside markets. Money was scarce and “business” sluggish in the extreme. But there was hope. The building of the railroads would scatter large sums of money, immigrants would flow in, and the good times of ’56 would return.

The act of the Minnesota legislature of May 22, 1857, accepting the congressional land grant of March 5, provided, as anticipated by Congress, for the distribution of the lands to these four corporations:—

First, the Minnesota and Pacific Railroad Company, for building a main line from Stillwater through St. Anthony to Breckenridge and a “branch” from St. Anthony to St. Vincent.

Second, the Transit Railroad Company, to build from Winona by way of St. Peter to the Big Sioux River north of 45 degrees north latitude.

Third, the Root River and Southern Minnesota Railroad Company, for two lines; one from La Crescent to a junction with the Transit at Rochester; the other from St. Paul and St. Anthony via Minneapolis, up the Minnesota River, to Mankato and on to the mouth of the Big Sioux.

Fourth, the Minneapolis and Cedar Valley Railroad Company, for a line from Minneapolis by way of Mendota and Faribault to a point on the south line of the state, west of range 13.

The lands were to inure to the companies in installments of 120 sections, upon the completion of twenty-mile stretches of road for the running of regular trains. The constitutional amendment of April 15, 1858, had for a particular object the enabling of the companies to get each its first twenty miles built and receive its 120 sections (76,800 acres). The sale or hypothecation of this land would build an additional stretch, and so on. To make it the easier for the companies so to build, the amendment provided that when any ten-mile stretch should have been graded and made ready for ties and track, the company should receive $100,000 in the seven per cent. special Minnesota state railroad bonds authorized; and, when any ten-mile stretch so graded should be complete with rails and rolling stock, an additional like sum in bonds. Now these bonds were by no means a bonus; they were to be a “loan of credit,” according to the favorite phrase of the day. The companies on receiving them were obligated to pay the interest as it should accrue, and to redeem the principal when due. The most rigorous provisions were made in the amendment itself to secure these liquidations. The companies were required to pledge the net earnings of their several lines, to convey to the state by deed of trust the first 240 acres of land earned by construction, and to transfer to the state an amount of their own company bonds equal to that of the special state bonds delivered. These company bonds were to be secured by mortgages on all the properties and franchises of the companies. Human ingenuity, it was fancied, could exact no sounder guarantees. While the legislature was still in session in the midsummer of 1858, the companies let their contracts, and the dirt began to fly in a manner very cheering to citizens living along the surveyed lines, who boarded the hands and furnished forage, timber, and other supplies.

But there was trouble with the finances from the start. On August 4 Governor Sibley gave warning (why should it have been needed?) to the companies that he should hold them to a strict compliance with the obligations they had assumed. In particular he demanded that when they came to exchange their company bonds for the special state bonds they must secure to the state a prior lien on their properties and franchises. The companies balked at this, and by their attorneys applied to the supreme court of the state for a mandamus requiring the governor to issue them bonds without such priority. To obtain a construction of the law Governor Sibley waived objection to being governed by the court in a matter within his own official discretion. The mandamus issued. The text of the amendment of April 15 showed no requirement of priority, and the legislative journals show that efforts to inject such requirement had been vain. The state railroad bonds, issued to the companies as they severally completed their ten-mile stretches of grading, when placed upon the market did not go off like hot cakes. In form they were bonds of Minnesota acknowledging to owe and promising to pay dollars, signed, countersigned, and sealed like other bonds. The faith and credit of the state were pledged in the constitutional amendment to the payment of the interest and redemption of the principal. But the people understood that all this was mere form; the railroad companies, not the state, were to pay. The newspapers industriously circulated this idea. Sixty-seven members of the legislature who had voted for the issue of the bonds signed a published declaration that none of them would ever vote for a tax to pay them. When offered in the New York market they were not wanted, unless by speculative operators at a figure warranting risk. Governor Sibley’s personal representations in Wall Street did not increase confidence. He attributed his failure to factious interference of citizens and Republican newspapers.

Construction was resumed with the season of 1859 by contractors willing and able to take bonds in pay, but by midsummer this plan ceased to work. One firm in July was obliged to put up $30,000 to raise $8000 in cash. Railroad building ceased, and Minnesota sat in ashes. The surprise and exasperation of the people can easily be imagined. The companies had not followed the course expected of them to complete and put in operation successive ten-mile stretches, but preferred to push the grading for many such stretches and postpone track-laying and other work of completion. This aroused a suspicion that they did not intend to complete any sections, but to secure their $10,000 per mile, a sum far in excess of the actual cost, and quit. This suspicion was intensified by rumors that the grading had been confined to discontinuous earthwork alone, on the level prairie where it could be cheaply done. These rumors had but slight foundation, but they were accepted as true and to this day there are those who believe them. When the legislature of 1860 met (there was no session in 1859), Governor Sibley in his retiring message informed that body that the four companies had graded 239.36 miles, and had received 2275 one thousand-dollar special state bonds in exchange for an equal amount of company bonds.

