Fort Snelling and the establishment of Minneapolis and Saint Paul

See also: History of Saint Paul, Minnesota and History of Minneapolis, Minnesota

Fort Snelling

Fort Snelling was the first major U.S. military presence in the state. The land for the fort, at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, was acquired in 1805 by Zebulon Pike. When concerns mounted about the fur trade in the area, construction of the fort began in 1819.  Construction was completed in 1825, and Colonel Josiah Snelling and his officers and soldiers left their imprint on the area. One of the missions of the fort was to mediate disputes between the Ojibwe and the Dakota tribes. Lawrence Taliaferro was an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. He spent 20 years at the site, finally resigning in 1839.

Dred Scott

In the 1850s, Fort Snelling played a key role in the infamous Dred Scott court case.  Slaves Dred Scott and his wife were taken to the fort by their master, John Emerson. They lived at the fort and elsewhere in territories where slavery was prohibited. After Emerson’s death, the Scotts argued that since they had lived in free territory, they were no longer slaves. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided against the Scotts. Dred Scott Field, located just a short distance away in Bloomington, is named in the memory of Fort Snelling’s significance in one of the most important legal precedents in U.S. History.

By 1851, treaties between Native American tribes and the U.S. government had opened much of Minnesota to settlement, so Fort Snelling no longer was a frontier outpost. It served as a training center for soldiers during the American Civil War and later as the headquarters for the Department of Dakota. A portion has been designated as Fort Snelling National Cemetery where over 160,000 are interred. During World War II, the fort served as a training center for nearly 300,000 inductees. After World War II, the fort was threatened with demolition due to the building of freeways Highway 5 and Highway 55, but citizens rallied to save it. Fort Snelling is now a historic site operated by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Fort Snelling was largely responsible for the establishment of the city of Minneapolis. In an effort to be self-sufficient, the soldiers of the fort built roads, planted crops, and built a grist mill and a sawmill at Saint Anthony Falls.  Later, Franklin Steele came to Fort Snelling as the post sutler (the operator of the general store), and established interests in lumbering and other activities. When the Ojibwe signed a treaty ceding lands in 1837, Steele staked a claim to land on the east side of the Mississippi River adjacent to Saint Anthony Falls. In 1848, he built a sawmill at the falls, and the community of Saint Anthony sprung up around the east side of the falls. Steele told one of his employees, John H. Stevens, that land on the west side of the falls would make a good site for future mills. Since the land on the west side was still part of the military reservation, Stevens made a deal with Fort Snelling’s commander. Stevens would provide free ferry service across the river in exchange for a tract of 160 acres (0.65 km²) at the head of the falls. Stevens received the claim and built a house, the first house in Minneapolis, in 1850. In 1854, Stevens platted the city of Minneapolis on the west bank.  Later, in 1872, Minneapolis absorbed the city of Saint Anthony.

The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota owes its existence to Fort Snelling. A group of squatters, mostly from the ill-fated Red River Colony in what is now the Canadian province of Manitoba, established a camp near the fort. The commandant of Fort Snelling, Major Joseph Plympton, found their presence problematic because they were using timber and allowing their cattle and horses to graze around the fort. Plympton banned lumbering and the construction of any new buildings on the military reservation land. As a result, the squatters moved four miles downstream on the Mississippi River. They settled at a site known as Fountain Cave. This site was not quite far enough for the officers at the fort, so the squatters were forced out again. Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, a popular moonshiner among the group, moved downriver and established a saloon, becoming the first European resident in the area that later became Saint Paul. The squatters named their settlement “Pig’s Eye” after Parrant. The name was later changed to Lambert’s Landing and then finally Saint Paul. However, the earliest name for the area comes from a Native American colony Im-in-i-ja Ska, meaning “White Rock” and referring to the limestone bluffs nearby.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are collectively known as the “Twin Cities.”  The cities enjoyed a rivalry during their early years, with Saint Paul being the capital city and Minneapolis becoming prominent through industry. The term “Twin Cities” was coined around 1872, after a newspaper editorial suggested that Minneapolis could absorb Saint Paul. Residents decided that the cities needed a separate identity, so people coined the phrase “Dual Cities”, which later evolved into “Twin Cities.”  Today, Minneapolis is the largest city in Minnesota, with a population of 382,618 in the 2000 census.  Saint Paul is the second largest city, with a population of 287,151. Minneapolis and Saint Paul anchor a metropolitan area with a population of 2,968,806 as of 2000, with a total state population of 4,919,479.