The legislature of 1858 has enough to answer for in proposing to the people the consummate folly of offering to sell bonds which they never meant to pay. Of the final act of their session (August 12) it cannot be charitably recorded that it was one of mere folly. As the end of their labors drew nigh in the dog days, it became known that there would be a residue of some $10,000 of money appropriated by Congress for territorial expenses. It seemed a pity not to keep that money in Minnesota. After a variety of proposals consuming much time had failed to receive concurrence, the two houses agreed to a compromise by which $6000 was appropriated for stationery and $3500 for postage, the members to share equally. Governor Sibley was obliged to give his official sanction to this division, because it was impossible in the last hour of the session to veto the general appropriation bill in which these items had place, but he took occasion to say that he gave a most reluctant consent to the grab.

The banking act passed by the legislature of 1858, on July 26, provided for the issue of circulating notes secured by deposits of public stocks of the United States, or of any state, up to ninety per cent. of the average value of such stock for six months in the New York market. On one of the last days of the session an amending act was passed injecting into the proper section of the bank act the words “or the State of Minnesota at their current value.” The intended operation of the clause was that bank-notes might be issued on the security of the special railroad bonds. To obtain a favorable rating by the state auditor a clique of operators traded among themselves in the bonds, in New York city, until they felt warranted in submitting affidavits that their value as ascertained in that market was ninety-five cents on the dollar. The auditor of the state thereupon issued some $600,000 in notes to fifteen banks depositing the special railroad bonds. On January 1, 1861, he was obliged to report that seven of them had failed, and that he had sold their bonds. In one case he got seventy cents; in six others, prices ranging from thirty-five cents down to sixteen and a quarter cents.

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.

The people of Minnesota had moderated their expectations of an abounding population, but they were still greatly disappointed when the census of 1860 footed up but 172,023 inhabitants, including 2369 Indians. The native born were 113,295, the foreign born 58,278. The great Scandinavian influx had hardly begun. Of the whole number of persons engaged in gainful occupations, 53,426, the farmers were 27,921, dwelling mostly in the river counties and those immediately in the rear. With her population so widely spread out on the land and that in its virgin fertility, Minnesota was not really poor, in spite of business stagnation, of a high interest rate (two per cent. a month), and of isolation from outside markets for half the year. This isolation was, however, mitigated by the completion of a line of telegraph to the cities at the head of navigation, so that “through” dispatches were regularly received in October, 1862. The office in St. Anthony was closed after a few months, and the business men of Minneapolis were obliged to subsidize that of their city.

The conflict in national politics in 1860 was a hot and lively one, not merely between the two great parties, but within the separate ranks. The Democrats had not been so long out of power as to despair of a return. The Republicans had just begun to taste the sweets of office and its emoluments, and were fierce for more. The aspirants were inconveniently numerous and eager. In the caucuses and conventions they competed with almost brutal ardor for nominations, equivalent, in their happy anticipations, to elections. No sooner had the October elections resulted in a Republican triumph than aspirants for federal employment began weaving the combinations which should capture the Minnesota appointments. The friends of Governor Ramsey formed into one camp; the “land office clique” into another. The latter gained a temporary advantage, but did not succeed in their ultimate purpose of placing one of their number in the United States Senate when the next vacancy occurred. They also failed to get Governor Ramsey, his own logical successor, out of the way by a promotion to the headship of the Interior Department.

The Minnesota Democracy had been steadfast adherents to Senator Douglas, who had earned their support. The delegation to the Charleston convention of 1860, though not instructed, was presumed to be solid for the Illinois statesman. When Senator Rice and another separated and stood by Breckinridge, there were accusations of treason, bribery, and all the crimes in the political calendar. It ought to have been foreseen that Mr. Rice by temperament and interest would be attached to the conservative wing of the Democracy.

As the time for the state election of 1861 drew on, it was so apparent that Messrs. Ramsey and Donnelly would succeed themselves as governor and lieutenant-governor that only the slightest activity was manifested in the campaign. The total vote for governor on October 8 was 8048, of which Ramsey received 6997.

CHAPTER X
ARMING FOR THE CIVIL WAR

Governor Alexander Ramsey was in Washington on April 14, 1861, the day the Confederate colors were flown over the ruins of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The attack on that work was an avowed act of war. Early that Sunday morning he hastened to the War Department to make a tender of one thousand Minnesota men for the national cause. The offer was put in writing at the request of Secretary Cameron, who was on the point of waiting on the President. Minnesota’s tender of a regiment was doubtless the first recorded. It was so promptly accepted that on the next day Governor Ramsey could so telegraph to St. Paul. On the 16th Lieutenant-Governor Donnelly issued the executive proclamation calling for volunteers to form a regiment of infantry to serve for three months. The principal effect of Governor Sibley’s ambitious militia organization already mentioned had been to stimulate the organization of independent volunteer companies in the larger towns and cities. These companies were the convenient nuclei of those which filled up the regiment. The arms of those independent companies were somewhat irregularly appropriated. Thirteen days after the proclamation, on April 29, ten companies nearly full were mustered into the service of the United States at Fort Snelling. Governor Ramsey, who was present at the muster, announced his appointments of field officers. Willis A. Gorman, former territorial governor, a regimental officer in the Mexican War, he placed in command. The vigor with which this experienced colonel established and enforced military routine was a surprise to his raw soldiery. They learned later the value of his discipline, which at the first they were disposed to be restive under. Early in May the state furnished black felt hats and black trousers. These, with the red shirts previously supplied, constituted their uniform. Drilling went vigorously on, diversified with sword and flag presentations and some feasting in the neighboring cities.