Early European settlement and development

Home of Henry Hastings Sibley

Henry Hastings Sibley built the first stone house in the Minnesota Territory in Mendota in 1838, along with other limestone buildings used by the American Fur Company, which bought animal pelts at that location from 1825 to 1853.  Another area of early economic development in Minnesota was the logging industry. Loggers found the white pine especially valuable, and it was plentiful in the northeastern section of the state and in theSt. Croix River valley. Before railroads, lumbermen relied mostly on river transportation to bring logs to market, which made Minnesota’s timber resources attractive. Towns like Marine on St. Croix and Stillwater became important lumber centers fed by the St. Croix River, while Winona was supplied lumber by areas in southern Minnesota and along the Minnesota River. The unregulated logging practices of the time and a severe drought took their toll in 1894, when the Great Hinckley Fire ravaged 480 square miles (1,200 km²) in the Hinckley and Sandstone areas of Pine County, killing over 400 residents. The combination of logging and drought struck again in the Baudette Fire of 1910 and the Cloquet Fire of 1918.

Logging pine c. 1860’s–1870’s

Saint Anthony, on the east bank of the Mississippi River later became part of Minneapolis, and was an important lumber milling center supplied by the Rum River.  In 1848, businessman Franklin Steele built the first private sawmill on the Saint Anthony Falls, and more sawmills quickly followed.  The oldest home still standing in Saint Anthony is the Ard Godfrey house, built in 1848, and lived in by Ard and Harriet Godfrey.  The house of John H. Stevens, the first house on the west bank in Minneapolis, was moved several times, finally to Minnehaha Park in south Minneapolis in 1896.

Minnesota Territory

Stephen A. Douglas (D), the chair of the Senate Committee on Territories, drafted the bill authorizing Minnesota Territory. He had envisioned a future for the upper Mississippi valley, so he was motivated to keep the area from being carved up by neighboring territories. In 1846, he prevented Iowa from including Fort Snelling and Saint Anthony Falls within its northern border. In 1847, he kept the organizers of Wisconsin from including Saint Paul and Saint Anthony Falls.   The Minnesota Territory was established from the lands remaining from Iowa Territory and Wisconsin Territory on March 3, 1849. The Minnesota Territory extended far into what is now North Dakota and South Dakota, to the Missouri River. There was a dispute over the shape of the state to be carved out of Minnesota Territory. An alternate proposal that was only narrowly defeated would have made the 46th parallel the state’s northern border and the Missouri River its western border, thus giving up the whole northern half of the state in exchange for the eastern half of what later became South Dakota.

With Alexander Ramsey (W) as the first governor of Minnesota Territory and Henry Hastings Sibley (D) as the territorial delegate to the United States Congress, the populations of Saint Paul and Saint Anthony swelled. Henry M. Rice (D), who replaced Sibley as the territorial delegate in 1853, worked in Congress to promote Minnesota interests. He lobbied for the construction of a railroad connecting Saint Paul and Lake Superior, with a link from Saint Paul to the Illinois Central.

Statehood

In December 1856, Rice brought forward two bills in Congress: an enabling act that would allow Minnesota to form a state constitution, and a railroad land grant bill. Rice’s enabling act defined a state containing both prairie and forest lands. The state was bounded on the south by Iowa, on the east by Wisconsin, on the north by Canada, and on the west by the Red River of the North and the Bois de Sioux River, Lake Traverse, Big Stone Lake, and then a line extending due south to the Iowa border. Rice made this motion based on Minnesota’s population growth.