Some days after the muster, the War Department decided to accept no more regiments for three months, and gave to the men of the First Minnesota the option of enlisting for three years or taking their discharges. A considerable number, many of whom had been more patriotic than judicious, chose the latter alternative, but their places were immediately supplied, and a full regiment was mustered in for three years.

In the early morning of June 22 the regiment was paraded for the last time at Fort Snelling. Chaplain Edward D. Neill offered prayer, made an address, and gave the Hebrew benediction, “The Lord bless you and keep you,” etc. This over, the command embarked for Prairie du Chien, whence it proceeded by rail to Washington. On July 3 it was put into camp near Alexandria and attached to Franklin’s brigade of Heintzelman’s division of McDowell’s army. At the battle of Bull Run the First Minnesota was sent forward alone in support of Rickett’s battery to attack the position held by Jackson’s brigade without a single skirmisher in advance. The battery had barely unlimbered when all its horses were killed and cannoneers dispersed. The First Minnesota held its ground until forty-two men were killed and one hundred and eight wounded, the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment on the Union side. Thirty were missing, mostly prisoners, among whom were Surgeon Stewart and his assistant, Le Boutillier, who remained on the field attending the wounded. The regiment did not leave the field till ordered off, and marched “in perfect order” to Centreville. From that point to Alexandria its ranks were broken by the rabble of men and vehicles which thronged the road. In a compendious work it is impossible to follow in detail the career of this splendid regiment and those later sent out from Minnesota. It shared honorably in the operations of the Army of the Potomac in the season of 1862. At Antietam, holding its ground after both flanks had been uncovered, the First lost one hundred and forty-seven in killed and wounded. The company of Minnesota sharpshooters (the Second), added to the regiment after the battle of Fair Oaks, had twenty out of its forty-two men present shot down in that action.

After the organization of the First Regiment out of existing state militia, other militia companies remained over, equally desirous for a part in the war for the Union. When Governor Ramsey called for a second regiment on the 14th of June, 1861, the response was immediate. Before the end of July the Second Minnesota Infantry had been mustered in at Fort Snelling, uniformed and supplied. It received as commander Colonel Horatio P. Van Cleve, a graduate of the United States Military Academy, who had resigned from the regular army after some years of service. On October 14 the regiment left Fort Snelling, without patriotic exercises, for Louisville, Kentucky, where it joined Buell’s army. At Mill Springs it behaved with coolness and gallantry, suffering a loss of twelve killed and thirty-three wounded. The whole remaining season of 1862 was occupied with laborious marches between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, with occasional minor engagements. It was present at Shiloh, Corinth, and Perrysville, where its losses were nominal.

The Third Minnesota Infantry was called for on September 18, before the Second had gone to the front. The companies were promptly recruited by aspirants to commissions, and the organization was complete by the middle of November. For its colonel Governor Ramsey selected Henry A. Lester of Winona, who had made a creditable record as a captain in the First Regiment. In a few months he brought the command to a high state of discipline, and by his personal qualities gained the complete confidence of officers and men. In April, 1862, the regiment was sent to Murfreesboro’, Tennessee, a point of some strategic importance, thirty miles southeast of Nashville, and was there in July when the Confederate cavalry leader Forrest was raiding thereabout to delay the movements of Buell. The covering force was a small brigade in two separate encampments. A Michigan infantry battalion of five companies and two cavalry troops were stationed to the east of the town, the Third Minnesota about a mile and a half northwest on the Nashville pike. No intrenchments seem to have been constructed. At an early hour of July 13 Forrest’s advance brushed away the cavalry outposts, captured the brigade commander in his quarters in the village, and fiercely attacked the Michigan men. It was not till noon, however, that he was able with his main force of more than one thousand men to compel their surrender. At the sound of the firing, Colonel Lester got his command under arms and placed them in a good position for defense not far from his camp, and there he held his men while the forenoon wore away with the sound of battle in his ears and the smoke rising from the burning warehouses in the town. The barest show of attack was made on his front, but Forrest in person led a considerable party around his flank to attack his camp, defended by Corporal Charles H. Green with twenty teamsters, convalescents, and cooks. It took three charges, Forrest leading the last, to rout and capture the little band. The gallant corporal died the same day, of his wounds. Soon after one o’clock P. M. the adjutant of the Michigan battalion came out from the town under flag of truce and safeguard to summon Colonel Lester to the presence of his colonel. In the interview which succeeded, the surrender of the Minnesota regiment was recommended. Returning to his command, Lester summoned his officers to a council. On an open vote the majority was for fighting. Two company commanders then left the council. The colonel, not content with the open vote, proposed a ballot. The result was five to surrender, three to fight. In the minority were Lieutenant-Colonel Griggs and Captain C. C. Andrews, both of whom became regimental commanders. It may be said in mitigation of the action of some of the company commanders voting for surrender, that as they held their offices by election they felt bound to act in a representative capacity and not according to their own judgment. The end of it was the unconditional surrender of the Third Minnesota without having been seriously attacked. The enlisted men were paroled and sent to Benton Barracks, St. Louis. The officers were paroled at Richmond after three months. On December 1 President Lincoln discharged dishonorably all those who had voted for the surrender.

The Fourth Minnesota regiment was called at the same time as the Third, but for service on the Indian frontier. The muster began October 2, and was complete before the close of the year. For colonel Governor Ramsey chose John B. Sanborn, his adjutant-general, as yet inexperienced in warfare, but his appointment was later abundantly justified. Two companies were sent to Fort Ridgely and two to Abercrombie to overawe the restive Sioux. A fifth company went to Fort Ripley to insure the good behavior of the Chippeways. The remaining five companies spent the winter of 1862 at Fort Snelling, where they were thoroughly instructed. On April 20, 1862, the Fourth Regiment, its absent companies having been recalled to Fort Snelling, embarked for the South. It reached Halleck’s army in May in front of Corinth, Mississippi, in time to partake in the siege which the enemy terminated by a timely evacuation. After some months of inaction, during which one third of its men got into the hospital, the regiment participated gallantly in the affair at Iuka on September 18, losing three killed and forty-four wounded. At the battle of Corinth, October 3 and 4, the Fourth was actively engaged, with the surprisingly small loss of two killed and ten wounded.

The muster of the Fifth Minnesota began December 19, 1861, and was completed on the 29th of March following. Three companies were sent to the frontier forts to relieve companies of the Fourth called in. To encourage recruiting Governor Ramsey proposed to appoint to the field and staff positions such gentlemen as the line officers should nominate to him. For colonel their choice fell upon a gentleman, German born, who had seen service in the Prussian army. The experience of a few months proved to him and his friends that a mistake had been made. Lieutenant-Colonel Lucius F. Hubbard, afterwards governor of Minnesota, succeeded and held command until assigned to a brigade. Leaving behind the three companies on duty in the frontier forts, the regiment went south in May, 1862, in time to participate in the operations which resulted in the occupation of Corinth, Mississippi. The summer was passed in quiet, diversified by the affairs at Farmington and Iuka. When Price and Van Dorn undertook, on October 8, to dislodge Rosecrans from his intrenched position at Corinth, it fell to the Fifth Minnesota to take a most honorable part in their repulse. Recalled late that night from outpost duty, the men bivouacked in a street of the town. In the forenoon of the 4th, after a furious bombardment, the Confederates assaulted and pushed a column of attack through the Union line near its right. Colonel Hubbard saw the impending danger, and without waiting for orders threw his regiment on the flank of the Confederate column, broke it into fragments, and drove it back in complete disorder. The batteries temporarily lost to the enemy he retook, and restored the shattered battle line. Such is the willing testimony of Rosecrans himself. Survivors of the Fifth delight to recall the gallant and fearless behavior of their young Catholic chaplain on that field. He is now the Most Reverend John Ireland, Archbishop of St. Paul, known everywhere for splendid services in church and state.

In addition to the five infantry regiments recruited under the calls of 1862, five minor organizations were formed, one of which, the Second Company of Minnesota sharpshooters, has been mentioned. The First Sharpshooters were mustered in at Fort Snelling, October 5, 1861, and sent to Washington to become Company A of the Second Regiment of United States Sharpshooters. That command participated in the battles of second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, doing effective work with its Sharps rifles. The Minnesota company had ten wounded at Antietam.

Brackett’s Cavalry Battalion of three companies, to which a fourth was added January 1, 1864, was recruited in the fall months of 1861, and remained in service till May, 1866. The command, by services appropriate to its arm, contributed not a little to the victories of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth. It accompanied Sully’s Indian expedition to the upper Missouri in 1864, and took part in the battle of Killdeer Mountain. Stationed on the right of the line, the battalion checked a fierce flank attack, which it followed with a gallant counter-charge, inflicting heavy loss on the savages.

The First Battery of Light Artillery was mustered in at Fort Snelling, November 21, 1861, and sent south in midwinter to join Sherman’s division at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. In the battle of Shiloh, April 6, 1862, this battery, forced back with Prentiss’s routed division, united in the heroic stand at the point known as “the hornet’s nest,” which held back the enemy’s advance till Grant’s disordered regiments could be formed for final and effective defense. Captain Emil Munch had his horse shot under him and was severely wounded. The Second Light Battery was not accepted till March 21, 1862. Its commander, Captain William A. Hotchkiss, had seen service as an artilleryman in the Mexican War. At Perrysville and Stone River this command played a gallant part, fortunately with small loss.

The passage of the enrollment act of April 16, 1862, indicated an expectation that to reëstablish the authority of the government over all territory, an increase of the army would be necessary, and that the raising of new troops might not be left to the pleasure or convenience of the states. On the day of McClellan’s escape to the James River (July 2) President Lincoln called for 300,000 volunteers. Minnesota’s quota was 5362. On August 4 this call was followed by an order for drafting 300,000 men from the loyal states. Volunteering, which for some months had gone but languidly forward, revived. Public meetings were held in all the towns; bounties were offered by citizens and municipal bodies; splendid examples of patriotic sacrifices were set by men who could ill afford them, and could ill be spared by the communities. The actual recruiting was mainly done by gentlemen who were promised commissions in consideration of their services. The distribution of the quotas to counties and towns really set the whole people at work, with the result that before the harvest was over five new regiments, the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth, were substantially filled. However, it was not till November 19 that the announcement could be made that every local quota had been filled and that all danger of the draft, from time to time deferred, was averted. The immediate employment of all these regiments was, as we are to see, far different from the expectations of the recruits. The appointments to the field and staff positions were no easy task for Governor Ramsey. It was well known that he would desire the legislature of 1863 to elect him to succeed the Hon. Henry M. Rice as United States senator, and that another aspirant was at least equally desirous. His personal admirers urged him to distribute the military “plums” in a way helpful to his political success. His political opponents were prophesying that he would certainly do so, and charged him with selfishness, heartlessness, and disregard of experience. To the head of one regiment he appointed William Crooks, an experienced civil engineer, who had been two years at West Point and was his political opponent. For three other regiments he took Lieutenant-Colonels Miller, Wilkin, and Thomas from the First, Second, and Fourth Minnesota regiments respectively.