At the time, tensions between the northern and the southern United States were growing, in a series of conflicts that eventually resulted in the American Civil War. There was little debate in the United States House of Representatives, but when Stephen A. Douglas introduced the bill in the United States Senate, it caused a firestorm of debate. Northerners saw their chance to add two senators to the side of the free states, while Southerners were sure that they would lose power. Many senators offered polite arguments that the population was too sparse and that statehood was premature. Senator John Burton Thompson of Kentucky, in particular, argued that new states would cost the government too much for roads, canals, forts, and lighthouses. Although Thompson and 21 other senators voted against statehood, the enabling act was passed on February 26, 1857.

After the enabling act was passed, territorial legislators had a difficult time writing a state constitution. A constitutional convention was assembled in July 1857, but Republicans and Democrats were deeply divided. In fact, they formed two separate constitutional conventions and drafted two separate constitutions. Eventually, the two groups formed a conference committee and worked out a common constitution. The divisions continued, though, because Republicans refused to sign a document that had Democratic signatures on it, and vice versa. One copy of the constitution was written on white paper and signed only by Republicans, while the other copy was written on blue-tinged paper and signed by Democrats. These copies were signed on August 29, 1857. An election was called on October 13, 1857, where Minnesota residents would vote to approve or disapprove the constitution. The constitution was approved by 30,055 voters, while 571 rejected it.

The state constitution was sent to the United States Congress for ratification in December 1857. The approval process was drawn out for several months while Congress debated over issues that had stemmed from the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Southerners had been arguing that the next state should be pro-slavery, so when Kansas submitted the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, the Minnesota statehood bill was delayed. After that, Northerners feared that Minnesota’s Democratic delegation would support slavery in Kansas. Finally, after the Kansas question was settled and after Congress decided how many representatives Minnesota would get in the House of Representatives, the bill passed.  The eastern half of the Minnesota Territory, under the boundaries defined by Henry Mower Rice, became the country’s 32nd state on May 11, 1858.  The western part remained unorganized until its incorporation into the Dakota Territory on March 2, 1861.

Civil War era and Dakota War of 1862

Minnesota strongly supported the Union war effort, with about 22,000 Minnesotans serving. The 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry was particularly important to the Battle of Gettysburg.

Mass hanging in Mankato, Minnesota.

At the same time, the state faced another crisis as the Dakota War of 1862 broke out. The Dakota had signed the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and Treaty of Mendota in 1851 because they were concerned that without money from the United States government, they would starve, due to the loss of habitat of huntable game. They were initially given a strip of land of ten miles (16 km) north and south of the Minnesota River, but they were later forced to sell the northern half of the land. In 1862, crop failures left the Dakota with food shortages, and government money was delayed. After four young Dakota men, searching for food, shot a family of white settlers near Acton, the Dakota leadership decided to continue the attacks in an effort to drive out the settlers. Over a period of several days, Dakota attacks at the Lower Sioux Agency, New Ulm and Hutchinson, as well as in the surrounding farmlands, resulted in the deaths of at least 300 to 400 white settlers and government employees, causing panic in the settlements and provoking counterattacks by state militia and federal forces which spread throughout the Minnesota River Valley and as far away as the Red River Valley.^[59] The ensuing battles at Fort Ridgely, Birch Coulee, Fort Abercrombie, and Wood Lake punctuated a six-week war, which ended with the trial of 425 Native Americans for their participation in the war. Of this number, 303 men were convicted and sentenced to death.

Episcopal Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple pled to President Abraham Lincoln for clemency, and the death sentences of all but 39 men were reduced to prison terms. On December 26, 1862, 38 men were hanged in the largest mass execution in the United States. Many of the remaining Dakota Native Americans, including non-combatants, were confined in a prison camp at Pike Island over the winter of 1862–1863, where more than 300 died of disease.   Survivors were later exiled to the Crow Creek Reservation, then later to a reservation near Niobrara, Nebraska. A small number of Dakota Native Americans managed to return to Minnesota in the 1880s and establish communities near Granite Falls, Morton, Prior Lake, and Red Wing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Minnesota#European_exploration