CHAPTER XI
THE OUTBREAK OF THE SIOUX

While the whole people of Minnesota were striving night and day to fill up the new regiments with volunteers to reinforce the national armies, there was trouble brewing within their own boundaries. The reader will have observed that small garrisons had been and were still maintained on the Indian frontiers. There was one at Fort Ripley, below Crow Wing, to protect the Chippeway agency; there were two on the borders of the Sioux reservations. Of these one occupied Fort Ridgely, situated on the north bank of the Minnesota River in the extreme northwest corner of Nicollet County. It was begun in 1853 when the lower Sioux were arriving on their reservation. The garrison had for its purpose the support of the authority of the government agents thereon. Another post had previously been established on the west bank of the Red River, some fifteen miles north of Breckenridge, chiefly for the purpose of protecting the Red River trade, carried in hundreds of single ox carts, from depredations of both Sioux and Chippeways, whose hunting parties waylaid not only one another, but the white man’s caravans. Fort Abercrombie, although at some distance from the upper reserve, was near enough to keep the upper Sioux aware of the Great Father’s power. Although called forts, no one of the three was in any sense a strong place. Each consisted of a group of detached buildings standing on the open prairie. The lapse of years in quiet seemed to justify the assumption that it would be a useless thing to form a proper inclosure and fortify it.

The Minnesota Sioux betook themselves to the reserves designated in the treaties of 1851 in no comfortable frame of mind. They believed that they had been obliged to abandon their ancient homes for an inadequate compensation, and that government agents had conspired with the traders and half-breeds to cheat them of money promised to be paid to their chiefs. Two years passed before they were assured by act of Congress that they would be allowed to remain in Minnesota and not sent to some far-off unknown country. The treaty commissioners of 1851 congratulated the government on the establishment of a policy of “concentration,” under which the Indian would be induced to abandon the chase and get his living from the soil. The Pond brothers, foreseeing that this policy was premature, decided not to follow the tribes among whom they had labored to the reservations. Concentration of wild Indians averse to cultivation only gave opportunity for unceasing grumbling in council over the general rascality of the white man, the tyranny of the agent, the immorality of his employees, the extortions of the traders, and the imbecility of the missionaries, who worked for nothing.

In the buffalo season these Sioux swarmed out into the Missouri valley to make boot upon the still countless herds. At times some wandered back to their old homes below. The reservations, while ample in area for eight thousand Indians, were in shape ridiculously ill-adapted for concentration. Originally they formed a “shoestring” one hundred and fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. That width had been reduced by the treaties of 1858 to ten miles. There was no privacy for the Indian. An easy morning walk took him to the boundary, where the accommodating white man met him with a keg of illicit whiskey. This opportunity for “business” doubtless had no little effect in attracting settlers to the lands fronting on the reservations. The citizens of Brown County in 1859 publicly denounced the criminal practice, and the county commissioners offered a reward of twenty-five dollars for evidence leading to conviction in any prosecution. While generally harmless, the Indians annoyed the settlers by untimely visits for food, and occasional thefts of horses and cattle.

The treaties of 1858, already mentioned, ceding those parts of the two reservations lying north of the Minnesota River, were negotiated with a few selected chiefs carried to Washington so that they might not be restrained by the discussions of the braves in council. This was a source of suspicion, which turned out to be well grounded. The consideration for the ceded lands was in part additions to annuities, in part moneys to be paid as the chiefs in open council should direct. There was long delay in securing the ratification of the treaties by the Senate, and necessary ancillary legislation from Congress. Three years passed before the final payments. The lower Sioux found but $880.68 coming to them from their “hand money,” instead of $40,000. The consent of the chiefs to this division of moneys to traders and others was obtained in a surreptitious, not to say dishonest, manner. The upper Sioux were sufficiently, but not so extensively, plundered. From the time of their removal to the reservations up to the opening of the Civil War, the annuity Sioux were nursing their wrath against the deceitful and greedy white man. At the same time they were becoming distrustful of the power of which he boasted. When the Great Father had no cavalry to chase Inkpaduta, but was obliged to hire Indians to make that fruitless pursuit, the Sioux inferred that while he had a great multitude of people he could not make soldiers of them. A veteran missionary recorded the opinion that the failure of the government to pursue and capture Inkpaduta was the “primary cause” of the uprising which came five years later.

The exchange of the garrisons of regular troops at the forts for raw volunteers was to the Sioux a sign that the Great Father was in trouble, and the dispatch of raw men to help defend his country confirmed this view. Through the traders and half-breeds the Indians were kept informed of the repulses suffered by his warriors at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, and elsewhere. Nowhere could gossip spread more speedily than in an Indian village, where gossip was the business of the braves when in camp. It is in evidence that the strong “Copperhead” element among the traders and half-breeds did not conceal their satisfaction over the defeat of loyal troops and their belief that the Great Father was going to be “cleaned out.”

The winter of 1861-62 was unusually severe. When spring opened food was scarce in all the villages. The Sissetons had eaten all their horses and dogs. The farmer Indians had in the previous summer been so badgered by the unregenerate of their own bands, and by the visiting Yanktonnais of the plains, that their industry had relaxed, and they had but little food to spare. The “payment” was accordingly looked to with unusual eagerness. According to custom it should come as soon as the grass of the prairies should be fit for pasture. Spring ripened into summer, but the agents’ runners did not bring the welcome summons to the villages. The upper Sioux, tired of waiting, came in to the agency at Yellow Medicine in the middle of July to the number of four thousand, and with them came one thousand Yanktonnais, literally on the edge of starvation. The agent supplied some flour, pork, lard, and sugar and told them to go home. He would call them when he was ready. But the savages did not depart. In a fortnight they had consumed the rations and were again hungry. The agent declining to furnish more, an armed mob of several hundred warriors surrounded the government storehouse, surprised the little guard of infantry, broke the locks and bolts, and carried off one hundred sacks of flour. Making a virtue of necessity, the agent, after a talk in council, agreed to issue all the provisions and annuity goods, on condition that the Indians would depart and stay away till called. Trouble with the upper Sioux was thus tided over, but their respect for the Great Father’s power was not increased by the forced compliance of his agent.

There was less want of food in the villages of the lower Sioux, but there was enough to cause distress and desire for an early payment. The agent had no advices. He could give no reasons for the delay of the money. The traders assumed to know more than he, and with a fatal blindness teased the Indians with suggestions that the Great Father had spent all his money and had none left for his red children. As the Indians were heavily in debt to them, they began refusing further credits. Among the rumored reasons for the delay of the money, the one most accepted was that the government officials were allowing friends to use it in speculations on supply contracts. The fact was that the Indian appropriation of 1862 was not passed in Congress till July 5. The gold was drawn from the treasury on August 11, and was at once dispatched to the west. It was brought to Fort Ridgely at noon on August 18.

The lower Sioux did not assemble and raid the warehouses, but resorted to a less riotous procedure. On the warpath or the hunt it was Indian law that a kind of provost guard composed of active warriors should maintain order on the march and in bivouac. It was called the Ti-yó-ti-pi, or “Soldiers’ lodge,” had a large discretion, and exacted instant obedience. A modified soldiers’ lodge was now set up (June, 1862) on the lower agency, attended by one hundred and fifty warriors. In its frequent councils all the grievances of the past and present were rehearsed, and schemes for redress broached and discussed. Evidence is wanting to support the assertions of contemporaries that in this soldiers’ lodge there was concocted a definite scheme of murder and pillage to be carried out later. Possibly some braves, more patriotic than judicious, pictured the consequences to the cowardly white man if the great Sioux nation should launch its hosts against his undefended farms and villages. But the oratory of the lodge fed fat the ancient grudge of the red men and added to their chronic exasperation. The dog days drew on, but there was no outward sign of insurrection. Although he felt that the Indians were in an evil and turbulent state, Agent Galbraith did not think it injudicious for him to leave his people in charge of his assistants and go off to New Ulm with a batch of forty-nine volunteers for the army on the afternoon of August 15. The same day he had passed through some of the villages and had conferred with Little Crow about the brick house he was to build for that chief. Two days after that, Crow attended morning services in the Episcopal mission chapel, and gave no sign of excitement or enmity.

But for an unforeseen incident the peace might have lasted another day, and lasting that other day, on which the annuity gold arrived, might not have been broken by one of the bloodiest Indian wars of the continent. On Sunday, August 17, 1862, a party of Sioux from Rice Creek were hunting in Meeker County for deer, and, if chance should offer, for Chippeway scalps. Early in the afternoon, in Acton Township, Meeker County, a detachment of these hunters, four or more in number, coming to a settler’s cabin, where three families were assembled, wantonly murdered five out of eleven persons. The motive for this crime is not easy to conjecture. The houses were not plundered nor fired. The evidence that the savages were drunk has not been found. There may be some value in the story that the first shot was fired by a young man who, having been twitted by his companions with cowardice, wished to show them that he dared shoot a white man.

Seizing a team and wagon of a neighboring farmer, the scoundrels drove furiously to Shakopee’s village, some ten miles above the lower agency. Upon their arrival late at night a council of warriors was called. The high connections of the murderers did not relish the idea of turning them over to white man’s justice to suffer a death signally ignominious to Indians. There was but one alternative, to treat the killing of the afternoon as an act of war, and call the nation to arms. After an outburst of patriotic eloquence this course was resolved on, and as soon as the braves could arm and mount, they moved toward the agency under the lead of Shakopee, who was no lover of the whites. The party arrived at Little Crow’s village, two miles above the lower agency, at daybreak, and arousing that chief from sleep, explained the situation.

Little Crow was the fifth Medawakanton chief who had borne that name, given in French (Le Petit Corbeau) to an ancestor who wore on his shoulders the skin and feathers of a crow. Although in temporary disgrace for connivance in the extortions of the traders under the treaties of 1858, he was still the most experienced, virile, and eloquent of the chiefs. White men who knew him still praise his good sense and kindness of heart in ordinary relations. It seems to be true that in the soldiers’ lodge he had counseled against anything like war on the white man, whose resources his journeys to Washington had revealed to him. But Little Crow was a heathen Indian. The dogs of war were loose, and the leadership was his if he would have it. He could recover his lost prestige, and show his people that he was as brave in war as he was eloquent in council. Vanity and ambition triumphed. “It must come,” he said. “Now is as good a time as any. I am with you. Let us kill the traders and divide their goods.” By seven o’clock Little Crow had possibly two hundred warriors, armed and painted, surrounding the agency, with small parties distributed about the warehouses and dwellings. Upon signal, fire was opened on all the whites in sight. Five fell dead and many others were wounded. Fortunately the eagerness of the savages to loot the stores distracted them from killing, and gave opportunity for the survivors to gain the cover of the thickets in the river-bottom. So soon as the plunder of the traders’ goods was done, small parties of warriors were detached to raid the neighboring farms and settlements. These, on that day and the next, spread themselves over the parts of Brown and Nicollet counties next to the river. The white men encountered were mostly killed, and the women taken captive with their children; but some of these were butchered when they delayed the march. The dwellings and grain stacks were fired, the farm wagons seized and loaded with plunder were driven into Little Crow’s village. By ten o’clock in the forenoon refugees from the lower agency had reached Fort Ridgely. That work was garrisoned by Company B of the Fifth Minnesota Infantry, commanded by Captain John S. Marsh, who had been promoted out of a Wisconsin regiment which he had joined because too late to be enlisted in the First Minnesota. His first act was to send a mounted man to overtake and recall Lieutenant Timothy I. Sheehan, who had at an earlier hour marched for Fort Ripley with a detachment of C Company of the same regiment. Putting forty-six of his men in wagons, mounting himself and his interpreter, Peter Quinn, he took the road to the agency. Six miles out from the fort he came to burning houses and mutilated corpses by the roadside. Refugees warned him that there was trouble ahead. Pushing on, he reached the ferry abreast of the agency, and formed his men in line in readiness to cross. A signal shot rang out and a volley of bullets laid several of the soldiers low. A moment later another volley came from Indians concealed on the right of the road by which the detachment had arrived. After a brief contest, in which half of his men had fallen, Marsh led the remnant to the cover of the thicket on his left. Observing a body of Indians moving to intercept his party, he decided to cross the river, supposing it to be fordable at that point. Wading into deep water he was drowned, in spite of the efforts of three brave men to rescue him. This was the “Battle of Redwood Ferry.” Twenty-three soldiers were killed and five wounded. Captain Marsh had been drowned, and Interpreter Quinn’s body had been riddled with bullets at the first fire. The survivors straggled into Fort Ridgely in the course of the following night.

Tuesday the 19th was occupied by the savages in other and more distant raids for robbery and slaughter. In the afternoon a demonstration by a body of one hundred and fifty Indians, more or less, was made on New Ulm. This was successfully resisted by the organized townsmen commanded by Captain Jacob Nix. One young woman was killed by a random shot, and a few other persons, including Captain Nix, were wounded. A few buildings were fired. Later in the afternoon, in the evening, and in the night, help came from St. Peter, Mankato, and other towns.

The “outbreak” was begun and mainly carried on by the lower tribes, the Medawakantons and Wah-pé-ku-tes, in spite of the fact that the Acton murders were done by members of an upper band. It was late in the afternoon of Monday the 18th when the upper Indians, the Sissetons and Wahpetons, hearing of the news, went into council on a hill near the Yellow Medicine agency, twenty-five miles distant northwest of the scene of the morning carnage. John Other Day, a Christian Indian, and Joseph La Framboise, a half-breed, informed the white people resident at and about the agency, already wondering over the mysterious council, of the outbreak below and collected them, to the number of sixty-two, in the government stone warehouse.

There they passed an anxious night. After midnight a trader’s employee came in mortally wounded. At daylight a bookkeeper of another was killed and a clerk painfully wounded. The upper Indians were keener for plunder than for blood. Collecting wagons for the women and children and the wounded, the party left their shelter, forded the river, and under the faithful guidance of Other Day made their way across country to Hutchinson. Friendly warning given late on Monday to the missionaries, Williamson and Riggs, residing a few miles above the agency, enabled them to escape with their families and assistants, forty-five in number, to safe hiding in the river-bottom, from which they began the next day their journey to Henderson.

Sporadic killing, plunder, and devastation in the regions adjacent to the agencies mostly ceased by Tuesday night. Small parties of savages, however, escaping from the control of the chiefs, spread themselves to distant settlements to revel in carnage and fire. Within a week there were murder and pillage in Meeker County, forty miles to the northwest of the agencies, in Murray County, fifty miles to the southwest. Two persons were killed at Sioux Falls, one hundred miles away, and four near Breckenridge, one hundred and sixty miles as the crow flies. Fort Ridgely, Hutchinson, Forest City, Glencoe, and even St. Peter were threatened, but not attacked.

These forays had their natural and intended effect. As the tidings of Indian butchery spread, the settlers loaded what furniture and provisions they could in their wagons, and driving their stock before them, made their way to the “river towns.” An area two hundred miles long from north to south and fifty miles in breadth was depopulated, while the harvest awaited the reapers. Their flight was all the more precipitate because of rumors that the Winnebagoes had broken out along with the Sioux, and that the Chippeways were to close in from the north. No small number of persons went back to their former homes in other states. The occasional appearance of small parties of Indians out for cattle-stealing and other robberies for a month after the outbreak justified all the fears of the fugitives. On September 22 two children were killed within fifteen miles of St. Cloud, and the little village of Paynesville was fired. A small number of persons ignorant of the country, and not way-wise, wandered about for weeks before finding settlements. Hundreds of settlers in the Missouri valley went to Sioux City and other towns.

To what extent the upper Indians participated in these raids and in the several battles it is difficult to determine. They were quite as much exasperated and were more turbulent than the lower bands. That some of their leading chiefs and braves sympathized is known to be a fact, and it cannot be doubted that many individual members participated in the murders and the war which ensued.

CHAPTER XII
THE SIOUX WAR

It was not till Wednesday the 20th that Little Crow could muster and hold together a body of warriors sufficient to undertake regular warfare and carry out a well-laid plan to capture Fort Ridgely. He was aware, of course, that its little garrison had lost its commander and fully half of its men. He probably did not know of the arrival of two reinforcements: one, Sheehan’s detachment recalled by Captain Marsh before beginning his fatal march; the other, the party of recruits, enlisted at the agencies and taken by Agent Galbraith as far as St. Peter. They took and kept the name of “Renville Rangers.” The information brought to Agent Galbraith at St. Peter on the evening of the outbreak indicated Fort Ridgely as the point where his recruits would be most needed. He had therefore led them thither at daylight of Tuesday, armed with some Harper’s Ferry muskets belonging to a local militia company. He had to give bonds to the exacting custodian. What with these troops and with male refugees from the agencies and the surrounding farms, Lieutenant Sheehan, the ranking officer, had not more than one hundred and eighty combatants. Upon the withdrawal of the regular garrison the year before, six pieces of artillery of various patterns had been left behind with Ordnance-Sergeant John Jones in charge. Of this the Indians may not have been informed. The so-called fort consisted of buildings grouped on the sides of a square of three hundred feet, one of them of stone. Outside were small log houses for civilian employees, stables, and stacks of hay and grain. The site was on the bluff separated from the river (Minnesota) by a bottom a half mile in width. Ravines of erosion cut the hillside into excellent places of approach and cover.

Without warning, at one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon a volley was poured into the central inclosure. Two soldiers fell, one dead, the other badly wounded. One citizen was killed soon after. The fire was returned from such points of advantage as the structures afforded. Sergeant Jones had already made up three gun detachments, partly from citizens who had seen service and partly from soldiers whom he had instructed. It was not long before he had his guns in action, to the great surprise of Little Crow, who presently drew off his men. Thursday was a day of rain, and seems to have been spent by the Sioux chiefs in consultation and in preparing for a stronger assault. The time was well spent by the besieged in fitting ammunition, building barricades of cordwood, covering roofs with earth, and other practicable strengthening of defenses.

At one o’clock P. M. of Friday, Little Crow delivered his main attack, with a force largely increased, on the south and west of the post. From the cover of ravines he kept up a lively fire till late in the day. His last move, unusual in Indian warfare, was that of massing a body of warriors in a ravine running up toward the southwest angle of the inclosure, for a charge on the garrison. Sergeant Jones thereupon had his twenty-four pound cannon pointed down that “coolie,” and landed a single shell which sent Crow’s warriors flying off the field. In the two half days’ fighting there had been three persons killed and thirteen wounded within the post.

As refugees, many wounded, came pouring in to New Ulm on Monday, the need of outside help was felt and no second thought was necessary to suggest the one man to whom the townsmen should appeal. Charles Eugene Flandrau, for many years resident at old Traverse des Sioux, who had been Sioux agent, member of the constitutional convention, and a judge of the state supreme court, was the best known man all up and down the Minnesota valley. His name was a household word. At four o’clock on Tuesday morning a messenger brought him the summons of the people of New Ulm. Riding into St. Peter he found the citizens awake and alert, but without organization. In a public meeting in the courthouse he was elected captain of the relieving party to be formed. About noon a detachment of eighteen mounted men was put upon the road, which arrived in New Ulm in time to reassure the citizens after their repulse of the Indians. Early in the afternoon Flandrau’s company marched and was swelled to one hundred and twenty-five men by accessions along the route. It was late in the evening when he arrived. Early on Wednesday morning Captain Bierbauer arrived from Mankato with one hundred men, and other squads came in that day.

In a public meeting Captain Flandrau was promoted to colonel, and proceeded with dispatch and excellent judgment to form a staff, to organize the fighting force, and to fortify a central stronghold for non-combatants. Choosing three blocks of the main street, he threw up barricades across the ends and connected the rear walls of abutting buildings with bullet-proof constructions, and loopholed the walls of the brick buildings. On Thursday parties were sent out to the neighboring hamlets and farms to bury the dead and bring in the wounded.